"...Mother
& I went to the pastures this afternoon, the pasture season is about up, so
will have to take the cattle out of the Fox pasture this week. I think I will feed the steers this fall. I
took hogs to Wichita on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, got $14.60 on Tues.,
$15.05 on Thurs. and don't know yet what the ones brought on Friday as I didn't
stay to see them sell. I took six hogs
each trip.
"I
haven't bought you a cow yet. I'll try
and watch out for one between now and spring...."
--Letter from my grandfather, on the farm in Bloomington, Kans., Sunday, October 11, 1942
to my father, a college student in Winfield, Kans. (These hog prices were per hundred pounds of
live weight. Steers are castrated male cattle.)
Hardly any of the plants and animals that
provided my grandparents’ livelihood on the Kansas prairies were indigenous to
that place. Some of the prairie grasses
in the pastures and meadow were likely the only exceptions. Osage (and earlier Caddoan) farmers and
hunters had maintained those prairie grasses for centuries by burning them, while most of
the other farm plants and animals had a long history of coevolution and
domestication by humans far from the Great Plains.
Cattle were the largest animals that newcomers brought with them to Kansas in the nineteenth century. Millions of bison had once inhabited those prairies. Bison populations were affected by the development of bison-hunting cultures among Plains Indians after Europeans introduced horses, by competition with those horses that grazed wild, and by increased pressures on Plains Indians as whites forced Eastern Indians off their land and toward the Plains. Whites then pushed bison to the brink of extinction through hunting in the late nineteenth century. Cattle, like those of my grandfather, took the ecological niche that bison had held just a few decades earlier, both as consumers of grass and as a source of meat for the ecosystem’s top predator, humans.
Cattle were the largest animals that newcomers brought with them to Kansas in the nineteenth century. Millions of bison had once inhabited those prairies. Bison populations were affected by the development of bison-hunting cultures among Plains Indians after Europeans introduced horses, by competition with those horses that grazed wild, and by increased pressures on Plains Indians as whites forced Eastern Indians off their land and toward the Plains. Whites then pushed bison to the brink of extinction through hunting in the late nineteenth century. Cattle, like those of my grandfather, took the ecological niche that bison had held just a few decades earlier, both as consumers of grass and as a source of meat for the ecosystem’s top predator, humans.
According to archeologists and
biologists, most of the world’s domestic cattle (Bos taurus) descend
from the now-extinct wild ox or aurochs (Bos primigenius) that once
lived throughout Eurasia and Africa north of the equator. It was these aurochs
that artists painted on the walls of Lascaux Cave in France some seventeen
millennia ago. Humans began to tame
these fierce creatures at least as early as the seventh millennium B.C.E., as
evidence from Turkey attests. They began
to use cows for milk production by the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Egypt and
Mesopotamia. Ultimately, cattle fared much better than their wild cousins.
By most accounts, the last aurochs died in Poland in 1627. Thus, cattle -- an animal that had once roamed Europe
wild and been replaced by its domestic cousins there -- had an unwitting role in
displacing bison from the Plains and nearly leading to their extinction.
(Source: Dan Flores, "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850" Journal of American History 78:2 (1991): 465-85; Frederick L. Brown, “Cows in the
Commons, Dogs on the Lawn: A History of Animals in Seattle,” [Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Washington, 2010], 71-72).
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