University of Nebraska Press
  • Cattle Towns, Prison TownsHistorical Geographies of Rural Carceral Archipelagoes
abstract

Prison towns and cattle towns in the rural American West both exist as places marked by incarceration. Comparing the formation of these carceral archipelagoes offers an opportunity to better understand how certain bodies have become exploitable and killable within the American industrial landscape. Their comparison also provides a starting point for thinking through the historical geographies and shared spatial logics of industrial meat production and for-profit prisons.

keywords

cattle, animal, prison, rural, incarceration, meat

introduction

I begin this paper with a reference to a book that influenced some of my early research and teaching on the American West, Robert Dykstra's The Cattle Towns (1968). The book examines the development of small western towns in the 1870s and 1880s, towns established along the route of the free-range cattle trade by small groups of local entrepreneurs. Cattle towns such as Dodge City, Kansas, lay at the junction of livestock trails and the railroad, and they provided facilities to receive herds driven up from the South, especially Texas; a place to sell those livestock; and a transportation hub connected to ranches and meatpackers in Chicago and beyond.1 Today, Dykstra's themes of commercial development (cattle meat trade), cultural change (saloons, gambling, prostitution), inmigrations of transient worker populations (cowboys), and the rapid expansion of town police forces strike me as disconcertingly similar to other small, rural archipelagoes developed on the "trade" in other lives exploited for profit—US prison towns.2

In the prison town of Susanville, California, for example, capital investment by local officials and entrepreneurs, expansion of the prison [End Page 141] infrastructure on the built environment, and the increasingly familiar, everyday impact of the prison on social relations and cultural norms is obvious. Local shops, bars, fuel stations, and workers who quickly move through Susanville on their career advancement trajectory all shape this prototypical prison town that is like so many others across the US landscape.3 In the United States the prison boom over the past four or five decades brought what I want us to consider as a "prison archipelago" of correctional facilities to innumerable, typically rural, settlements such as Susanville as part of their economic development strategies. And just as the violence wrought by the prison town is mostly hidden behind prison walls, most "frontier violence" of the cattle towns was enacted not through the surface interpretation of cattlemen's alcohol consumption and gun violence, as Hollywood may wish us to believe, but rather via colonial wars with and land dispossession of Native peoples,4 as well as the "invisible" violence effected on the cattle themselves.

In this paper I study the historical-geographical developments of the cattle town and the prison town side by side, offering an opportunity to explore them respectively as sites of US industrial development with their accompanying social, political, technological, and economic themes and outcomes. The fact of their geographies developing as rural carceral "archipelagoes" in arguably similar ways has particular salience for how we might think about captivity and incarceration of marginalized bodies, and how regimes of violence themselves develop, are sustained, and what they come to represent.

I begin with the development of the mid- to late nineteenth-century US cattle town archipelago, which began in Texas and moved northward along an axis of small rural towns in states such as Kansas and Oklahoma. These in turn served as nodal points for moving the cattle (and other animals) by railroad to the emerging stockyards and slaughterhouses in Chicago and elsewhere. The developing slaughterhouse technologies and other accompanying mechanizations were part and parcel of the developing archipelago I discuss, which eventually found its zenith in the fully industrialized world of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and factory farms that dot the American landscape today.

I place this development of the cattle town archipelago into conversation with that of the US prison town archipelago in the later twentieth century, when the US witnessed a sharp acceleration in the numbers of incarcerated individuals and the mass "industrialization" of prisons— [End Page 142] supported by evolving philosophies of punishment, new technologies, and an uptick in prison sitings. Mass incarceration was fed by a host of cultural, social, and legal trends such as prison sentencing reform, the racialized war on drugs, and victims' rights movements, which in turn relied on the development of a particular "spatial fix" of prison towns, mostly in economically struggling rural areas in the American South and West, to be sustained.5

Importantly, understanding the development of these archipelagoes in rural towns and areas can help us more fully understand rurality itself. The geographies of these mostly "hidden" industries placed in towns and sites that are often struggling economically offer insights into how particular technologies and architectures of violence can be maintained. As discussed below, a number of scholars have also drawn concrete parallels between mechanistic and technological developments borrowed and informed within and across the agricultural industrial complex and the prison industrial complex, such as assembly line techniques and the invention of certain fabricated materials such as barbed wire.6

Along with these themes I am interested in understanding the development of the historical geographies and spatial logics of these industrial areas and towns, which involved many, oftentimes acrimonious, local debates. What have been the economic, cultural, social, and legal losses and gains in their development? Who are the primary stakeholders, and who primarily gains from these industrial historical-geographical developments? I offer some starting points for answering these questions by placing in conversation a set of sites that may not appear at first glance to have much in common. Ultimately, the juxtaposing of these carceral sites, of thinking about their logistical, theoretical, and philosophical commonalities side by side, offers an opportunity to better understand how certain bodies become exploitable and killable within the US industrial landscape.

The Carceral and the Rural

As I argue below, the cattle town and the prison town archipelagoes have been enabled via similar spatial and geographical imperatives, the development of shared mechanizations and technologies, and their shared carceral logics. Dominique Moran has defined carceral geography as a field of geographical research that focuses on practices of incarceration [End Page 143] and zones of confinement, viewing "carceral space" broadly as a type of institution with particular types of distributional geographies, as well as internal and external social and spatial relations. While carceral geography has primarily concerned itself with prisons and jails, spaces of detention of refugees, noncitizens, and asylum seekers, as well as those "trans-carceral" spaces that deliver carceral effects without physical immobilization, I argue for extending "the carceral" to zones of captivity, confinement, and enclosure of animals alongside that of incarcerated humans. I present this argument fully in my book Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals (2018). Suffice it to say here that the notion of spatial confinement and incapacitation is key to the carceral, but one that is expansive, that goes beyond the narrowly geographical to include a variety of practices, meanings, and social relations of surveillance, discipline/control, and domination.7

As a starting point, I suggest that the respective historical geographies of cattle towns and prison towns as industrial sites relied foundationally on their shared carceral logics across space and time—exploiting the most vulnerable populations of animals and humans who lacked (and continue to lack) legal and other social protections. Within carceral spaces, the bodies of the incarcerated are subjected as well to routine processes of "animalization"—which is itself deeply intertwined with racialization—while their status as property or "person" is continually negotiated.

When writing about cattle and prison town "archipelagoes," I am borrowing from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1978), wherein he argued that this island concept can be appropriately applied to a set of institutions, surveillance systems, and technologies that "discipline" and exert power and control over populations and whole societies in a spatially ordered and universalizing way. In the last chapter of Discipline and Punish Foucault offered numerous terms and concepts related to the prison extended outward, which have been foundational to carceral studies generally: in addition to carceral archipelago, the "carceral continuum," "carceral city," "carceral network," "carceral methods," "carceral system," and "carceral texture of society."8 These are all a piece of and implicated in what Foucault described as "rippling carceral circles" emanating from the prison or prisonlike spaces and diffusing throughout the social body as a whole. Many critics from various vantage points have challenged Foucault's theorizing of [End Page 144] this "universality" of the carceral.9 While I do not attend to this broad critique here, I do engage with one particular aspect of it, which is to say that I focus on carceral sites and institutions as sharing a particular spatiality—that is, on how carceral archipelagoes articulate(d) with rurality and diffused in specific ways throughout the rural American landscape.

A number of authors outline the rich historiography of rural studies over the past several decades and offer insights for the present study.10 Briefly, rural places themselves have been traditionally defined as areas dominated by extensive land use in agriculture or forestry, or by large open spaces of undeveloped land containing small settlements. Recent studies have challenged, modified, or enhanced those definitions, at least partially by considering the interdisciplinary nature of rural studies and the differences in rural studies on a global scale. Recent studies also articulate a deterritorialization or "rematerialization" of the rural as breaking down conventional rural and urban dichotomies. But generally speaking, rural places have been defined by: (1) function (by land use, by geographical location, and/or as sites rich in primary resources and commodity chains); (2) as places with unique political economies subject to and the product of broader uneven social, economic, and political parameters incentivized by or subjected to particular governmental regulations and state processes; and (3) by the social meanings that people ascribe to them and their inhabitants—often as mythologized or romanticized places that have particular moral values that are nature- or eco- friendly. There is an apparent predominance of this last perspective in Anglocentric geography, but as will become apparent, it is the first and second that are most germane to my study. And as Woods observes, the spatial settings within which rural and urban identities are most entangled and where distinctions are most elusive are in "small towns in rural regions."11 It is to these sites and the part they played in nineteenthcentury industrial agricultural development and twentieth-century prison industrial development that I turn in the remainder of the paper.

the cattle town archipelago

A typical nineteenth-century frontier cattle town or "cow town" was a small settlement that lay at the junction of the livestock trail and the developing railroad lines that were emerging in the central Plains to transport [End Page 145] cattle to points north for slaughter (see note 2). Southern Texas as the epicenter of US cattle ranching and the origin point of the livestock trails dates to the Spanish colonial period, due to its mild climate, plentiful grass, and available water. In the late eighteenth century more than fifty Franciscan missions held herds of cattle, but after 1821 and Mexican independence, most abandoned their missions and dispersed their cattle holdings to local Native peoples or into the wild. The latter of these became part of the public domain, and ranching entrepreneurs began claiming them—rounding them up into herds of 300 to 1,000. One hundred thousand cattle roamed Texas by 1830, and three decades later, on the eve of the Civil War, that number had increased to an estimated 3.5–5 million.12

As Shillingberg outlines in some detail, the Civil War dramatically shifted the direction of the Texas cattle drives. Before the war, small allotments of Texas cattle had reached Kansas City and other Missouri river towns, with some going as far east as Saint Louis and various Illinois border settlements, to New Orleans, then the largest market in the South, and to Mobile, Alabama. Those animals were either driven overland into Louisiana or shipped from Galveston, Corpus Christi, and other Texas gulf ports. Thousands more were driven to the higherpaying markets of the California gold rush camps during the early 1850s, the first long-distance drives in the history of the range cattle business. But the Civil War changed this. Most significantly, the war closed the Mississippi River to southern commerce, and beginning circa 1863, Texans began shifting their longhorn cattle to northern markets. Though the first documented cattle drive was as early as 1846, the year 1866 witnessed the "birth of the great Texas cattle trail drives."13

The best-known of the Great Plains livestock trails ran from Texas northward to the state of Kansas, as herders drove millions of cattle north from the mid-1860s through the mid-1880s. The Central Great Plains had already been benefiting from the postwar railroad boom. As the Union Pacific's Eastern Division, later renamed the Kansas Pacific Railroad, continued pushing westward, negotiations ensued as to where to locate a cattle shipping point. Entrepreneurial cattlemen and town builders who were set to profit enormously attempted to garner political support for themselves and worked out agreements with the emerging railroad industry to develop their rural towns as shipping depots. And as railroads proliferated in Kansas and Nebraska, new cattle towns and [End Page 146]

Fig 1. Cattle in Abilene, Kansas, 1886. Photograph reproduced by permission from the Kansas State Historical Society.
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Fig 1.

Cattle in Abilene, Kansas, 1886. Photograph reproduced by permission from the Kansas State Historical Society.

markets sought Texas livestock trails to reach them. From 1867 until 1871 the Chisholm Trail was the main livestock trail from Texas, a trail that ran from San Antonio to Fort Worth, Texas, through Oklahoma, ending in Abilene, Kansas (see figure 1). Sites such as Abilene were still relatively unpeopled and well-watered, and they offered plentiful grass. Later came the Western Trail or "Dodge City Trail" across the Oklahoma panhandle, with herds drawn to an active market in Dodge City, Kansas, then on to Ogallala, Nebraska, and then driven farther to the Northern Great Plains.14 [End Page 147]

An individual cowboy on these trails would oversee the movement of 245–350 cattle. Cowboys collectively drove 600,000–700,000 animals from Texas during 1871 alone. Depictions of cowboys in fictionalized western films, illustrated weeklies, and so on were of grueling conditions and tough, heroic, or romantic men—for example, the depiction offered by John Wayne in the film Red River (1948), which also popularized the lightning storms, stampedes, rustler attacks, and dangerous river crossings the cowboys experienced. Scholarly work has also documented the lives of the cowboys (and the wranglers, cooks, and trail bosses that accompanied them); for example, they worked twelve- to eighteen-hour days for three months at a time, making between twentyfive and forty dollars per month. As Cronon describes, "Far from being a loner or rugged individualist, [the cowboy] was a wageworker whose task was to ship meat to cities."15

But what about the lives of the animals? As Rifk in adds, the cattle generally covered between ten and twelve miles per day on their threemonth trek north to the rail link, becoming more "trail broke" as days and weeks wore on and thus becoming easier to handle—or to put it another way, less able to resist their circumstances. As cowboys needed to minimize the weight loss of their herds, they moved the cattle slowly, pasturing them along the way. In this way, the potential energy cost of expending the animals' stored body fat via travel was shifted to the energy cost of locomotives burning wood or coal. Overall, animals' lives had been redistributed across regional space: they were born in one place, fattened in another, and killed in still a third.

Meanwhile, a great deal has been written about the many entrepreneurs and towns set to profit on the lives of the animals. Of the towns that developed along the cattle trails, no place is more iconic of the rural cattle town than Dodge City, Kansas. Dodge City, a site that had previously served as a center for the trade in buffalo hides, flourished within the Texas cattle market from 1876 to 1885. By November 1881, in Dodge City alone, 572 railroad cars, averaging 20 animals per car, had been shipped that year, amounting to 31,440 individuals. Prices were averaging thirty dollars per head, net, which brought millions of dollars in return for cattlemen.16 A number of local enterprises sprang up to support and profit from the demands of the growing population—those related to consumer goods and services, dry goods and retail outlets—as well as hotels and boardinghouses, saloons and dance halls, banks, doctors' and [End Page 148] attorneys' offices, laundries, barbershops, drugstores, blacksmith and livery shops, and realty and contractor offices.

Local politics in places such as Dodge City centered on conflict between critics and defenders of the cattle trade. Critics were of two groups: farmers who feared their crops would be trampled by the cattle as well as feared infection of their domestic animals by the "Texas fever" that longhorn cattle carried. Other people opposed the saloons, professional gambling, and prostitution that came along with the cattle trade; this included business owners but most especially the evangelical reformers who advocated temperance. Many more moderate reformers advocated enhanced policing and tough gun control laws, as well as monthly tax assessments on saloonkeepers, gamblers, and prostitutes to help finance the police supervision. But Hollywood-style violence and street duels were more myth than reality. Between 1870 and 1885 only forty- five adults died violently in the five major Kansas cattle towns—Abilene, Dodge City, Caldwell, Ellsworth, and Wichita—and these included "justifiable killings by the police." Town leaders wanted to keep the violence down so as to not damage property and deter in-migration. The primacy of the Kansas towns in the cattle trade ended when the railroad trunk lines moved south to Texas and cattle could be shipped directly from Texas.17

the prison town archipelago

The cattle town archipelago(s) that developed in the nineteenth-century US share many of the same features as the prison town archipelago(s) that developed in the twentieth-century US. These towns shared a common developmental arc in rural areas based on similar carceral philosophies and practices. Both relied on the captivity ("incarceration") and commodification of marginalized bodies in these developmental trajectories. Clearly, though, not everything about the cattle town and prison town are comparable. The Texas cattle drives and development of the cattle town archipelago I discussed above, for example, was relatively short-lived compared to the long historical trajectory of prison sitings and construction that continues today. The celebration of the romantic, heroic cowboy and his herds in taming the West, as well as "the healthy beef" movement that accompanied the rise of the slaughterhouse, has no real parallel in the prison industry. [End Page 149]

In my discussion I am applying the island concept of cattle town archipelago to refer to the linked trails and towns that in a specific "production chain" captured and turned live animals into commodities. While perhaps not a production chain in the same manner of a cattle town, prison town archipelagoes nonetheless developed as clusters of predominantly rural towns that relied on similar production approaches to ostensibly resuscitate struggling rural economies, and using carceral techniques to do so. Moreover, the production of "cattle" in this way, a term with etymological roots in the word "chattel," meaning property (see note 2), allows us to draw a further link between this type of exploitation of "animalized" bodies with the case of the prison; as many commentators have argued, the prison (with its overrepresentation of black men) represents the afterlife of the plantation, which is itself the afterlife of slavery—the prison as its latest form.18

An explosion of academic scholarship and journalistic, public policy, and activist accounts in recent years have analyzed the social, political, and economic trends behind unprecedented, accelerated mass incarceration in the US over the past four or five decades—such as prison sentencing reform, the racialized war on drugs, and the victims' rights movement—and the resultant physical and material patterns of prison development on the landscape. Incarceration of approximately 2.3 million people today relied on the development of a particular "spatial fix" of prison towns in this new prison economy. Factory closings, corporate downsizing, the shiftto service sector employment, the closing of "main street" businesses in favor of national chains, and especially the farm crisis and the decline of traditional agriculture and other resourcedriven economies have triggered profound changes, especially in rural areas. Much of the literature on the prison-building boom highlights attempts by economically struggling rural communities and towns, particularly in the American South and West, to "resuscitate" their economies by building prisons. And perhaps like the fate of the cattle towns in the nineteenth century, the economic progress promised to such towns has failed to materialize, instead flowing elsewhere (see figure 2).19

The PBS documentary Prison Town USA (2007) alerts us that at the height of the US prison-building boom in the 1990s, a prison opened in rural America every fifteen days. John Eason studies this phenomenon in detail, documenting the proliferation of prison building in rural America—specifically in poor, rural, southern towns—for the past [End Page 150]

Fig 2. View in my prison town, the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Photo used under Creative Commons 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. I discuss the historical geography of this particular prison and prison town in K. M. Morin, "'Security Here Is Not Safe': Violence, Punishment, and Space in the Contemporary US Penitentiary," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2013): 381–99.
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Fig 2.

View in my prison town, the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Photo used under Creative Commons 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. I discuss the historical geography of this particular prison and prison town in K. M. Morin, "'Security Here Is Not Safe': Violence, Punishment, and Space in the Contemporary US Penitentiary," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2013): 381–99.

fifty years. During this time the total number of prison facilities tripled, with approximately 1,700 state and federal prisons operating today, with annual profits exceeding $40 billion, employing on average 230 workers, and costing approximately $20,000 per prisoner annually.20 By 2012 more than 60 percent of these prisons were located in what Eason defines as a rural prison town, that is, a "nonmetropolitan municipality." Moreover, Eason found that from 1980 to 2006, nearly 28 percent of all rural prisons were built in just three southern states, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. His work illustrates that prison building specifically and disproportionately affects rural southern communities, communities that themselves have a disproportionately large share of black and Hispanic residents. While it is indeed the case that most US prisoners come disproportionately from urban black and Hispanic communities, who are typically incarcerated at great distances from their homes, Eason's work helps us understand that not only economic but also racial disadvantages are the biggest indicators of where a prison will be built.21

Hurling also offered a nuanced, regional examination of southern rural prison town archipelagoes. She followed the development of [End Page 151] four such archipelagoes: (1) in the West Texas Plains (one out of every five new rural prisons in the 1990s opened in Texas, the state with by far the largest number of new prisons); (2) in the Mississippi Delta region; (3) in the southern Appalachian coal fields region; and (4) and in south-central Georgia. Importantly, before 1980 only 36 percent of prisons were located in rural communities and small towns. But since the start of the prison-building boom in the 1980s, approximately 350 rural counties acquired new prisons, and more than half of all rural counties added prison work to their available employment mix during the final two decades of the twentieth century. To Huling, these communities commonly experienced declines in farming, mining, timberwork, and manufacturing (together with the farm crisis, factory closings, corporate downsizing, and the shiftto service sector employment noted earlier).

Hundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions around the country—in addition to those in the South—became newly dependent on an industry that itself is dependent on the continuation of conditions under which "criminals" and criminality can be continually produced ("socially constructed"). Norton offers an interesting case study of a rural prison archipelago that developed in upstate New York based on arguments by local officials that buildings constructed for the 1980 Winter Olympics would serve the prison industry in the future. New York State built thirty-nine new state prisons between 1982 and 2000, all of them in rural counties. But it was the forty-fifth state senate district in the far northern region of the state that built more than any other district, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, there were fourteen prisons located in the district, more than twice any other. Norton shows that a short-term opportunistic argument to win the Olympic bid depended on a vision of a future archipelago of prisons and, indeed, a steady supply of prisoners to fill them.22

carceral infrastructures and developments

The infrastructural developments on which cattle towns and prison towns were based share a number of commonalities. Among the most obvious were material and technological developments used in carceral spaces to control their "inmates," such as barbed wire. But equally important were the range of social, legal, political, and economic characteristics [End Page 152] of rural areas themselves that offered conditions for carceral archipelagoes to take hold.

Cattle Towns: Stock Pens and Stockyards

In the boom years of the 1870s and 1880s, the cattle barons enjoyed near hegemony over western public lands by declaring a simple right of sovereignty. An informal code of entitlement, "range rights," inhered if a rancher appropriated a local stream. Thus, the first step in consolidating power in the cattle industry was in control over grazing land. Concomitantly, one of the most significant instruments of violence and spatial control within the cattle industry of the time was the "revolutionary" invention of barbed wire, which facilitated the enclosure of those public lands for private use. The traditional wooden fence would not be feasible in a landscape lacking trees for lumber. Large-scale fencing only became feasible in this region with the invention of barbed wire. Netz argues for the critical importance of examinations of such technologies across species lines—and in the case of barbed wire, the control of cattle during colonization of the American West. Joseph Glidden patented barbed wire in 1874 and opened a small manufacturing plant in DeKalb, Illinois, for its production. As Cronon states it, "Fences hastened the transition from prairie to pasture." An early adopter, Charles Goodnight, a Texas cattle baron, fenced in more than three million acres of public range with illegal fences while others followed suit, fencing land over which they had no legal claim.23

Innovation in transportation—that is, the railroad, which is to say specifically the cattle car and, by 1869, the refrigerated car that hauled dead animal carcasses—was the most important technological development that influenced the cattle beef trade and, indeed, structured so much of the lived experience of animals. Dykstra refers to railroad development and banking as the two most important "services" aiding the industry. Railroad development actually included an array of ancillary infrastructural developments in the cattle towns—company-owned cattle pens and stockyards, railroad stations with telegraph facilities, and supervisory personnel (and even if territorial ranchers instead walked their herds to their destinations). Numerous scholars point to one of the earliest and most successful Kansas entrepreneurs to link the livestock trails with the railroad, the dealer Joseph McCoy, who, among [End Page 153] other things, built stock pens near the rail depot on 250 acres of land in Abilene, Kansas, to hold cattle awaiting shipment north on the Kansas Pacific Railroad.

The first twenty-car shipment of cattle from Abilene to Chicago was in September 1867. As Rifk in observes, "Cattle stepped over the divide and onto the railcars, thus changing the course of America's history." McCoy convinced the railroad to construct a rail siding for a cattle pen at the Abilene depot and then pay him a commission on every carload of cattle shipped. By 1871 Abilene was processing 700,000 longhorn steers annually, all bound for the abattoirs in Saint Louis and Chicago (see figure 1). This north-south cattle complex expanded in the 1870s as the demand for beef, tallow, and hides greatly expanded amid postwar prosperity. It was primarily British companies that played a major role in developing the transcontinental railroad in the 1870s and 1880s—the "foreign cattle barons" who eventually also shipped refrigerated cow carcasses to Britain in ocean steamers. Moreover, the British taste for "fatted beef" transformed the industry beginning on the eve of the Civil War, by feeding surplus corn to cattle.24

Thus, the first locus of power over meat processing was in control over grazing land, and the second was control over meat processing—which included the vast infrastructure of railroad transportation, control over slaughterhouses in Saint Louis, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and especially Chicago, and the distribution outlets of processed meat. The nineteenth-century cattle towns served as a key and foundational locus for the entire process, for example, in directly feeding Chicago's giant Union Stock Yards and setting the stage for today's meatpacking industry. While Cincinnati provided the prototype of the "disassembly line" of animals (pigs), Chicago set the standard in mechanization and mass production of animal killing and processing.

The Chicago Union Stock Yards opened on Christmas Day 1865. Patterson describes the enormous complex of hotels, restaurants, saloons, and offices that were eventually built, and "an interlocking system of 2,300 connected livestock pens" that took up more than a square mile in southwestern Chicago.25 At the time, the meat companies Armour and Swifteach employed more than five thousand workers within those yards. By 1886 more than a hundred miles of railroad tracks surrounded the yards, and each day trains with new refrigeration capability unloaded hundreds of cars full of western longhorn cattle, [End Page 154] sheep, and pigs onto the planks and sprawling pens. The 450 acres of the Union Stock Yards contained twelve platforms behind which were long rows of chutes and holding pens, divided by those for cattle, sheep, and hogs. These divisions were laid out on a grid system with numbered alleys or streets running between them. As Rifk in describes it,

Everywhere the eye could see, there were cattle milling, moving, being separated and corralled into designated areas, to await their last walk up the chutes. … Hoisted onto chains and hooked onto rails, those noble creatures, venerated by much of western culture for the first few thousand years of recorded history, were hurried along from station to station, where they were hacked at, cut up, severed, divided, reduced, and reconstituted, ending up as disembodied cuts of meat at the end of the line.26

Ultimately, the heyday of the cattle trail and prosperous cattle town was short-lived. The trail drives had thrived during the brief life of the range cattle industry between 1865 and 1895. As noted, the period began when a combination of railroad growth and refrigerator cars made it possible to transport beef more easily from the West to points north and east. The industry grew and prospered until 1886, when overproduction and a subsequent drop in market prices, followed by devastating weather, changed the nature of the cattle business. Ranches continued but with reduced numbers and smaller herds. Eventually rail lines proliferated extensively throughout the Great Plains and West, reaching their source commodity directly, and ranchers began relying on irrigated crops to feed their animals. They thus replaced "reliance on the natural production of the land with reliance on a managed and transformed environment." Today we see the outcome in the most exaggerated form of the factory farm or CAFO.27 Cattle towns such as Dodge City and Abilene lost their significance in the cattle industry, but some became small tourist attractions.

Prison Town Infrastructure and the Myth of Progress

Technological advances supporting mass incarceration (of human prisoners) are important to note. The industrial requirements for advanced prison construction include a vast array of sophisticated tools and methods of surveillance, control, and regulation of prisoners—certainly [End Page 155] barbed wire was a key advancement in the control of not only cattle during colonization of the American West but also people during prison construction from the early twentieth century onward, as Netz shows.28

Prison design and architecture developed around advancements in assembly-line techniques as well, necessary for the highly regulated and systematic moving and transporting of prisoners both within the prison and to and from it. Advancements in prison construction materials themselves are another consideration. Within the context of increased (mass) incarceration has been a sharp increase, for example, in the use of maximum- security confinement and permanent lockdown as a primary means of controlling prison violence, a spatial design that attempts to maximize security while ensuring that prisoners rarely leave their cells. New state and federal prison construction that accommodates the ostensible need for maximum security or administrative segregation units has meant that as a general trend, prison cells have become smaller, more self-contained, and more reliant on mechanization of certain functions, for example, in lighting and in the opening and closing of cell doors. Advancements in prison construction materials have also aided this penal philosophy, with cell furniture made of reinforced concrete or steel. Each cell typically only has a concrete slab bed, a built-in storage shelf, a desk and seat, and a toilet and sink. Most services that prisoners receive are delivered to them electronically or through the small hole in the cell door.29

Dominique Moran offers a useful historical geographical analysis of the "profit through punishment" concept that served as the basis for rural prison town development. Fifty years ago, prisons were considered "lulus"—locally undesirable land uses—by most town residents because they feared a prison would lower land values, create security risks, and produce an uptick in families of the incarcerated moving into the area and overburdening social services. This NIMBY (not in my backyard) trend shifted drastically when state legislatures began lobbying to place new correctional facilities in out-of-the-way rural locations, their remoteness a geographical advantage. Such rural places ostensibly offered cheaper land, tax breaks, infrastructure subsidies for things such as roads and sewers, an answer to high unemployment rates, more dispersed opposition to the prison siting, and overall the promise of economic salvation.30 [End Page 156]

The spatial imperative of building prisons in out-of-the-way, "invisible" rural locations was and remains key to their functioning. Entrepreneurial actors seizing on fraught local politics surrounding economic development debates attempt to change rural locations to prison YIMBYs (yes in my backyard). Infrastructures that supported new prison siting stepped in to fill the economic void created in many communities by the deregulation of factory-scale farming and thus the closing of many small farm operations, as already noted.

Eason helpfully reminds us that prison siting decisions are typically made at the state level, by state legislators, but politics are "always local," with local actors and civic leaders themselves vying for contracts.31 Anne Bonds, citing examples from the Pacific Northwest, has documented arguments by local community leaders that prison building is the answer to poverty and resultant decline in social service provision needs. Her work illustrates that rural towns experiencing job loss and high unemployment see prisons as a vehicle for community economic development. This includes employment from construction, housing, hotels, gas stations, and restaurants needed to accommodate the workers, visitors, and new residents, as well as accrual of revenues from property and sales taxes. Rural town leaders also expect to benefit from federal grant programs and community development funds, which are allocated on the basis of census data on population and poverty, numbers to which prison populations heavily contribute. Despite the considerable outlays and incentives these communities employed to recruit prison siting, such as donated land, infrastructural grants, and property and tax breaks, budgetary instability persists alongside the need for fiscal cutbacks.32 As these and other cases show, economic prosperity accruing to the local community is short-lived at best.

Numerous scholars from a variety of disciplines have found that no real structural economic gain or renewal has materialized for rural places that have built prisons. Among other things, local residents rarely find long-term employment in the prison industry, correctional officers rarely live in the local area, few multiplier effects ultimately develop, and prisoner labor itself has over time displaced local unskilled workers. While profits from building and maintaining prisons is definitely accruing somewhere—mostly to the state or to private enterprises that contract out various goods and services to prisons, such as in food services [End Page 157] and health care provision—they are not accruing to the local community, even if there is a perception of economic growth.

Williams, for example, studied the development of the thirteenprison archipelago in Florence County, Colorado, starting back in 1871. He shows that state and local governments depended on the lobbying "myth" that prisons would bring economic development in order to find communities willing to accept new prisons, even though the profits of those prisons have accrued to industries outside of the local community. Williams argues that there is no empirical evidence to show what might have happened to these communities without the prisons. And even if one were to argue that once a prison is built in a small rural community there indeed may be "more population, more to do, more movies to see, more places to eat," as Fraser and others have helped us understand, even those questionable "improvements" in community social life depend on the continued social construction of crime and criminals to fill the prisons.

It is not only prisoners' labor that is increasingly commodified by work programs on the inside; their bodies and lives themselves can be bought and sold as well. With prisoners, in addition to laboring for abhorrently low wages on the inside of prisons, the profits of which accrue to the state and private entities, many local and regional economies depend on the income generated from the "purchase" of incarcerated bodies from other jurisdictions to continue filling carceral sites that were built during the 1980s and 1990s construction boom. Indeed, the carceral logics behind many prison-construction-as-economicdevelopment strategies vary across those that suggest an ostensible current "crises" caused by housing local prisoners elsewhere, to those that foresee future projected numbers of incarcerated bodies exceeding current capacity, to those that promise new revenue generated by housing prisoners from other jurisdictions.33 Again, the basic carceral logic and "business" of the prison industrial complex writ large—jobs, infrastructure, services—requires a reproduction of a steady supply of criminals in order to prevent from failing those local economies that are based on prisons and jails. The carceral logic of profits through punishment, then, not only exploits prisoner bodies as commodities to be bought, sold, and traded but also typically fails to provide promised community benefits. [End Page 158]

violence and rural carceral archipelagoes

It is clear that the embodied experiences of both animals and prisoners in the rural carceral archipelagoes outlined above deserve greater attention. Numerous scholars and activists (including myself) have already exposed the fundamental pathology of the racialized prison system in the US today and the shockingly unconstitutional, uncivil treatment of those imprisoned. That said, one of the most important insights I have gained through this research is that a critical historical geography of the animal lives discussed here remains to be written. Such a historical geography would reveal the material and physical lived experiences of bovine animals on the trails from Texas to Kansas and other cattle towns, and would detail the emotional and psychological experience of being an animalized commodity trapped within the infrastructures that supported that movement and within a typical cattle town. There is much more to learn than we do from representations of cattle drives in John Wayne movies that treat the animals as mere figures on the landscape, as more than commodities to be watered, fed, controlled, and moved. Such animals had stories, lives, and agency.

The recent exponential growth in critical animal studies helps us better understand the lived experiences of captive animals on contemporary farms, in zoos, in research labs, and in other "carceral" spaces within which they undergo harmful processes and practices. Yet a quite different approach is needed to understand the carceral experiences of historical animals, those long dead and no longer directly accessible. Various archival sources offer starting points for accessing these lived experiences, but interpreting them requires a deep ethnographic and creative methodological engagement that select historians and historical geographers have proposed.34

Thus far in my work I have found only "traces" of these topics in the existing archive of western American literature. Within the archive I have found bits of what we might call "cattle hagiography." For example, the three West brothers of South Texas were a powerful force in expanding and building a personal empire based on the lives of Texas cattle. By the 1880s and 1890s the Wests had made significant profits in the cattle business and expanded their operations into large-scale ranching that covered tens of thousands of acres across South Texas. George West described one of his prized steers this way: [End Page 159]

Born on the West ranch in Live Oak County in 1883, the steer was at the time sixteen years old. There was not a drop of improved blood in his veins, and he weighed close to 1700 pounds. His horns had an upward curvature, and when he stood at rest their tips were over eight feet above his hoofs. They measured seven feet and nine inches straight across, and about nine feet following the curves … the noblest specimen of the type [I have] ever owned.35

While a critical distance from such hagiography is necessary, it is within reach to consider such animals as this admirable sixteen-year-old, 1,700-pound steer as having played a crucial role, albeit unwillingly, in the development of nineteenth-century cattle towns and the vast beef industry that was to come.

I began this essay with an observation that Robert Dykstra's themes of commercial development (the cattle meat trade), cultural change (saloons, gambling, prostitution), in-migrations of transient worker populations (cowboys), and the rapid expansion of town police forces in nineteenth-century cattle towns struck me as disconcertingly similar to other small, rural archipelagoes developed on the trade in other lives trafficked for profit a century later: US prison towns. My juxtaposing of the nineteenth-century cattle towns and the twentieth-century prison towns in the foregoing discussion has highlighted the ways that the development of these archipelagoes of rural towns has been enabled by, indeed dependent on, similar spatial and geographical imperatives as well as shared carceral logics and practices that have enabled certain lives to be made exploitable and disposable for the profit of others.

Placing these archipelagoes side by side gives us an enhanced understanding of rurality itself—particularly the relationship of rurality and rural places to particular kinds of industrial development, and the impact of these industries on small-town life and communities. As rural studies continues to develop and challenge traditional understandings of the functions and political economies of rural places, my work points to how we must consider "the rural"—particularly places economically vulnerable to the maneuverings of exploitative legal and political entrepreneurs—as contributing to industrial violence in the form of meat processing and mass incarceration in the US on a scale not seen previously.

Let me quickly add that industrial violence is obviously not unique to or restricted to rural places—in fact, an argument can be made that [End Page 160] far more violence toward animals occurs in slaughterhouses located in urban areas than in CAFOs and other places of animal reproduction—and that no place is "essentially" dangerous and violent. It nonetheless remains the case that the specific and "distant" rural towns and archipelagoes discussed here, with their unique features, made them attractive developmental points in the production and commodification of certain bodies. In this work I have observed the value in thinking across time, to point to key historical moments that deeply link the developmental trajectories of the agricultural and prison industrial complexes we see today.

Karen M. Morin
Bucknell University

acknowledgements

I thank Michael Wise and two external referees for valuable advice on the material presented here. If space limitations prevented me from developing all of the referees' useful comments here, they will help as I continue work on a related book-length manuscript, tentatively titled Cattle Trails and Animal Lives: The Founding of an American Carceral Archipelago.

notes

1. Portions of this introduction are drawn from the prologue to my book, Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals (London: Routledge, 2018) and my paper, "Carceral Space: Prisoners and Animals," Antipode 48, no. 5 (2016): 1317–36. See also R. D. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), and, for reference, K. M. Morin, Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008).

2. Before proceeding I would like to pause and consider K. Gillespie's apt observations about referring to the animals in this study as "cattle" in The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 8. As Gillespie explains, the term "cattle" has etymological roots in the word "chattel," meaning property, which deeply resonates with human chattel slavery. Gillespie recommends the term "bovine animals" to refer to either cattle or livestock, to signal that they are more than mere property. While "cow" is a colloquial term for a bovine animal, in animal agriculture "cow" technically refers to a female animal that has given birth to at least one calf; a "heifer" is a female who has not yet given birth; a "calf" is a male or female animal under six months of age; a "bull" is an intact adult male; and a "steer" is a castrated male. I acknowledge the speciesism that "cattle" connotes, although I will use the term in this paper as it helps underline the many actors, practices, and processes that helped create these animals as property (e.g. "cattlemen," "cattle barons," "cattle towns," etc.).

3. J. Fraser, "An American Seduction: Portrait of a Prison Town," Michigan Quarterly Review 39, no. 4 (2000): 775–95; J. Eason, "Mapping Prison Proliferation: Region, Rurality, Race and Disadvantage in Prison Placement," Social Science Research 39, no. 6 (2010): 1015–28; D. Che, "Constructing a Prison in the Forest: Conflicts over Nature, Paradise and Identity," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 4 (2005): 809–31; A. Bonds, "Discipline and Devolution: Constructions of Poverty, Race and Criminality in the Politics of Rural Prison Development," Antipode 41, no. 3 (2009): 416–38.

4. Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, ed. D. Wishart (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), s.vv. "Cattle Towns," "Frontier Violence."

5. R.W. Gilmore, in her Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), masterfully outlines how this took place in California.

6. For example, see S. Gideon, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948, rpt. 2013); R. Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); C. Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002).

7. Such spaces thus reflect the "carceral turn" and deployment of a new range of strategies of social control and coercion, with unprecedented fluidity between forms of confinement. See D. Moran, Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015); D. Moran, J. Turner, and D. Conlon, eds., Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). I also discuss these and related themes, including "carceral logic," in Morin, Carceral Space, 9–13, 76–83, 101–15.

8. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), especially the chapter titled "The Carceral," 293–308.

9. If everything and everywhere is carceral, then the concept becomes evacuated of meaning and loses its potential for helping us understand how a very specific carceral logic extends (only or mainly) to certain bodies and certain populations—and not to others—incapacitating and disposing of them in particular ways and in particular kinds of spaces. For a specifically spatial critique, see N. Gill, D. Conlon, D. Moran, and A. Burridge, "Carceral Circuitry: New Directions in Carceral Geography," Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 2 (2018): 183–204.

10. See, for example, P. Cloke, "Rural Geography and Political Economy," in R. Peet and N. Thrift, eds., New Models in Geography, vol. 1 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 164–97; N. Argent, "Rural Geography I: Resource Peripheries and the Creation of New Global Commodity Chains," Progress in Human Geography 41, no. 6 (2017): 803–12; N. Argent, "Rural Geography III: Marketing, Mobilities, Measurement and Metanarratives," Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 4 (2019): 758–66; M. Woods, "Rural Geography: Blurring Boundaries and Making Connections," Progress in Human Geography 33, no. 6 (2009): 849–58; P. Cloke, T. Marsden, and P.H. Mooney, eds., Handbook of Rural Studies (London: Sage, 2006).

11. Woods, "Rural Geography," 851–52. In reference to breaking down the boundaries between the rural and the urban, today we observe the blending of the urban and rural, entangling in "peri-urban" communities, in the rural-urban fringe, exurbia, and by ruralization of the city defined by and coconstituted by their networks of interactions, such as in urban farmers markets and farm-to-table restaurants.

12. J. Rifk in, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton, 1992), 68–70; R. White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 220–25; P. F. Starrs, Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

13. W. B. Shillingberg, Dodge City: The Early Years, 1872–1886 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2009), 158–61, quotation on 160; Rifk in, Beyond Beef, 70; Great Plains Encyclopedia, s.vv. "Cattle Towns" and "Dodge City, Kansas"; Dykstra, Cattle Towns.

14. Other cattle trails appeared on the Northern Plains along several routes: the Northern Trail, the Oregon Cattle Trail, and the Jones and Plummer Trails. For example, from 1869 to 1875 cattlemen in the Pacific Northwest pushed herds eastward into Wyoming over the Oregon Cattle Trail. See Great Plains Encyclopedia, s.v. "Cattle Trails"; Dykstra, Cattle Towns, 8–9. K. Hoganson, "Meat in the Middle: Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest, 1965–1900," Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (2012): 1025–51, notes that there were of course other sites of cattle (beef) production and reproduction in the nineteenth-century US, in her case, in Illinois. For reasons of their iconicity as well as their role in the development of the Chicago slaughterhouses, I focus on the Central Plains Texas–Oklahoma–Kansas route and cattle towns that developed along it in this paper.

15. W. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 219–20.

16. Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 217–18, 223–24; also see Rifk in, Beyond Beef, 17, on cowboys' hours and pay. As I note in my conclusion, a historical geography of the lived experiences of these animals remains to be written and is tentatively the focus of my next research project.

17. Great Plains Encyclopedia, s.v. "Cattle Towns."

18. 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay, written by Spencer Averick and Ava DuVernay (Sherman Oaks, CA: Kandoo Films, 2016); B. Franklin, Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); K. McKittrick, "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place," Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947–63; J. James, ed., The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

19. Among the enormous body of scholarship devoted to the causes of mass incarceration in the US, I would cite as most useful M. Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), and for carceral geographers, Gilmore's Golden Gulag. Among the many works focused on struggling rural towns that relied on prison building as economic development strategy, see Fraser, "American Seduction"; A. Bonds, "Profit from Punishment? The Politics of Prisons, Poverty and Neoliberal Restructuring in the Rural American Northwest," Antipode 38 (2006): 174–77; A. Bonds, "Building Prisons, Building Poverty: Prison Sitings, Dispossession, and Mass Incarceration," in J. M. Loyd, M. Mitchelson, and A. Burridge, eds., Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 129–42; A.K. Glasmeier and T. Farrigan, "The Economic Impacts of the Prison Development Boom on Persistently Poor Rural Places," International Regional Science Review 30, no. 3 (2007): 274–99; T. Huling, "Building a Prison Economy in Rural America," in M. Chesney-Lind and M. Mauer, eds., Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York: New Press, 2011), 197–213; J. Norton, "Little Siberia, Star of the North: The Political Economy of Prison Dreams in the Adirondacks," in K. M. Morin and D. Moran, eds., Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past (London: Routledge, 2015), 168–84; E. J. Williams, The Big House in a Small Town: Prisons, Communities, and Economics in Rural America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011); L. Gilpin, "As Jobs Disappear in Coal Country, a Giant Prison Is Pitched as the Solution," Huffington Post, 4 July 2018. For a useful analysis of how communities understand and embrace the "carceral logics" of prison expansion, see J. Schept, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

20. Prison Town USA, directed by Katie Galloway and Po Kutchins (PBS P.O.V., 2007); J. M. Eason, Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1–3.

21. J. M. Eason, "Reclaiming the Prison Boom: Considering Prison Proliferation in the Era of Mass Incarceration," Sociology Compass 10, no. 4 (2016): 261–71, esp. 262–63; J. M. Eason, "Mapping Prison Proliferation: Region, Rurality, Race and Disadvantage in Prison Placement," Social Science Research 39 (2010): 1015–28, with statistics on 1020–21. For a good source on prisoners incarcerated at great distances from their homes, see M. L. Mitchelson, "Research Note: The Urban Geography of Prisons: Mapping the City's 'Other' Gated Community," Urban Geography 33, no. 1 (2012): 147–57.

22. Huling, "Building a Prison Economy," 199. After Foucault's insights in Discipline and Punish, I address issues surrounding the social construction of crime and criminality and the need for the correctional industry to keep 'the machine going' in a number of papers, including Morin, "Security Here Is Not Safe"; also see Morin, Carceral Space; Norton, "Little Siberia."

23. Netz, Barbed Wire, 1; Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 221; also see Rifk in, Beyond Beef, 101–13.

24. Dykstra, Cattle Towns, 78–111; Rifk in, Beyond Beef, 70, 87–88, 93–100; Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 218–20; D. A. Pacyga, Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

25. Pacyga, Slaughterhouse; Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, 57–64; Rifk in, Beyond Beef, 113–19; Gideon, Mechanization Takes Command (1948), 213–46.

26. Pacyga, Slaughterhouse, 1–18; quotation in Rifk in, Beyond Beef, 119–20. As I discuss in Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals, 61–66, the design and production methods of the slaughterhouse were the precursor to assembly line production itself, including in the prison.

27. White, "It's Your Misfortune," 223–27, quotation on 227.

28. Netz, Barbed Wire; Patterson, Eternal Treblinka; Morin, "Security Here Is Not Safe."

29. The references cited in Morin, "Security Here Is Not Safe," offer an expansive accounting of this literature.

30. Eason, "Reclaiming the Prison Boom."

31. Eason, "Reclaiming the Prison Boom;" also see Bonds, "Profit from Punishment"; Huling, "Building a Prison Economy."

32. Moran, Carceral Geography, 63–64; Glasmeier and Farrigan, "Economic Impacts"; Bonds, "Building Prisons"; Che, "Constructing a Prison"; Norton, "Star of the North"; Huling, "Building a Prison Economy"; Fraser, "American Seduction"; Williams, Big House in a Small Town.

33. See, for example, R. Grim, "Mississippi Jails are Losing Inmates, and Local Officials Are 'Devastated' by the Loss of Revenue," Huffington Post, 14 April 2016; R. Grim, "Mississippi Prison Boss Defends Repossessing Inmates to Cover Budget Shortfall," Huffington Post, 15 April 2016. This material is also covered in chapter 4 of my Carceral Space, 88–118. Also see Morin and Moran, Historical Geographies of Prisons.

34. See, for example, E. Fudge, "A Left-handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals," in N. Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 1–18; S. Nance, ed., The Historical Animal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015); M. Few and Z. Tortorici, eds., Centering Animals in Latin American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); H. Ritvo, Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

35. B. Shackelford, The Wests of Texas: Cattle Ranching Entrepreneurs (Denton: Texas State Historical Association Press, 2015), quotation on x.

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