For humans, of course, symbols are more than just practical tools; they embody culture. Branding was, and still is, a major component of the culture of the West. Ranches, for the last century, have often been named after their brands; pride is taken in mastering this symbolic system that defines human control over space and over animals. Ranchers will show off their ability to recognize the many symbols invented. The ritual is still central to ranching life: tying the animals’ legs tightly together; setting a fire; carefully heating the branding iron (large, so as to make an articulate, clearly visible mark); then applying the iron until—and well after—the flesh of the animal literally burns. As put by Arnold and Hale (western authors writing in 1940), “There is an acrid odor, strong, repulsive . . . [the animal] will go BAWR-R-R-R, its eyes will bulge alarmingly, its mouth will slaver, and its nose will snort.” (At this stage, typically, a bull will be castrated, and in many cases, a cut will be made in the ear as a further symbolic mark.)
A complicated ritual: as the same authors note, “[the inventor of branding] could hardly have suspected how much fun and interest would eventually center around cattle-branding.”16 The entire practice is usefully compared with the Indian correlate. Indians marked bison by tail tying; that is, the tails of killed bison were tied to make a claim to their carcass. Crucially, we see that for the Indians, the bison became property only after its killing. It was only then that the bison made the passage from nature to human society. The cow, on the other hand, was a property—indeed, a commodity—even while alive. It would be branded early in its life.
In the special case of calves born free, branding was the moment when a cow passed from nature to culture. A feral calf caught on the Texas plains, unbranded and technically called a “maverick,” would be branded and thus made a commodity. Once again, a comparison is called for: we are reminded of the practice of branding runaway slaves, as punishment and as a practical measure of making sure that slaves—that particular kind of commodity—would not revert into their natural, free state. In short, in the late 1860s, as Texans finally desisted from the branding of slaves, they applied themselves with ever greater enthusiasm to the branding of cows. Sometimes whole herds would be collected through “mavericking” (the technical term for hunting and branding wild calves). Such herds would gain their marketable value by being herded north, as far as Chicago. This was a fortune that required, as investment, nothing more than motion and violence.
Violence, of course, was everywhere in the West. Central control did not yet extend across the land as a whole but was still limited to the network of military garrisons. Beyond that, power was wielded by small, mounted bands, ready to kill: the same kind of people who had fought for Texan slavery against Mexico, and then against Indians, or against each other in the Civil War. The habits of violence were endemic to the land. The combination of violence and motion, after all, is what made the West so cinematic.
But the West was even more interesting than that. Its myth was based not merely on violence and motion in the raw but on another, more subtle encounter: that between violence and motion, on the one hand, and civilization, on the other. This myth is fully based on reality: the North had won a war designed to make the West into an extension of its prosperity based on the prudence of farmers. It had also won this war through the experience of violence and lawlessness. Hence the liminal character of the West.
Consider, for example, James Butler Hickok, at one of the mythmaking moments of the West. The year was 1871, and Wild Bill, as Hickok was popularly called, was employed by the city of Abilene, Kansas, to act as its marshal. Abilene had been made practically overnight by the Illinois cattle trade when, in 1867, the rail terminus to Chicago opened there. The economy was booming: the cattle needed pens, attracting settled farmers; the cattle drivers looked for gambling and sex, attracting an altogether different kind of population. This led to the division of the city, neatly marked by the railroad tracks, between law and lawlessness. On one side was a midwestern small town transplanted further west; on the other side was the demimonde of a border town. Wild Bill was hired to prevent any spillover across the tracks. He was considered successful, but he was also deeply resented by the Texan herdsmen, particularly because of his past (born in Illinois, his adult life was divided between fighting Indians and fighting Southerners). Toward the end of the cow season, on October 5, he was passing the Alamo Saloon when a shot was fired, narrowly missing him. The Texan Philip Coe, pistol in hand, explained that “he shot a stray dog,” and then fired again at Wild Bill, who immediately shot Coe twice in the stomach—as well as fatally shooting a bystander who came to help. This turned out to be Wild Bill’s friend Michael Williams. Grief-stricken, Wild Bill set out to chase the Texans from town; a marked man, he lived now in constant fear for his life. This is the stuff western myth is made of; but consider the denouement of the combat. Abilene decided that it had had enough, and it could from now on live on marketing the growing agricultural produce of the county. The Texan trade was asked to move to other rail termini, and Wild Bill’s contract ended.17
Here, then, is the historical development. The economic value of the plains was, to start with, marginal. At first they attracted primarily cow owners. However, the very act of pushing the cows into the plains raised their value, even if only a little. This rise in value justified a certain amount of Northern investment, such as the extension of the railroad or the settlement of new towns. This investment, in turn, raised the value of the land even further, so that an economy based purely on cows on the open range was no longer justified. The cow ecology would have to adjust to a much more competitive use of the land. And Texas, after all, did lose the war. The extermination of the bison made the Great Plains into a vacuum that Texas got sucked into—to get entangled in the web centered in Chicago.
Competitive use of the land was marked not only in the North-South confrontation of the saloon cities but also among the Texan herd itself. There were more and more cows now in an area devastated by the transition from the bison, and further reduced by the encroaching agriculture on its most fertile lands. To remain competitive, you had to secure the grass for yourself, and the cattle industry moved into buying and claiming land—fraudulently claiming homesteads or (especially in Texas itself, whose landholding system was not influenced by the Homestead Act) directly leasing vast estates from the state.18 As the 1860s turned into the 1870s, control over cows had to be supplemented by control over the land itself. Where the cows would go was now something to be fixed. Farmers, as well as the railroad, needed to make sure cows would keep off their lands; cow owners needed to secure land to which their cows, and no others, could get access. All those cows, all this motion: it now somehow had to be delimited.
That, in itself, was nothing new. Ever since domestication, the control of animals on agricultural land had always been a complicated operation—especially considering that animals were in fact always forced to provide the main source of muscle power on the farm and as a result were part of agricultural production itself. Modern capitalism insisted on this discovery: that private ownership of the land could lead to intensive investment and thus to much-higher profits. The enclosed field, kept for the use of a single owner, was one of the hallmarks of capitalism in Britain and therefore also later in the United States.19 Such fields could have been defined symbolically but more often were fenced by some combination of various materials easily available in northern Europe and in northeast America: stone, hedges, and—especially in rain-rich Atlantic America—wood.20 With the expansion of agricultural land in America, the capital represented by fencing grew immensely; an often-quoted report by the Department of Agriculture in 1871 put the total value of fences at over