North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion and Differentiation

by Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov

In this revisionist study, historical geographer Jordan reinterprets cattle ranching in the Old World and New, challenging the notion that western cattle culture derived principally from Texas.

Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

TERRY GILBERT JORDAN-BYCHKOV
Past president of the Association of American Geographers, died at his home in Austin, Texas, on 16 October 2003, from pancreatic cancer. (In recognition of his 1997 marriage, he began using the name Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov as his professional nom de plume, while retaining his birth name for other purposes). Born in Dallas in 1938 as a sixth generation Texan, Terry earned his master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin (where he met Walter Prescott Webb) and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His dissertation was later published as German Seed in Texas Soil: Immigrant Farmers in Nineteenth-Century Texas (1966). This was to be the first of fifteen authored or co-authored books and textbooks published during his lifetime. These include The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region and Landscape (2003); The American Backwoods Frontier: an Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (with M. Kaups, 1989), one of a handful of books that offer a truly original interpretation of the American identity; and The Human Mosaic: A Thematic Introduction to Cultural Geography (nine editions 1976-2003, with Mona Domosh and Lester Rowntree), a classic textbook. At the time of his death he had completed field research in sixty-five countries, reflected in books and journal articles focused on Australia, Siberia, and the European source regions of Texas folk culture. A book expressing his view of the discipline, My Kind of Geography, is forthcoming. Terry was elected President of the Association of American Geographers (1987-88) and also received the AAG Honors Award in 1982 and Distinguished Scholar Award from the AAG American Ethnic Geography Specialty Group. For many years he chaired the geography department at the University of North Texas before joining the Department of Geography at the University of Texas at Austin in 1982 as the Walter Prescott Webb Professor of History and Ideas. He received awards for his work from the Pioneer America Society, National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Texas State Historical Association, Texas Heritage Council, American Association for State and Local History, and the Agricultural History Society. He was elected a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association. Sessions in Terry’s honor have been organized by his students for the 2004 AAG Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. In accordance with his family’s wishes, donations in Terry’s name may be may be made to the UT Department of Geography and sent to the Department of Geography, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712.

Reviews

[Gaye Ingram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terry G. Jordan's research has been basic to my understanding the real South, the one that began before and persisted long after the cotton boom and Civil War. In this book, he traces North American cattle-ranching to European and African origins that first meet in South Carolina. Although the British colony of SC advertised widely in Ireland and the Rhine River Valley for "Protestants: Farmers, Not Graziers," among the start-ups offered immigrants were land for farming and cattle (seed, farm implements, and a still were others). Drawing on their history as cattle growers, most of the Scots-Irish and many of the English immigrants discovered SC's geography made it possible to grow herds of cattle even as they worked their rice farms. The bounteous wetlands and piney woods provided free forage for their stock in the shoots of new cane in the large canebrakes that remained green most of the year and in the protected grasses and plants that grew beneath the tall stands of longleaf pines. Even when their rice fields fared poorly, their stock of cattle and hogs proliferated in nearby free ranges. Jordan shows how registries of brands developed and how the South Carolina practice of free-range ranching drew also on African ranching practices. Slaves from ranching sections of Africa became important players in the emerging cattle ranching practices of the coastal regions. A single mounted horse rider might control a large herd. Their expertise on horseback and the responsibility with which they were entrusted gave these enslaved workers a freedom and prestige unavailable to their fellows who worked the rice farms. Thus old-world practices and a new geography created a new cattle raising culture in South Carolina. It moved down through the pine barrens that follow the southern coasts into Georgia, across East and West Florida and the Mississippi Territory into Louisiana, where Spanish practices (e.g., use of lariate to rope cattle) were added to the already proven practices. From Louisiana and the piney woods of East Texas, it spread west and north.

As Jordan shows, this was not a small culture. Indeed, in 1860 the sale of beef, hogs, and hides produced more revenue in the Southern states than cotton. Among the features that developed early were what was called "penns," cleared land that included a small dwelling house, usually a log cabin; a fenced-in area for holding milk cows, calves, and some of nearby herd at night; another for a slaughtering area; and another to protect the home vegetable garden produced for family use. These were often large establishments, but they were eminently portable. As the range grew thin, cattlemen simply moved southward to a similar location, where they could quickly clear and build a cabin and outlying facilities. The pinewoods and adjacent canebrakes and swamps were literally filled with cattle penns from South Carolina to Louisiana by 1812. Cattlemen were already in place and moving at the time of the Revolutionary War and by the time cotton began to make millionaires out of many who had migrated from the Northeast and the Atlantic seaboard states.

As a Southerner, I'd always been at a loss to reconcile the South I knew with the plantation South. In this and other works by Jordan as well as by historians like Grady McWhiney, I discovered what I believe helps account for the large population of middling Southerners who have long formed the backbone of the general culture of the South.

Jordan's prose is eminently readable, and this book contains many simple maps and charts that complement the text. It traces the ranching culture from the South Carolina into the northern plains, identifying evolutionary points. Fascinating. I read it the way I read novels. Only more so. I recommend it to anyone interested either in the South, the southern frontier, or ranching.
Comment

[Beau Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on the history of ranching that I've ever read. Can be a bit dry in spots, but it is a history book after all.