The Heartland

by Kristin L. Hoganson

  Recognizing their inability to keep the Texan animals off their territory, the Cherokees settled instead for a ten-cent tax. Though poor compensation for the grasses consumed, it was better than nothing. And nothing was what the Five Tribes got after an Arkansas judge ruled that the transit tax represented undue regulation of interstate commerce. It was in this context that some members of the Five Tribes and the neighboring Osages leased land to Texas ranchers, thereby contributing to further mingling of wayward animals. The greatest blow to the Five Tribes’ ranching endeavors came in 1893, when the Dawes Commission, tasked with privatizing collectively held Indian land, began the allotment process that greatly reduced the Five Tribes’ holdings. Regarding Indian grazing lands as excessive, the commission members put over three million acres of unallotted land on the market. White settlers snatched up the newly available prairies, bringing the great age of Indian livestock production in Oklahoma to an end.162

  As the story of Oklahoma allotment reveals, many of the lands placed on the market after the Civil War for grazing use and purchase were Indian lands. This expropriation of Native American land had major implications for Illinois fatteners. To begin with, they numbered among those who took advantage of land offerings. When nine million acres of the Sioux reservation in South Dakota were thrown open to settlement in 1890, the Champaign Daily Gazette reported enthusiastically on the “Preparations for a grand rush.”163 Local directories mention residents who owned “western lands” and grown children who decamped for South Dakota, Kansas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Oregon, and elsewhere. Even those who stayed on the wet prairie benefited from the ongoing colonization of Indian lands, for the grass-fed animals of the Northwest joined those of the Southwest on their feedlots.164

  Like Mexican stock raisers, Native American stock raisers were not as integrated into midwestern farming webs as Ontario breeders. In contrast to their fraternal ties with the men who dominated the Canadian breeding industry, Illinois cattlemen had little common ground with the Native American groups that regarded cattle tending as women’s work, comparable to the cultivation of fruit trees.165 This sense of difference held fast even as the Five Tribes became more fully incorporated into the commercial cattle industry. After the Civil War, the Five Tribes joined Illinois farmers in investing in improved breeds such as Durhams and Devons.166 As a result, the Cherokees won occasional recognition for their herds. The Prairie Farmer, for example, reported on a thousand-head Cherokee herd brought to Indiana for fattening that resembled “our native stock,” due to evident Durham blood.167 However, such herds appeared to be exceptions that proved the general rule. When a team of livestock investigators in Abilene noted “one drove of especial merit” that had been “raised among the Cherokee Indians by Col. Gains, an Indian notable of much intelligence,” they cast merit and intelligence as atypical qualities in Indian country.168 The reason the team had taken the trouble to inspect Gains’s operation was their conviction that most Cherokee cattle were a deadly menace to the herds of the Midwest.

  BAD BLOOD AND BOUNDARY DRAWING

  Although boosterish articles on the cattle-fattening business did not stress the Mexican or Indian Territory origins of some ostensibly “Texan” cattle, Illinois farmers were not oblivious to these connections. Reportage on “Spanish fever,” also known as “Texas fever,” “Cherokee cattle disease,” and “the cattle disease,” made these connections difficult to miss.169 Spanish fever was a mysterious ailment that had little outward effect on animals driven north from Texas, but that devastated the northern cattle exposed to southern stock. Signs of infection included restlessness, a wild gaze, swollen eyeballs, elevated temperatures, and blindness. As the disease worsened, the animals retained their urine and their bodies stiffened, even as their neck muscles twitched uncontrollably. Prostration and death followed within days. Autopsies revealed kidneys “turgid with blood,” bladders “much distended by bloody urine,” and windpipes full of “frothy blood.”170

  Spanish fever hit Champaign fatteners hard in the summer of 1868. From June to July of that year, the Illinois Central Railroad shipped about fifty carloads of cattle a day from Cairo, Illinois, to its Tolono stockyard in southern Champaign County. The animals—about fifteen thousand total—had traveled from the Red River area near Shreveport, Louisiana, up the Mississippi. As one shipper described it, the animals had stood on the hard, hot deck for about a week, without room to lie down. Having been denied food and drink as well as rest, they landed in Cairo “in great poverty of flesh and famishing with hunger, and so near dead from exhaustion that in many instances they had to be helped up the levee to the shipping yards of the I.C.R.R.” From Tolono, the cattle were distributed to nearby feedlots in and around Champaign. Wherever they went, they came into contact with native animals, and an epidemic ensued.171

  Desperate fatteners rushed their diseased cattle to market, but many died on the way east, causing considerable financial losses. Among those who suffered grievously was John T. Alexander. In that terrible summer, he took in one hundred to six hundred cattle a week, mostly from Cairo via Tolono, but some from Abilene via Chicago. Even as these southwestern cattle fattened on his farms, his own cattle, and those of his neighbors, sickened and died. When a veterinarian came to investigate, he found men skinning and burying the carcasses from sunrise to sunset.172

  Counting the payments he made to his neighbors to cover their losses, Alexander suffered a $75,000 blow. No longer able to maintain his large holdings, he frantically sought a buyer, turning at first to a Canadian company that he thought would be able to take everything and then finally breaking Broadlands into parcels for sale.173 As his payments to his neighbors suggest, Alexander was not alone in misfortune. Across the county, the toll exacted from the “dreadful scourge” amounted to about five thousand deaths. Though not the only stricken part of the state, Champaign was the hardest hit.174 Though the worst epidemic, it was not the last: Spanish fever became a matter of ongoing concern.175

  As the moniker “Spanish fever” suggests, this disease struck contemporaries as foreign in its origin. Since no cases were reported in Spain, the word Spanish implied Mexican origins.176 Indeed, reportage on the fever made it clear that Texan animals were not the only ones to spread it to vulnerable midwestern herds; Mexican and Cherokee cattle did as well. It was the threat of disease that drew the greatest attention to the presence of these animals in Illinois.177

  Northern farmers responded to the danger by urging health inspections and quarantine for “all foreign cattle.”178 Heeding their outcry, the governor of Illinois appointed two cattle commissioners and called a convention, which was attended by delegates from several northern states (including at least one from Champaign) and Canada. This gathering failed to solve the problem. Delegates did bring up the issue of ticks (later discovered to be the transmitters), but they focused on the problem of cattle ingesting ticks that had dropped into their feed rather than the problem of ticks biting cattle.179 In 1869, the Illinois legislature decided that the most effective strategy would be to limit mobility. It passed a bill excluding the entry of southern cattle from March through October, with the exception of animals that had wintered in northern states.180 Illinois was not the only state to pass such legislation, nor even the first: Kansas had restricted the importation of southern cattle in 1861 and Missouri had done so thereafter. (Indeed, the restrictions those states placed on overland routes had benefited the Mississippi River route that funneled cattle to central Illinois.) After Bureau of Animal Industry studies had conclusively proved in 1889 that ticks were the culprits, the federal government passed a national quarantine law.181 When it came to the movement of livestock, the role of tariff barriers paled beside health-based barriers to mobility. The disease threat posed by Mexican and Indian animals did little to foster feelings of attachment to Mexico or Indian Territory, much less their people.

  Canadian cattle also suffered from disease, most notably the deadly pleuropneumonia.
182 Yet rather than providing evidence of Canadian depravity, pleuropneumonia provided further evidence of Canada’s tight connections to northern European breeders, because the disease had come to North America from Europe. Instead of causing midwestern farmers to look upon Canada as a pestilential and menacing neighbor, pleuropneumonia reminded them of the essential commensurability of the two countries, as Canadian officials were as likely to slap restrictions on U.S. animals as the reverse when outbreaks occurred.183 Recognizing the common interests of U.S. and Canadian breeders, the American Association of Breeders of Short-horns pressed both U.S. and Canadian officials for tougher quarantine regulations.184 By the 1880s, Canada had instituted such strict quarantine provisions for imported cattle that the United States required no additional surveillance of transshipped animals. When the United States quarantined Canadian cattle in the Northwest in 1895, it did so because the British government had warned of contagious disease in the area.185

  Illinois farmers recognized Canadians as fellow victims and worthy allies, but they saw Mexicans and Native Americans more as threats, aptly represented by disease-ridden animals. Seeing them as such helped lay the groundwork for further border-drawing efforts, among them the extension of health inspections and quarantine practices from animals to people.186

  CONTINENTAL CROSSROADS

  Given that most people in Champaign never went to Canada or Mexico, it may seem a stretch to claim that borderlands, north and south, extended to their mucky roads and flat expanses of puddled farms. Yet it has long seemed commonsensical to place the same people at the very heart of a continent-spanning nation because of the larger forces at work. Midwestern farmers did not need to personally tour the surrounding country to be woven into its fabric. As tariff policies, quarantine restrictions, railroad grants, and Department of Agriculture veterinary inspections demonstrate, the reach of the federal government extended far beyond mustering troops and distributing land. Even in the government’s sproutlike nineteenth-century form, its tendrils enlaced the country. Economic, social, and cultural relationships further stitched the Midwest into the very heart of the land.

  Nationalist maps that come to a screeching stop at borders notwithstanding, this land sprawled to the north and south, extending beyond the Great Lakes and Rio Grande. The Illinois farmers who looked northward for breeding stock and southward for animals to fatten made the most of their position in the middle. In the process of advancing their own particular fortunes, they brought seemingly disparate borderlands together. By framing the Midwest as thoroughly domestic and quintessentially American, the heartland myth has prevented us from seeing the Midwest as a place where borderlands converged.

  Which is not to say that the people in the middle regarded both borders as commensurate. When midwestern stock producers looked to the north, they did not see many threats. Although Canadians could be economic rivals, their complementary productive systems, familiarity, and ties to the British Empire enhanced the appeal of an integrated borderlands region. If it had been up to the rural residents of the Old Northwest to draw the lines and fix the boundaries, the region we know as the Midwest might very well have become the Lower North.

  To the south, in contrast, the farmers in the middle saw a gulf—in economic competitiveness, in human relationships, and in the quality of stock. The midwestern livestock producers who knew Mexico through animals worked hard to erase the marks of difference and danger from these animals, to homogenize meat through diet and breeding. Yet despite the profits they derived from fattening range cattle, in the process hiding their points of origin, they did not embrace Mexico or Mexicans as economic equals. To the contrary, when they looked to the south, they saw the need for a well-patrolled border, with crossings of more an imperialist than a familial kind.

  Insofar as they pressed for more border enforcement, midwestern farmers may seem to provide evidence for the myth of heartland insularity. But their support for new border-policing practices did not result from distance. To the contrary, it resulted from their intimate relations with, and, indeed, economic dependence on, border-crossing animals, and from the comparative perspectives derived from a place in the middle.

  ARCHIVAL TRACES

  The ordinary meat-eating races

  Urbana Union, 1855: “We have ourself seen a hundred bushels to the acre raised on old ‘Indian corn patches’ which had been cultivated probably for hundreds of years.”1

  Champaign Daily Gazette, 1899: A First National Bank advertisement: steamship passage, “via all the principal lines, sold to any part of the world . . . foreign exchange bought and sold, and letters of credit issued available the world over.”2

  The Illinois Agriculturist, 1902: A. D. Shamel, an Instructor of Farm Crops at the University of Illinois, has ambitions of spreading corn into “great territories now undeveloped,” and Africa in particular. “Some prominent agriculturalists confidently predict that upon the development and settling up of our corn belt, when the farms become small and intensive cultivation is the rule that then this great African corn belt may be taken advantage of.”3

  Urbana Courier, 1905: Advertisement for International Stock Food-coupon holders can obtain free samples of International Poultry Food, International Worm Powder, International Heave Cure, International Gall Cure, International Colic Cure, International Distemper Cure, and International Louse Killer, provided they purchase a pail of International Stock Food at the regular price.4

  Chicago Daily Tribune, 1909: “Champaign, Ill. has three track buyers, who buy for export, they have already taken over 10,000,000 bu [bushels] for export via New Orleans, to be shipped by Jan. 1.”5

  The Breeder’s Gazette, 1911: “The porcine species is purely the associate of home-making humanity. The American Indian never produced a hog, nor have the Asiatic tribes of wandering proclivities. His very nature renders him a product of civilization and the associate of progressive mankind.”6

  Urbana Courier, 1918: “With food the United States made it possible for the forces of democracy to hold out to victory. To insure democracy in the world, we must continue to live simply in order that we may supply these liberated nations of Europe with food. Hunger among a people inevitably breeds anarchy. American food must complete the work of making the world safe for democracy.”7

  The World’s Meat, 1927: “Those nations which have been the most vigorous colonizers of modern times and which are the most advanced in the achievements of this industrialized age are the heaviest meat eaters.” Meat eating “may not be the cause of greater virility,” but “all the racial evidence available indicates that the ordinary meat-eating races are the most virile races of the world.”8

  3

  HOG-TIED

  The Roots of the Modern American Empire

  WISCONSIN SCHOOLS

  Since its inception the heartland myth has insisted on American exceptionality. The heartland of myth is God’s country. Its wholesome farms, with their tall tasseled stalks standing golden in the sun, provide the rural counterpart to the Puritans’ city on a hill. More seat of virtue than throne of power, the heartland of myth seems innocent of imperial designs.

  The founders of the republic, however, imagined their creation as a new Rome, destined to expand over time. The term empire later fell into disfavor as it came to be associated with European colonial injustices, but for the first century following independence, Americans did not hesitate to speak of their expanding republic as an empire, mostly “of liberty” but sometimes just plain. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided the legislative mechanism for their expansive vision. By enabling the incorporation of new states, on an equal basis, it headed off the possibility of subordinate western colonies. Yet by promoting the conquest, dispossession, and displacement of indigenous nations, it also advanced the imperial project. It was under the auspices of the Northwest Ordinance that the ostensibly anticolonial settler colony of Illinois became another stately jewel in the imperial orb.9

/>   Frederick Jackson Turner, of the University of Wisconsin, moved the Old Northwest out of the realm of empire and into the domain of democracy in his frontier thesis of 1893. Rather than compare U.S. expansion to European colonialism, he compared the American frontier to the boundaries that European states drew with each other. This sleight of hand enabled him to keep the American empire out of the imperial world system of the time, placing it in a special world of its own, a world of nonimperial democracy building on the part of white men gifted with vast expanses of free land. Turner provided such a powerful national narrative that it took generations of historians (notably including one of Turner’s successors at Wisconsin, William Cronon) to retire it from active duty history, relegating it to an office in the echoing halls of myth.

  Along with historians of the American West such as Cronon, the foreign relations historian William Appleman Williams (yet another Wisconsin luminary) played a major role in debunking Turner’s thesis. In Empire as a Way of Life (published in 1980), Williams drew attention to colonial violence, as it played out in land grabs and removal policies. But it was Williams’s earlier work that had put the word empire back into play. In The Roots of the Modern American Empire (published in 1969), Williams construed the Midwest very differently from both the founders and the Turner school. Focused more on overseas expansion than the continental variety, this book treated the Midwest as fully incorporated into the nation, its history as thoroughly domestic, until the flood of its abundance broke the dam. Writing in the midst of the Vietnam War, a conflict that he vigorously opposed, Williams had set forth to discover the wellspring of American empire. He found it on the farm, and, more specifically, in farmers’ desire for export markets in Asia and Latin America.