Not all emigrants were good ambassadors for Illinois, as seen in the case of a onetime Champaign resident who was extradited from Chicago for cracking bank safes in the dominion.71 Some Canadians began to fear that the flood of U.S. settlers would carry Canada into their Union, just as they carried Texas from Mexico.” Nevertheless, the two-way mobility between the Midwest and Canada contributed to a sense of affinity that cut across the border. As a commercial journal put it, there was “scarcely a family in the Dominion but what has members or kins-people living in the United States, and this operates as a mighty force in the interest of peace and closer communion.”72
NORTHERN TRAFFIC
In the early nineteenth century, a significant amount of midwestern agricultural production traveled to eastern markets via the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. Although U.S. canal and railroad construction diverted traffic from Canadian routes, reducing their relative significance, Canadian investments in canal construction and expanded commerce after the Civil War led to an increase in U.S. tonnage on the St. Lawrence. In 1885, 3,795 U.S. vessels passed through the Canadian canal system; by 1899, the number had risen to 6,101.73
Ongoing improvements and expansions in U.S. railroad lines did not cut Canada out of U.S. shipping maps, because some of the freight cars that headed east from Chicago ventured north of Lake Erie. In 1876, with the completion of the eastern Intercolonial Railway, it was possible to ship goods by rail from Chicago to Halifax via Canadian lines, some of which added third rails to their wide-gauge tracks to accommodate traffic from the United States. Halifax was not much of a market, but it was one day closer to Europe than any U.S. port. (This helps explain why most of the cattle imported to the United States from Britain landed there.) Alternatively, freight could reenter the United States near Niagara and travel through Upstate New York to eastern U.S. markets.74
By 1880, Sir Henry Tyler, president of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway Company, claimed that his line was carrying 10 percent of the traffic east from Chicago, including 6 percent of the livestock traffic. This may not seem particularly noteworthy, but considering that the Grand Trunk had just completed its own line to Chicago, those numbers show a remarkable ability to attract business.75 The rise of refrigeration, beginning with an 1878 shipment from Chicago to the Eastern Seaboard, added to the Grand Trunk’s competitiveness.76
Prior to refrigeration, beef had to be shipped east in tins or on the hoof. The former was unsavory, the latter expensive. Live cattle needed food, water, and rest en route, and that necessitated an expensive infrastructure of feed bins and stockyards. Shipping cattle also posed public relations challenges: by the 1870s, investigators were accusing live-animal transporters of cruelty. They published gruesome reports of animals goring each other in their close-packed quarters during transport. Investigators claimed that boxcar cattle lost their appetites and became too alarmed to drink, losing one hundred to five hundred pounds in a thousand-mile trip. In 1870, the U.S. commissioner of agriculture called for a “well-regulated beef express” with padded and partitioned cars, but shippers balked at the added expense.77
Though aiming primarily to improve the lot of mariners, British reformer Samuel Plimsoll also drew attention to the slave-ship-like conditions for cattle in the transatlantic crossing.
Samuel Plimsoll, Cattle Ships (London: Kegan Paul, French, Trübner and Co., 1890), 3.
Animals continuing their journey across the Atlantic faced even more horrific conditions. In 1890, the British seaman’s advocate Samuel Plimsoll published an exposé on cattle ships. His account brought to light the animal equivalent of slave ships, with cattle packed like sardines, heads alternating with rumps, in spaces as small as two feet three inches across per bullock. Plimsoll wrote of oxen “mad with terror and unrest” forced to stand for sixteen days at a stretch. That alone would have been “prolonged torture,” but crippling seasickness made things worse for the “dumb brutes.” Animals that might have been put down under other circumstances, due to maiming and other excruciating injuries, had to die a so-called natural death on ship for insurance to be claimed. Upon arrival, surviving animals staggered off the ships, barely able to stand, with broken legs, torn-off horns, and frightful wounds from which “trail through urine and ordure the animals’ intestines.”78
And if the ordinary crossings were not bad enough, the stories of journeys gone awry were much worse. On the steamer Santiago, the “poor brutes” were “slowly roasted in their stalls” by a fire. When the passengers abandoned ship, they had to beat the bullocks that had jumped from the flaming vessel away from their lifeboats with hatchets and oars. Another ship, caught in a cyclone three days out, arrived with only 14 live cattle, from a cargo of 360. And here even Plimsoll drew the veil, saying that the captain’s report of the suffering was too horrible to publish.79 It was in this context that refrigerated meat took off.
The administrators of the Vanderbilt and Pennsylvania railroad companies had such large investments in cattle cars and stockyards that they regarded the advent of refrigerated cars as more of a threat than an opportunity. But the Grand Trunk Railway was not committed to the live-cattle trade. Indeed, the special measures mandated during pleuropneumonia outbreaks to prevent the spread of the disease across national borders provided extra incentives for Canadian shippers to cast their lot with dead meat.80 Carcasses did not require posted bonds guaranteeing quarantined cars, “double isolated” enclosures, clean bills of health from veterinarians, keepers to collect and disinfect droppings, or government-supervised teams to bury animals that perished en route.81 All dead meat required was ice, and Canada had plenty of that. By 1885, the Grand Trunk was carrying 138,000 tons of dressed meats (59 percent of the trade) on its eastbound tracks.82
Chicago meat-packers turned to the Grand Trunk not only because of its investments in refrigeration but also because of its competitive prices. By undercutting the rate agreements of the major U.S. lines, the Grand Trunk railroad sparked several rate wars in the 1880s.83 In an age when nationalists were calling for a larger merchant marine to end U.S. dependence on foreign vessels, Illinois farmers heralded the Grand Trunk as the vehicle for obtaining more favorable shipping contracts.84 Rather than regard Canadian lines as a threat to U.S. interests, the commodity producers of the Upper Midwest hailed them as a means to advance the interests of a different polity: farmers, on both sides of the line.
FAMILY TIES
The railroad lines that linked the U.S. Midwest to Canada carried awareness along with animals and people. A sense of cultural affinity may be less tangible than commodity exchanges, migration flows, and railroad ties, but this was just as important in making a Great Lakes agricultural region. For midwestern farmers, the agricultural press played a significant role in building feelings of cross-border attachment. The Prairie Farmer serves as an example. On first glance, it may seem to testify to the expansive influence of midwestern farm culture, for it boasted that its readership stretched from Texas to Canada.85 Yet information also flowed into Chicago: the Prairie Farmer attributed some of its world news to Canadian outlets, and it republished material from serials such as the Canada Farmer.86 Readers of the Prairie Farmer found articles praising Canadian (or at least Anglophone Canadian) agricultural attainment, including one which claimed that “we ‘Americans’ have a great deal to learn from our British American cousins . . . we are, even in our best cultivated regions, very much behind the Canadian standard of farming.”87
As they stressed the cultural affinities between the farmers of the Great Lakes borderlands, agricultural publications downplayed the significance of the U.S.-Canada border. The Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, for example, identified its scope as “North America north of Mexico,” with some incidental treatment of “the tropical islands with which the United States holds governmental relations.” It went on to say: “There is no geographical or agricultural distinction between the United States and Canada except such as a
rises from difference in latitude.”88 Similarly, the Breeder’s Gazette pledged in its inaugural issue to “always keep a vigilant eye upon the business in the States, Canada and England”—thus suggesting that these three places together constituted a breeding community.89
Agricultural associations joined the agricultural press in linking U.S. and Canadian farmers together in common pursuits. Although Canadian and U.S. farmers organized independently, the U.S. National Grange and the Dominion Grange established formal contacts.90 Despite some disagreements over the desired relations between the two national organizations, the 1876 Grange encampment in Philadelphia attracted representatives from twenty-six states, England, and Canada.91 In 1877, the secretary of the Dominion Grange credited the U.S. National Grange with helping to spark the Canadian movement, and he professed respect for the National Grange’s ongoing dedication to elevating “our class.” He continued in this brotherly vein: “I trust those fraternal feelings, which should exist between our members everywhere, may grow stronger as time rolls on, and that we may ever be found working hand in hand for the common good.”92
This sense of fraternalism guided the activities of more specialized agricultural groups such as the American Shorthorn Association, also called the Short-Horn Breeders of the United States and Canada.93 Founded in 1871, the association drew its membership and leadership from both the United States and Canada, addressed its announcements and publications to audiences in both nations, and chose cities in both countries for its annual meetings.94 Among those who traveled to Toronto for the association’s 1875 meeting was Manly Miles, a professor at the Illinois Industrial University in Champaign.95
The fellowship fostered by the association did not render national differences moot. In the 1880s, U.S. members pressed the Department of Agriculture to make the duty-free entry of breeding animals contingent on registry in U.S. herd books. The prospect of paying $100 to register animals already listed in British and Canadian books led Canadian breeders to ask their government to impose comparable restrictions.96 But not all Shorthorn breeders took the nationalist route—some called for a single American herd book, arguing that “the States are constant customers of the Canadian breeders.”97 Furthermore, the fractures along national lines crossed others that cut different ways. In 1872, the Prairie Farmer observed that differences of opinion about pedigree standards were “not confined to the breeders of Canada on the one side, and those of this country on the other, but are common to individuals of both countries.”98 Personal—rather than national—economic interests determined members’ stances on inbreeding.99 Association members felt the nationalistic strains in their relationship keenly because their cross-border relationships were so close.
Indeed, contemporaries often described these relations in familial terms. Histories of Illinois typically cast French Canadians as forebears because of their early presence in the area.100 Contemporary Canadians (or at least the Anglophones among them) conjured visions of brotherhood. The editor of the Prairie Farmer praised the Canadians he met on the 1860 Illinois Central excursion for their “family traits” of frankness, pertinacity of opinion, adherence to naked facts, and reasoning.101 To welcome a speaker from Nova Scotia, a spokesman for the Illinois Farmers’ Institute rhapsodized about “unity and fellowship throughout the entire farming brotherhood.”102 As these familial references suggest, Illinois farmers did not really regard English-speaking Canada as foreign. It was not careless record keeping but a process of domestication that explains why U.S. studbooks failed to identify cattle from Canada as “imported.”103
Despite the feeling that the border did not or should not matter, tariff policies reminded farmers that it did. From the end of the Civil War into the 1890s, protectionist policies that were aimed at national consolidation (understood in Canada as particularly beneficial to urban economic interests) led to demands for more transborder integration, including trade reciprocity, commercial union, political union, and annexation.104 Advocates of closer relations emphasized not only the existing ties between Ontario and midwestern states but also their proximity and similar “physical conditions.”105 As one unionist put it: “the United States and Dominion of Canada belong as it were to each other . . . they are the geographical and commercial complement of each other.”106 Those who called for greater unity between the United States and Canada insisted that the nations’ common fundamental interests and geographic logic should outweigh their political differences. In the words of a reciprocity advocate: “The interests of these two peoples are as similar as the territories which they occupy . . . Nature knows no artificial boundaries.”107 According to this reasoning, the U.S.-Canada border was an arbitrary and permeable political line that bisected a biologically, culturally, and economically coherent community. Even episodes of state-to-state conflict (such as the tensions created by Canada’s havening of Union draft evaders and Confederate raiders) did not fundamentally shake the conviction that when it came to the Great Lakes region, the border figured more prominently in treaties and maps than in on-the-ground relationships.108
THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF “TEXAN” CATTLE
Given the absence of comparable social and cultural ties with Mexico, it may seem that the influence of southwestern borderlands petered out well before reaching central Illinois. Indeed, when mapping their southernmost connections, nineteenth-century Illinois farmers often stopped, misleadingly, in Texas. Nevertheless, focusing on commodified cattle reveals that Great Lakes borderlands were not the only ones to stretch deep into the Illinois countryside. Midwestern farmers were bound as well to Mexico, in ways that resembled their ties to yet another place at the edge of the nation: Indian Territory. These southern relationships differed qualitatively from those that connected them to Canada, but they, too, played a significant role in shaping the region.
There were, of course, good reasons for Illinois fatteners to dwell on the importance of Texas cattle. As Illinois shifted from grazing to fattening in the 1860s, its beef industry became increasingly reliant on Texas ranches for supply. Illinois beef producers had started to fatten Texas cattle in the 1840s, but epidemics and the Civil War disrupted these shipments.109 After the war, midwesterners reestablished connections with Texan suppliers. Early drives were beset by problems, including unfamiliarity with territory, swollen rivers, and resistance by Native American peoples who objected to damaging incursions on their land.110 In the following years, however, Mississippi River steamers and newly built railway lines facilitated the movement of increasing numbers of Texas animals to Illinois feedlots. As an 1871 agricultural report noted, Texan cattle were driven six hundred to nine hundred miles to the coast, by “energetic frontiersmen in small bands, armed to the teeth.”111 At the Gulf of Mexico, the animals were loaded on steamships for New Orleans. From there some traveled up the Mississippi. After arriving at Illinois feedlots, they met animals that had left Texas on foot for the arduous drive to the depots in Kansas.112
In contrast to the expensive Ontario animals imported for breeding purposes, Texas animals were cheap. Whereas purebred Canadian animals had aristocratic names, such as Lady Highthorn and the Seventh Duke of Airdrie, it would have been ridiculous to give a Texan steer any name at all, because of the castrated animal’s inability to produce his own line of descendants and because of his interchangeability with other low-cost animals.113 Whereas a celebrity bull might sell for thousands of dollars, and a “ripe graded steer” for as high as $6.85 per hundredweight in Chicago markets, Texas cattle sold for as little as $3.00 a hundredweight (or $36 for a steer in the common twelve-hundred-pound range). Prices in Texas were far lower than in northern packinghouses: $3.50 to $4.50 a head.114 As an 1875 agriculture report pointed out, Texas cattle were “comparatively valueless,” worth rearing only because of the abundance of forage and their ability to fend for themselves.115
According to livestock writings of the time, different assessments of worth boiled down to the matter of blood. Wh
ereas Illinois farmers associated Ontario animals with highly cultivated British blood, they characterized Texas Longhorns as the degenerate descendants of Spanish stock, introduced into Mexico by the conquistadors in the time of Cortés.116 Citing their wide variations in color as evidence of their motley ancestry, U.S. livestock experts traced the origins of Texan cattle back from Spain to North Africa. Rather than improving over time, as had inbred British animals, Texas cattle had “relapsed from a state of domestication.”117 Left to fend for themselves, they had only degenerated, returning to their African nature.118 The fact that not all “Texan” cattle came from Texas and that they were indistinguishable from Mexican and Native American animals did nothing to raise them in the estimation of Illinois farmers.
U.S. livestock experts regarded longhorn cattle descended from Mexican stock as inferior to pedigreed Shorthorns but capable of uplift if crossed with purebred bulls that were traceable back to northern European lines.
J. R. Mohler, “Science in the Live-Stock Industry,” The Scientific Monthly 32 (June 1931), 507–12.
CATTLE CROSSINGS ON THE RIO GRANDE
The border between the United States and Mexico was highly permeable in the late nineteenth century, and this applied to cattle no less than to people and inanimate goods. Although the combination of Mexican export taxes and U.S. import taxes inhibited licit trade, cattle production straddled the border.119 Would-be U.S. ranchers gained a foothold in the business by rounding up feral cattle from Mexican herds in Texas and by purchasing comparatively cheap animals in Mexico. Among them was Ohioan John T. McElroy, who purchased a herd in Sonora and then set off on a two-thousand-mile cattle drive to Kansas. The journey took three years, but the profits enabled McElroy (who had grazed the animals without cost on Indian lands) to buy ranch property in Texas.120
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