Cattle Country

As beef and cattle production progressed in nineteenth-century America, the cow emerged as the nation’s representative food animal and earned a culturally prominent role in the literature of the day. In Cattle Country Kathryn Cornell Dolan examines the role cattle played in narratives throughout the century to show how the struggles within U.S. food culture mapped onto society’s broader struggles with colonization, environmentalism, U.S. identity, ethnicity, and industrialization. Dolan examines diverse texts from Native American, African American, Mexican American, and white authors that showcase the zeitgeist of anxiety surrounding U.S. identity as cattle gradually became an industrialized food source, altering the country’s culture while exacting a high cost to humans, animals, and the land. From Henry David Thoreau’s descriptions of indigenous cuisines as a challenge to the rising monoculture, to Washington Irving’s travel narratives that foreshadow cattle replacing American bison in the West, to María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s use of cattle to connect race and imperialism in her work, authors’ preoccupations with cattle underscored their concern for resource depletion, habitat destruction, and the wasteful overproduction of a single breed of livestock. Cattle Country offers a window into the ways authors worked to negotiate the consequences of the development of this food culture and, by excavating the history of U.S. settler colonialism through the figure of cattle, sheds new ecocritical light on nineteenth-century literature.

This is from the author's note for Cattle Country-the first novelette of the three. There are many things here that can be found in nearly any Western; for it is not a calm book. But I hope you will feel: The courage of John Wade as he tries to fill a job that he knows is far too big for him; The strain of the decision Wells has to make of whether to get out of town safely himself or help the sheriff who will probably arrest him when the shooting is over; The sting of Wade's words as he tells Jim Halleran, "I'd like to think you were still a man I could be proud to know;" The frustration of Katherine Wade as she stamps her foot on the floor of the sheriff's office and says, "Damn Cowards;" The bigness of Henry Ashburn as he gives Bob Darlington a hand in a fight that does not concern him at all. This is Cattle Country! "I grew up in times and places much like Erwin Thompson paints in Cattle Country, Back Trail, and The Invincible Three. Although those times are gone, Thompson's well-written voice rings true with the memory and flavor of a world that should not be lost." -Jim Lyle, author of Things Seen in the Dessert

One of the most colourful chapters in the history of North American settlement began in the 1880s when the rich Alberta grasslands spreading east from the foothills of the Rockies became the magnet for cattle ranching. Award-winning Cattle Kingdomprovides readers with all the colourful tales of raffish characters, political intrigues and partnerships, fortunes made and lost, and the harsh realities of prairie winters. The era also gave us the mythic figure of the cowboy, still prominent in Alberta today. Nowhere is the story of ranching more rich and varied than in Alberta. There was an assortment of high rollers, big-money men from the east, English lords and remittance men, along with refugees from the American west and ordinary folk seeking a homestead and a new dream. The newly formed North West Mounted Police was on hand as well. Famous ranches were created during this period, including the Cochrane, the Oxley and the North West Cattle Company (Bar U). The cast of characters included John Ware; the brave and foolhardy Major-General Thomas Bland Strange, who had plans for a ranch for retired British army types; and the scrappy Pat Burns, who parlayed a small slaughterhouse in Calgary into a giant meat-packing and cattle empire. By the time of the first Calgary Stampede in 1912, the cattle kingdom was on the wane. More and more settlers arrived and began fencing and farming the once limitless grazing lands. And then came the discovery of oil. But during its brief and brilliant season in the sun, early ranching in Alberta put an indelible stamp on the history and culture of the Canadian west.

How to Take Monster Bucks will reveal the secret strategies of men who consistently bag older age-class deer each season. There is a price to pay to be the best at any sport, and trophy deer hunting is no different. But this book will save you thousands of hunting hours in your pursuit of monster bucks. Special Features Cackle to monster bucks Double-call trophy deer Find big bucks in cattle country Take the smartest bucks on the land you hunt Hunt late-season trophies Find wall-hanging bucks on your kitchen table For more than three decades, John E. Phillips has hunted white-tailed deer across the nation. He has gathered information for his newspaper columns and magazine articles on the out-of-doors for the past 20 years. The award-winning author of 18 books, Phillips has made his living learning the secrets of how expert hunters take white-tailed deer.

The implementation of the Brucellosis and Tuberculosis Eradication Campaign has been one of the most significant animal health achievements in the history of Australia and worldwide. The unprecedented technical and operational complexity of the campaign presented an enormous challenge to cattle producers, veterinarians, research scientists, field staff and administrators over the 25 years of the project. Beating the Odds in a Big Country captures the dynamism of the campaign and records the very real contribution in cash and kind made by the many producers whose herds were subject to eradication programs.

Featuring an international team of authors, Neural Network Perspectives on Cognition and Adaptive Robotics presents several approaches to the modeling of human cognition and language using neural computing techniques. It also describes how adaptive robotic systems can be produced using neural network architectures. Covering a wide range of mainstream area and trends, each chapter provides the latest information from a different perspective.

With this study the cattle guard joins the sod house, the windmill, and barbed wire as a symbol of range country on the American Great Plains. A U.S. folk innovation now in use throughout the world, the cattle guard functions as both a gate and a fence: it keeps livestock from crossing, but allows automobiles and people to cross freely. The author blends traditional history and folklore to trace the origins of the cattle guard and to describe how, in true folk fashion, the device in its simplest form—wooden poles or logs spaced in parallel fashion over a pit in the roadway—was reinvented and adapted throughout livestock country Hoy traces the origins of the cattle guard to flat stone stiles unique to Cornwall, England, then through the railroad cattle guard, in use in this country as early as 1836, and finally to the Great Plains where, probably in 1905, the first ones appeared on roads. He describes regional variations in cattle guards and details unusual types. He provides information on cattle-guard makers, who range from local blacksmiths and welders to farmers and ranchers to large manufacturers. In addition to documenting the economic and cultural significance of the cattle guard, this volume reveals much about early twentieth-century farm and ranch life. It will be of interest not only to folklorists and historians of agriculture and Western America, but also to many Plains-area farmers, ranchers, and oilmen.