Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  That so many store rather than fat cattle were exported from Ireland during these centuries is partly attributable to the unusual method of summering cattle on rented grass that obtained in many parts of the country. This reduced the amount of grazing available to each animal, with the result that few had the wherewithal to reach maturity.

  In a Survey of Londonderry in 1814, the Reverend A. Ross described the ‘mode of letting’. The cost of grazing a full-grown cow at three years old from May to November was known as the summ. A summ was divided into three feet. A year-old calf was a foot, and a two-year-old, two feet. A horse was five feet. Six sheep, or four ewes and four lambs, or 24 geese added up to a summ. If a summ was worth 6s., then the cost of grazing a two-year-old would be 4s., and so on. A summ on high land or poorer pasture varied, with the quality of the grazing, from 6s. to 10s. On fertile parkland grazing it ranged from £2 to £2 10s.

  This was similar to an arrangement I came across on a piece of ground called Brackenthwaite Hows. The grazing was divided into 16 stints. Each stint gave its owner the right to graze one cow or six sheep. I had eight stints, so in theory I could graze 48 sheep or eight cows. But it was not clear when the grazing could be done. I rented the other eight stints from the other two owners so that I controlled all the grazing, but had they insisted on exercising their grazing rights, there would not have been enough grass to keep nearly a hundred sheep all year round, let alone 16 cows. And because three people had the right to graze stock over the same ground, there was no point in trying to improve it by cultivation or fertilizer unless we all paid a proportion of the cost. The other two owners were not interested in spending money on it, so it remained unimproved, an object lesson in the reality of communal ownership of land, a hangover from the days of open fields, and the reason for enclosure.

  The Reverend Ross also attributed the inability of many farmers to feed their cattle beyond the store stage to the pernicious effects of gavelkind, the notion prevalent in Ireland of bequeathing a father’s land and goods equally between his surviving children. This practice, ‘so just and reasonable in theory, but so ruinous and absurd in practice, is interwoven in such a manner in the very constitution of their minds, that it is next to impossible to eradicate it’. In spite of every argument to the contrary, smaller landholders divided their land between their children until division was no longer practicable. In the course of two or three generations, a family would be brought to ruin.

  Ross tells of a farmer with 30 acres of arable land and two sons. He divided his farm between them, with the result that neither could easily support his family. One son had four sons, and during his lifetime he too divided his 15 acres equally between himself and them, giving each three acres. The sons imagined themselves ‘established landholders’ with the means to marry, and promptly did so, creating four of ‘the poorest and most wretched families that can be well imagined’. They had neither the land to produce the common necessaries of life, nor the money to get into another trade or profession. Ross bemoans the landlords who encouraged this subdivision as a means of increasing their political influence.

  But the people themselves must also take some responsibility for their own impoverishment. At first blush, gavelkind seems to be based on a loving desire to treat all the children fairly. But if the result was to condemn them all to grinding poverty, where is the love in that? It is suggested that the deeper reason had something to do with a profound connection with land and a desire to have a piece that they could call their own. It is not just owning it; it runs deeper than that. It has to do with belonging and an attachment to the soil that is almost spiritual. So it is hardly surprising that they were willing to countenance the practical consequences of minute division.

  1 Even the translation from the Gaelic doesn’t make it any more intelligible.

  CHAPTER 14

  From Scotland to the High Plains of Colorado

  FOR TENS OF thousands of years the permanent grasslands of North America supported millions of the ‘finest grass-eating creatures on four legs’. They were more like swarms of insects than mammals. No other herbivore has ever existed in such numbers as the American buffalo – or bison, depending on where you come from. It would have been easier to count the leaves in a forest than the number of buffalo in North America up to about 1860. It was estimated that at their most populous there were 100 million of the creatures roaming in great multitudes covering scores of square miles.

  In 1889, William T. Hornaday, in The Extermination of the American Bison, reported seeing a herd on the Arkansas river he estimated to be 50 miles long and 25 miles wide, which took five days to pass by. ‘From the top of Pawnee Rock I could see from six to ten miles in almost every direction. This whole vast space was covered with buffalo, looking at a distance like one compact mass, the visual angle not permitting the ground to be seen. I have seen such a sight a great number of times, but never on so large a scale.’

  Some herds were estimated to contain seven million animals. By a large margin, there were more herbivorous animals on the North American continent 600 years ago than there are now or at any time since. The soil on the American prairies under permanent grassland before the buffalo were exterminated was some of the deepest and richest on the planet. Buffalo grazing over hundreds of thousands of years made it rich in humus, kept the grasses young and vigorous and anchored the roots to the soil. In the early 1700s, travellers described the magnificent silver pasture in Nebraska, where the grass grew eight to twelve feet tall, so high that even a man on a horse could not see over it across the prairie.

  The herds were so huge that they frequently stopped boats as they crossed rivers, and overwhelmed travellers on the plains. Towards the end of their dominion they even derailed locomotives and held up trains by sheltering from blizzards in the newly opened railroad cuttings. So numerous were they that some Indian tribes believed the buffalo issued from the earth in an inexhaustible supply and that they could never disappear.

  The early Spanish explorer Vásquez de Coronado, travelling from Mexico to Kansas between 1540 and 1542 in search of the mythical Seven Cities of Gold, saw ‘an immensity of grass’ grazed by vast herds of ‘cows … that it is impossible to number them … there was not a day that I lost sight of them’.

  Their range was continental. They were the biggest herbivore at the apex of the largest ecosystem outside the boreal forest that lies across the north of America from Newfoundland to Alaska. Superbly adapted to the extremes of temperature, from 110 degrees in summer to minus 30 in winter, they shared the land with tens of millions of other grass-eating, fertility-building animals: antelope, deer, jackrabbits, prairie dogs, innumerable beaver and coyotes, wolves, brown bears, and birds in flocks so huge that the legendary ornithologist John James Audubon described them as blocking the sun for three days. Over millennia these animals had created some of the deepest, richest soils on the planet: their dung had fertilized the earth and their grazing had pruned the grasses so that their stems tillered out in a thick mat of roots and vegetation, covering the soil and protecting it from frost, drought and storm.

  There were hundreds of species of grasses, which covered a quarter of North America. The tallest grew on the eastern edge of the plains, across into Kentucky, giving way further west and at higher altitudes to the short grass of southeastern Colorado. The swards contained a diverse array of other plants as well as grasses and sedges, all of which gave the grazing animals a range of minerals and nutrients that they brought up from various depths in the soil through their roots.

  The buffalo migrated with the weather, roaming over the greater part of the modern United States and north into western Canada, grazing territory that ran 3,000 miles from the Great Bear Lake in Canada, south into northern California and Mexico, along the Gulf coast to Florida, then up the Atlantic seaboard almost to New York and west across to the Great Lakes. The land was one vast buffalo range between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, from Minnesota to Louisiana. There
were no fences and few natural predators to impinge on the dominance of the species. The herds practised a form of ‘mob stocking’, grazing an area intensively for a couple of hours and then resting to chew the cud before moving on to a fresh area.

  Despite buffalo being close relatives of domestic cattle, the Indians never tamed them. Why would they want to when they could kill one whenever they needed to? Later efforts by Europeans were no more successful. The animals were said to be ‘wild and ungovernable’, and despite their bulk, they could jump nearly six feet vertically and run at 35–40 mph when they had to. The bulls weighed up to a ton and stood between five and six feet at the shoulder.

  Buffalo had been exterminated from the eastern states by the last decades of the eighteenth century, but until the beginning of the nineteenth, both the native Indians and the buffalo were largely untouched in the ‘Great American Desert’ west of the Mississippi. Most of the area covered by the Great Plains had been owned by France (and Spain before that) and was ‘a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude’, wrote Robert Marcy after exploring the headwaters of the Red River. Not a place where people could live by agriculture, reported Stephen Harriman Long, the influential American explorer, in 1820.

  In one of the most significant and audacious land deals in history, the emerging United States had acquired possession of this vast tract of land from Napoleon. It stretched from New Orleans, up the west bank of the Mississippi into what is now Canada and down the continental divide (the watershed between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans) into New Mexico, Texas and back to New Orleans. The purchase price for 828,000 square miles was $15m, an average of three cents an acre – an astonishing bargain even at the time. It sounds even more of a snip when converted to today’s money, about $250m. Napoleon’s treasury was empty and he needed to finance his prospective invasion of England and keep his imperial ambitions afloat. The sale vies with the invasion of Russia as the worst decision the emperor made.

  The prairies had been occupied for thousands of years by tribes of Plains Indians: Cheyenne, Arapaho, Pawnee, Kiowa, Sioux and Ute – after whom Utah is named. These formed loose tribal associations and occupied themselves fighting one another. The Ute’s word for their dominant neighbours the Comanche – kimantsi – meant ‘enemy’; the Comanche were the Lords of the Plains, extraordinary horsemen, magnificent fighting men and superb hunters.

  The tribes may have spent much of their time in conflict, but they had at least one thing in common: their dependence on the buffalo, for clothes, tools, saddles, ropes, shields, utensils, meat – which could be dried, smoked, or stewed – weapons and shelter. They consumed or otherwise used every part of the carcase, including the organs, testicles, nose gristle, nipples, blood, milk and marrow. They generally preferred cows over bulls and particularly prized the meat from the hump, the tongue and unborn foetuses. Tepees were made from about 20 buffalo skins, dried, stretched and stitched together. They were light enough at 250 lb to be portable, yet weatherproof. The tribes’ whole existence relied on the buffalo, just as the Eskimo’s does on the seal.

  After the Civil War, the Indian tribes soon came into conflict with the settlers who were pouring into the empty plains from the east. The Indians roamed as free as the wind that blew across land where ‘there was nothing to break the light of the sun’, as Ten Bears, the Comanche chief, explained in 1867 at the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty with the president of the United States, which was broken almost before the ink was dry. Killing the buffalo for their hides had already begun on a huge scale. Santanta, the chief of the Kiowa, asked bitterly at the Medicine Lodge council, ‘has the white man become a child that he should recklessly kill and not eat? When the red men slay game, they do so that they may live and not starve.’

  By the Medicine Lodge Treaty the Indians were promised perpetual hunting rights to most of the drier grasslands on the High Plains, south of the Arkansas river, while the settlers were allotted the wetter plains in the east. Yet within a few years of signing, the treaty had been broken by hunters who invaded the land and killed the buffalo in their millions, stockpiling hides and horns to sell back east. Seven million pounds of buffalo tongues were shipped back east out of Dodge City in one two-year period in 1872–3. One government agent estimated that 25 million of the beasts were killed at this time. Great heaps of bleached bones lay stacked at railroad terminals waiting to be sold, at ten dollars a ton, for fertilizer.

  Greed and wanton destruction, unrestrained by either the national government or the western states and territories, and killing cows in preference to bulls, accelerated by the much-improved breech-loading rifle, ensured the buffalo didn’t stand a chance anywhere on the continent. After the railroads came through, the railway companies used to slow the trains down to the same pace as a migrating herd so the passengers could clamber onto the roof or open the windows and blast away with the rifles provided on the trains for defence against Indians. The railway companies wanted the herds culled or eradicated because of the damage done to trains by colliding with buffalo crossing the tracks. A herd of buffalo could delay a train for days.

  When the railroad came through the buffalo’s grazings in Colorado and Kansas in 1870, it split the herd in two. The southern herd was confined to the Texas Panhandle, where it was annihilated within four years. Some people could see what was happening and proposed protecting the remaining herds. Some of the army officers who had been involved in the slaughter early on tried to stop it. William Cody (‘Buffalo Bill’) spoke up for preserving the buffalo because he could see the species was struggling. But those in high places in the United States were determined to subdue the Plains Indians, and believed that eradicating the buffalo would bring them to heel – rather as the US sprayed ‘agent orange’ on forests and farmland in Vietnam to kill foliage and deprive the people of food and shelter. For this reason in 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant vetoed a federal bill to protect the rapidly dwindling herds, and in 1875, General Philip Sheridan, in an address to a joint session of Congress, supported the slaughter as a way of depriving the Indians of their livelihood. Its destruction was a national ecological tragedy that set the stage for the later devastation of the Dust Bowl.

  As the buffalo was being eradicated by just about anyone who could hold a rifle, the US army was doing the same to the Plains Indians, though unlike the buffalo, they did not go down without a fight. The most formidable opposition came from the Lords of the Plains, the Comanche; yet impressive as they were as fighting men, they were no match for the white man’s weapons and ruthlessness. They were finally broken by a Texan army under the unscrupulous General Sheridan during the Red River War of 1874–5. Six army columns descended on an Indian camp at Palo Duro Canyon. When the tribe fled, the army slaughtered their 1,048 horses, depriving them of mobility for the remainder of the war.

  The last of the buffalo were wiped out within five years of the destruction of the Comanche. Sheridan told the Texas legislature in 1875 that ‘lasting peace’ could only be achieved if ‘the Anglos killed, skinned and sold until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairie can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy … forerunner of an advanced civilization.’ It had taken only ten years to clear out the Indians and their buffalo; all that was left behind was mountains of skulls and bones and millions of sun-dried lumps of buffalo dung, which, while they lasted, the incoming settlers gathered to heat their sod houses and dugouts. The Great American Desert was about to become the Great Plains, where millions of acres of empty grassland lay open for the taking.

  At the same time as all this devastation was being wrought, on the other side of the world, in a little corner of Scotland, a few far-sighted stockmen were engaged in the creation of one of the most successful and valuable breeds of beef cattle the world has ever seen. Not that they knew it, but it was a breed that in due course was destined to take the place of the beleaguered buffalo on the grasslands of the New World.

  The Aberdeen Angus is one of the two bre
eds of polled black cattle – the other being the Galloway – to come out of Scotland, and is a testament to the remarkable skill of nineteenth-century Scottish stock-breeders. The breed originated in a polled strain of black cattle that had been around in Scotland since at least Roman times – and almost certainly much longer – part of the great tribe of Celtic black cattle that for many centuries had been driven into England from the Celtic parts of Britain: Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The two black Scottish breeds are distinguished by their being homyl – naturally hornless. Dr Johnson explained in 1775, in his Journey to the Western Isles, that the word meant ‘humble’, in the same sense that we refer to a humble – or bumble – bee ‘that wants a sting’. Polled cattle have no power to gore.

  One of the earliest references to polled cattle in Scotland is to a ‘black homyl’ in the Laws of Kenneth MacAlpin1 who reigned from 843–860: ‘If your neighbour’s kine fall a fighting with yours, and if any of them happen to be killed, if it be not known whose cow it was that did it, the homyl-cow (or the cow that wants horns) shall be blamed for it; and the owner of that cow shall be answerable for his neighbour’s damage.’ It is hard to understand why the cow without horns should be blamed for the fighting, unless it is that a polled beast would have to be unusually aggressive to fight with a horned one and cause damage and must therefore be to blame for starting it.