Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920

by David Igler

Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller & Lux, a vast meatpacking conglomerate started by two San Francisco butchers in 1858. Industrial Cowboys examines how Henry Miller and Charles Lux, two German immigrants, consolidated the West's most extensive land and water rights, swayed legislatures and courts, monopolized western beef markets, and imposed their corporate will on California's natural environment. Told with clarity and originality, this story uses one fascinating case study to illuminate the industrial development and environmental transformation of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. David Igler examines the broader impact that industrialism--as exemplified by Miller & Lux--had on landscapes and waterscapes, and on human as well as plant and animal life in the West. He also provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller & Lux, from the dispossession of Californio rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force. The book also covers such topics as land acquisition and reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. Above all, Igler highlights essential issues that resonate for us today: who holds the right and who has the power to engineer the landscape for market production?

Genres: History

284 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2001

Reviews

[Randy Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have driven the 35 miles between Los Banos to Chowchilla in the San Joaquin Valley hundreds of times. For me this is the wasteland of T.S. Elliot's poem. This irrigated farmland full of cotton plants, corn stalks, almond trees and alfalfa grass is devoid of life. That is the feeling I have hurtling along the freeway at 70 or 80 miles an hour. Only recently did I figure out my reaction. This comes from the fact that the San Joaquin Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world is the product of a mass killing and not only of flora and fauna but of the land itself. Early in the 19 century the San Joaquin valley was dotted by expansive lakes and marshes, miles of dense forests lined the rivers and elk traveled the valley floor unimpeded by the threat of guns and human bloodthirst.

This book provides a partial answer to how this happened. I had thought it was the monumental Central Valley project starting in the 1950s but Industrial Cowboys shows that the destruction of the valley's natural habitat occurred a century before that. Henry Miller and Charles Lux formed an extremely lucrative partnership that began with butchering cows but quickly branched out into a vertical manufacturing process that pushed the partnership to obtain huge swaths of San Joaquin Valley land that was transformed into cattle grazing to supply meat to San Francisco, the largest city in California.

Henry Miller wrote about his first trip to the San Joaquin valley in the 1850s when he said wistfully that elk still ran free along the valley floor. The author doubts that by that time there were many such free ranging elk in the valley but ironically Mr. Miller's efforts to control the land and the water of the valley killed off the remainder. Somehow years later a couple elk were found on one of his farms and he order that they be allowed to be cordoned off on their own space on the farm. This ended up resulting in the elk flourishing such that they needed to be captured and sent to a nature preserve. However, the elk had the last laugh. They mostly resisted capture and remained on the farm for decades to come. If only the San Joaquin valley itself had been able to resist humanity's merciless and ruthless assault. Maybe with climate change gunning for our kind with new velocity, the valley too will get its revenge.