In Meat We Trust (2 page)

But livestock also represented wealth and provided the easiest way to convert land to profit. Not everyone could afford, say, the slave labor on which rice and tobacco farming depended. Nor did every family have the hands needed to contest the forest; removing trees and undergrowth demanded years of backbreaking struggle. But everyone could spare the labor to keep a cow or two, and hogs required almost none at all. Livestock translated into tangible wealth that, with good management, multiplied more readily than silver or gold. In Maryland in the late 1600s,
one cow and a calf carried as much monetary value as six or seven hundred pounds of tobacco, a third of a year’s crop for one man. Life in North America even transformed the meaning of the word
stock
. Back in England, the term referred to wealth in general, whether money, furniture, or tools. But by the late eighteenth century, Americans defined it as “live stock,
or the beasts that are kept upon a farm.”

Settlers prized livestock as evidence of civilization and sources of wealth, but of course they also valued meat for its nutritional value. When we bite
into a piece of “meat,” we’re eating muscle, or, more precisely, the tissue from which muscle is constructed, tissue that contains water, protein, and fat. The proportion of each depends on the age, size, and species of the animal, but a general average is 75 percent water, 20 percent protein, and 5 percent fat, all of which humans require for life. Nowadays, fat suffers an undeserved bad reputation, but it’s one of the body’s most efficient tools for storing energy; stored fat provided the fuel that enabled early hominids to run from danger. But colonists also favored meat because foodstuffs now deemed more healthful—vegetables and fruits—required more labor to produce in the form of planting, hoeing, and harvesting. Not that making meat was labor-free: all flesh, whether cattle, hog, or human, contains water that nurtures mold and bacteria, so it must be eaten immediately or preserved. During warm weather, when flesh putrefied quickly, a household might slaughter a lamb or calf, small animals that yielded relatively little meat that could be eaten before it spoiled. But most meats were preserved. Americans pounded chicken to a paste, stuffed it into ceramic pots, and sealed the container with a layer of fat or oil. They dried beef in the sun and salted and smoked fresh pork. Colonial diets tended to be pork-centric not only because hogs abounded but because pork takes to preservation more readily than beef.

Abundance and desire translated into meat on the table. Statistics are hard to come by for an era that predated census bureaus and questionnaires, but the evidence compiled by historians allows a broad generalization: the average white colonial American
ate more and more varied food, and especially more meat, than anyone on the planet (aside from queens, czars, and other exceptionally privileged persons). Across Europe, a non-royal was lucky to see meat once or twice a week. A typical American adult male, in contrast, put away about two hundred pounds a year. (Slaves were chronically underfed and ate less of every kind of food.) Anecdotal evidence supports the estimates. A man who visited Pennsylvania in the 1750s marveled at the abundance of beef cattle. “[E]ven in the humblest
or poorest houses, no meals are served without a meat course.” Servants accustomed to scraps and scraping by in the Old World assumed and expected hefty meat rations in the New. One visitor to North America encountered an indentured servant who had run away “because he thought
he ought to have meat every day” and his master refused to cooperate. Another servant, William Clutton, complained that his master, one Thomas Beale, served only rations of bread and cheese when it was the “Custom of ye Country
for servants to have meat 3 times a week.” Clutton threatened to strike unless the meat was forthcoming and urged his friends to petition the king to “have [the matter] redressed.” He was hauled to court, where officials charged him with mutiny and sedition. But Beale’s cheapskatery backfired: several people testified that Clutton was a “very honest civill [
sic
] person.” He paid his court costs and walked free, presumably headed back to work and the meat to which he believed he was entitled.

Over time, carnivorous paradise begot lethal legacy. The abundance of meat spawned waste and fostered indifference bordering on cruelty. “The Cattle of
Carolina
are very fat in Summer,” charged one critic, but bone bags in winter because their owners refused to protect them from “cold Rains, Frosts, and Snows.” Settlers dismissed such criticisms, claiming they could spare neither time nor labor to build animal shelters or fencing, occupied as they were with “too many other Affairs.” (That their free-roaming livestock placed them on the same plane as the natives they despised was an irony white settlers chose to ignore.) As a result, cattle and hogs scattered their droppings hither and yon, left uncollected because no one could spare the labor to gather and spread them on corn and tobacco fields. Thus developed a cycle of destructive extravagance that Americans passed from one generation to the next. Abundance of land nurtured an abundance of the livestock that enabled settlers to eat well and to accumulate tangible wealth with a minimal investment of labor. The more livestock a household owned, the more secure its financial future, and the more meat it had to eat. The more meat people ate, the more they assumed and expected a meat-centered diet, and the more land they wanted, especially for cattle; a single adult bovine required anywhere from five to twenty acres for grazing. As the years passed, settlers exhausted their soil and overgrazed their land. Rather than build fences or sell off their livestock, they moved on to fresh ground. And why not? In America, millions of acres lay just over the horizon.

The cycle of extravagance spawned conflict, violence, and war. Grazing generated endless court cases and squabbling among neighbors as livestock owners tried to determine who owned which animals. Laws aimed at quelling disputes proliferated, and colonial legislators established mechanisms for ownership—branding was the most common—and penalties for theft, which of course could be applied only if a litigant proved he or she owned an animal. Livestock lust fractured once close-knit communities. William Bradford, Pilgrim leader at Plymouth, Massachusetts, complained that as his flock’s desire for cattle and hogs increased, “there was no longer any holding
[settlers] together, but now they must . . . go to their great lots. They could not otherwise keep their cattle. . . . And no man now thought he could live except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep them.” As a result, his people “were scattered all over the Bay” and their original settlement lay “thin and . . . desolate.” Bradford feared such desire would “be the ruin of New England” and bring “the Lord’s displeasure” down on them.

And not only the Lord’s. As whites migrated to accommodate their livestock, they collided with Native Americans. A member of the Narragansett tribe chanted a common lament: Once upon a time the tribe’s ancestors luxuriated in an abundance of “deer and skins.”
No more. Now “the English” had stolen the land and allowed “their cows and horses [to] eat the grass; and their hogs [to] spoil [the] clam banks.” Cattle tromped through natives’ patches of beans and squash, and hogs rooted up caches of corn. Whites in search of fresh meadow and forest for their livestock commandeered land that natives regarded as theirs, encroachment that pushed Indians into territory held by other tribes and nations. More often than not, warfare ensued, especially once white settlers understood that they could use livestock to force Native American dispersion. “Your hogs & Cattle
injure Us,” lamented one Indian in 1666. “You come too near Us to live & drive Us from place to place. We can fly no farther.” He begged the Maryland legislature to “let [his people] know where to live & how to be secured for the future from the Hogs & Cattle.” The answer? Nowhere. Courts refused to listen to natives’ complaints; assemblies ignored treaties; white settlers deliberately set animals loose in order to push Indians deeper into the frontier.

Natives in their turn used whites’ desire for livestock against their enemy. A royal representative who investigated one conflict stripped the event down to its basics: the English settlers engaged in “Violent Intrusions”
as a way to seize natives’ land; Indians sought “Revenge” by destroying “the Cattel and Hogs of the
English
.” In encounter after encounter, Indians stole, slaughtered, tortured, and mutilated livestock, because doing so struck at the heart of what it meant to be white and European. When a group of Narragansetts seized one white man, they forced him to watch as they killed five of his cattle. “[W]hat will Cattell
now doe you good?” they asked. After staging a retaliatory raid, another group of Indians warned that they stood prepared to fight for “twenty one years.” “You must consider,” they told their foes, “the Indians lost nothing but their life; you must lose your fair houses and cattle.” During the ensuing two years of ambush, torching, and retribution, seven thousand Indians died as compared to three thousand whites. But the natives slaughtered eight thousand head of cattle.

Other livestock-driven battles would follow, but whites had won the war: they would convert the wilderness, and large chunks of the continent, into a livestock trail epic in size and in its demands on the land and its people. Corn, rather than Bibles, served as the tool of conversion.

As the decades passed, colonists gradually abandoned hands-off husbandry in favor of more deliberate livestock production, prodded in that direction by the growth of a lucrative international trade in meat. Thanks to the British imperial system, North Americans were linked to markets in England, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia, and they participated primarily by exporting raw materials. Grain was in demand everywhere in the world, but turning that field crop into coin proved difficult. Grain is relatively fragile, and during a market-bound trek of anywhere from one to two months by water or on crude paths and roads, spillage, rot, rain, and rats devoured much of the profit. So colonists learned early that the most efficient way to squeeze income from grain was by converting it into beef and pork (or alcohol, which was bulky but essentially imperishable). Cattle and pigs walked themselves to market, the cattle grazing or feasting on corn at stops along the route, the hogs trailing to feed on kernel-dotted manure. The corn was essential to the system: Cattle that fed on grass alone staggered into sale yards scrawny and exhausted. Corn-fed cattle, in contrast, arrived in better health and bearing more weight and returned greater profit. Once the animals arrived at urban ports, exporters slaughtered the stock and packed it in barrels, shipping most of it abroad. Hinterland farmers responded by paying more heed to their livestock and taking more care with feed and shelter.

One of the most important
colonial cattle-producing regions flourished in the valley of the Potomac South Branch in what is now the northeastern corner of West Virginia. There, settlers developed an especially systematic and profitable mode of combining cattle, corn, and hogs. The area consisted of fertile bottomlands suited for planting corn and hilly upland ill suited for crops but thick with forage grass. (That grass had once fed bison, but by the early eighteenth century, those beasts, and the Native Americans who had followed them, were long gone.) In summer, South Branch farmers tended fields of corn while their cattle grazed upland pastures. Come fall, they harvested the corn in the simplest manner possible: they left the ears intact, cut the stalks to the ground, and piled the harvest into “shocks” that they distributed throughout their fields. Every day, hands led the cattle to a collection of shocks. As the cattle fed, they deposited undigested corn (the cattle’s digestive systems processed the corn’s nutrients, but the kernels passed through intact) and manure, the fertilizer for the next year’s planting. When the cattle had devoured the shocks, hands led them to a new location stocked with fresh corn and herded hogs into the first field. Those beasts snuffled up the leavings, including the corn kernels, and deposited their own manure.

This cattle-corn-hog complex was well established before the Revolution, but when that war ended, South Branch farmers joined a vast migration away from the coast and into the interior and the Ohio River valley. There they found ideal terrain in which to grow corn and raise cattle and hogs. For centuries, Native Americans had burned off trees along fertile bottomlands so they could plant corn, beans, and squash in the clearings. Migrating Americans swarmed onto these lush tracts, depositing not just themselves but their livestock. Out beyond the river, at the time the new nation’s primary waterway, lay acres of equally rich soil and pasture.

By the early nineteenth century, cattle grazing and feeding operations spread for miles along both sides of the Ohio River and far inland, too. In summer and fall, drovers and herds of as many as a thousand head clogged the overland roads that connected the interior to the ports and markets of the eastern seaboard. The bovine multitude could be seen a mile away, wrote one drover, thanks to “long moving lines
of rising dust.” The cattle parade marched two by two, each animal plodding through the track left by those ahead. Winter and spring rains turned the ruts into rivers of mud, and when the soil dried, the jagged path claimed wagon and carriage wheels that could not survive the jolt. Despite the bovines’ placid natures, keeping so many cattle in line and in motion was never easy, the task exacerbated by the hogs that trailed the drove, rooting through manure as they trotted to market. One drover nearly lost his herd when the crew of a passing steamboat eased their vessel alongside a trail and let loose with the boat’s whistle. The ear-piercing shriek sent the cattle “up the river
as if the deuce was in them.” The drover galloped after his charges and rode for a mile and a half before he managed to make his way to the head of the line and calm the runaways. He’d no sooner restored order than the steamboat caught up with him and the herd, and the crew taunted him with more whistle shrieks. “The name of the captain of the boat I knew not,” reported the angry drover, “but I wish to caution the public against a man of such mean and disgraceful conduct.”