How the west was won

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The extermination of the buffalo in the northern plains states set the
stage for genocide against the American Indian. The buffalo were
exterminated because they were "wasting" grass that could be used for
cattle-grazing. When the buffalo disappeared, so would the Indian
whose tribal economy revolved around buffalo hunting.

The white man's Buffalo "hunting", unlike the Indian's, was one of the
most grotesque and degrading activities the descendents of Europeans
ever visited on this continent. Buffalo are stationary targets and
hunting consisted of shooting the animals one by one in their immense
herds. The remains of the animals were mostly left to rot on the open
plains.

In an ironic twist, the Indians became a commercial windfall for the
beef industry in its infancy. When the Indian was shunted off to
reservations, they became wards of the state. With the buffalo
eliminated, they required government rations to survive. Those rations
consisted of beef.

The major consumer of this new commodity, however, were the
British who craved beef the way vampires craved blood. Eager to have
some control over this new economic sphere, British capital interjected
itself in all aspects of the western states economy. British companies
played a major role in financing the transcontinental railroads built in
the 1870s and 80s by coolie labor. At the same time the rails were
being laid, refrigerated shipping was invented by a young American.
This permitted huge quantities of beef to be exported to England and
other European countries. British investors bought the patent for this
new invention and launched the first shipping company: Eastman Ltd.
In 1875, 3 million pounds of fresh beef per month was being shipped
to England in refrigerated compartments.

Next English investors started buying land in the western territories in
gargantuan quantities. The Anglo-American Company, and Texas
Land and Cattle were two such companies formed to buy grazing land.
Despite their titles, they were British operations. Stockman's
associations, which had been formed to defend the interests of western
ranchers, were soon dominated by the British bourgeoisie. At the
Cheyenne club, rich British landlords enjoyed continental cooking
while reading the London Times. This was not a John Ford movie. By
the mid-1880s, British financial interests owned and controlled much
of the western land of the United States, turning it into a quasi-
colonial outpost.

Reaction against the British soon materialized. In the presidential
elections of 1884, candidate James C. Blaine urged "America for the
Americans." A bill was introduced in Congress around the same time
to ban ownership of land by foreign "noblemen."

Since the British had a preference for fatty beef, it soon became
necessary to replace grass with grain as the primary diet of cattle since
corn-fed cattle become fatter than grass-grazing animals. This soon
led to development of enormous portions of mid-western land for grain
production. The English demand for fatty beef, the western rancher's
need to get top dollar for their cattle, the midwestern corn farmer'ss
desire for outlets for his corn soon led to a vast Euro-American
commercial agriculture complex. While the American share increased
with time, the basic character of the operation remained intact and has
led to a completely destructive use of the precious resources of land
and water. This will be the subject of my next post.

Louis Proyect


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