The Cattle Boom in Southern Arizona: Towards a Critical Political Ecology

Pioneering across the continent, the livestock industry traveled in easy stages, since Colonial beginnings in the seventeenth century, three thousand miles westward till it reached the Pacific. Always just in advance of the oncoming settlers with their implements of agriculture, it has been the expression of a life of freedom and adventure. Even the imagination of the stay-at-home capitalists of the Old World was caught by this picturesque industry, and in the heyday of our trans-Mississippi development scores of Scotch and English ^pastoral companies" were formed to operate in America. On the vast unclaimed open prairies west of the Mississippi the business developed spectacularly and made fortunes for many of its followers. These successes, however, were due largely to the bounteousness of nature. Methods were crude; system and management were preceded by chance and fortitude. The cost of the herd or flock was small and expenses of operation almost negligible, except for the death toll that Nature exacted. Forrest M. Larmer, financing the Livestock Industry (1926: 1)

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