As the metropolitan carpet began to spread in the UK, a matching agricultural one was rolled out in America’s Great West, where swathes of previously inaccessible prairie (cohabited by Native Americans and millions of bison) were linked to the East Coast for the first time. The 1830 opening of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad signalled an era of economic expansion and ecological destruction on a scale never before seen. First to go were the bison, slaughtered for their hides or just for sport from moving trains, a massacre so relentless that the southern herd was wiped out within just four
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