The Day of the Cattleman

[Blake]

This book tells the story of the rise and fall of the cattle industry in the Northern Range of the Great Plains. It is an economic history of cattlemen and cowboys, which makes this history a little antithetical to my line of thinking as an environmental historian (there is both a natural and historiographical rivalry that is too dense to explain here, but ask me and I will happily share). In anyway, Osgood is an economic determinist. He sees the rise and developments of the cattle industry as following trends in economics. For example, western migration across the plains created a series of markets for cattle thus driving Texans and their herds Northward. The railroad then revolutionizes the cattle industry by exposing it to Eastern money and markets (and later English Markets).

Despite my disposition towards the economic angle of this work, I found a great deal of use for it. One of the chapters focuses on the often violent relationship between cattlemen and local tribes. The outcome of these encounters, for Osgood, change the economy of the region and the livelihood of the cattlemen. One of the instances mentioned are raids specifically targeting and destroying herds of cattle. I know from reading other works that the mass bison killing was in part intended to limit Indigenous power. These raids sound like a response in kind. I look forward to examining this further.

Returning to the rivalry between economic and environmental historians, I am curious what Osgood and Webb thought of each other. This book was first published in 1929 and Webb in 1931. They had to have been aware of each other. They recognize agency in ways that undercut the central concepts of each other's work. Giving the environment primacy is often at the expense of economics and vise versa. It would have been nice to see them debate on which had a greater impact on cattlemen.

[Thomas]

This review is so full of apt observations, it's hard to know where to start. First, I'll make a couple of connections I tend to in relation to the standard comps list. A key concept from Turner is successive frontiers, a great progressive doctrine in varoious fields--recapitulation, stages of civilization, and all that. Despite Webb's denials, he clearly is influenced by this, and uses the concept as his organizational scheme. Well, what about Osgood? Note his title: "the day of the cattleman." The cattlemen had their day, then had to move off the stage of history. So Osgood focuses on one of the stages of succession. This makes Osgood and Webb intellectual siblings.

[Thomas]

Second, as to the relationship of Webb and Osgood - I think of these two, along with John Hicks, as the beginning point for the serious treatment of agricultural (and thus, to a large degree, environmental) history of the Great Plains. I learned yesterday that my extended essay on the agricultural history of the plains for the Wiley Companion to American Agricultural History is now in print, although I haven't yet received an author copy! Blake, you might be especially interested in this for its pertinence to the grounding of your dissertation. Here is the edited draft - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g...

[Thomas]

As for your observation about economic determinism in Osgood, Blake, I think you are spot on, but we still can ask, why? Why did Osgood go down this road? The way I see this, both Webb and Osgood faced the same problem how to make cowboys-and-Indians history into something that would gain academic respect. Each, therefore, turned to an established interpretive theory for leverage. Both worked!

[Thomas]

One more thing - we see in Osgood the dilemma of Great Plains historians in his generation: the limited capacity to get to multiple archives. You notice that Osgood relies pretty much entirely on the records of the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association. The work is a posthole, a case study. How could it be otherwise? Travel north and south on the plains in that day was not feasible to any extensive degree. These guys worked with what they had at hand, and tended to assume the contents of other archives would confirm their generalities about the wider region. Unfortunately, this also leads to the bias of being captured by your sources. Osgood was all-too-uncritical of what he read in the stockmen's records.

[Blake]

The language of successive Frontiers makes sense. So many key points he makes refers to the cattleman's frontier. However, this would give way to the farmer's frontier by the end of the book. It almost seems as if the greatest bane to the cattlemen was the Granger Movement.

I think the use of economic history was meant to argue for the legitimacy of Western history and Cattle history in particular. Similar to Stegner's lament, it is likely Osgood was told history is about the old things in the Old World and maybe sometimes it is about key players on the East Coast/New England. This book is a challenge to that notion, but the only way to truly challenge that notion is to plug the history of the Cattle Kingdom into broader traditional schools of history. Osgood chose to demonstrate how the cattle trade linked back to the broader trends in U.S. economic history to demonstrate its legitimacy.

As for the case study, I think it makes sense for the time and even for today. While generalizations based on a test trench can only be so strong, they can tell us something about something. It has peaked my interest to look into Montana a bit for my dissertation. Interesting, newspapers.com turns up some interesting hits for both raids on cattle and bison hunting over the course of the 1870s. There is something happening there, and it will be interesting to go spelunking to find out exactly what that is.

Thank you for the article, I look forward to reading it.