How did some of the most savage and desolate islands in the world, scattered across the Pacific and Caribbean, become U.S. territories? The Great Guano Rush describes the fascinating and little-known history of this earliest example of American overseas expansion. "Guano" (bird droppings) was the 19th century's most important fertilizer and in 1856 Congress, believing that American farmers were being gouged on guano sales by foreign monopolists, authorized U.S. citizens to claim and exploit unowned guano-rich islands around the world. The legacy of this decision is a strange group of American "appurtenances", ranging from Haiti to the central Pacific and with a highly diverse subsequent history, from the notorious near-slavery on Navassa Island to the contemporary issue of the Johnston Atoll chemical weapon destruction plant. The Great Guano Rush is an important book for its insights on both 19th century America and the history of a key commodity. But it is also important in establishing that, contrary to the American free enterprise myth, the success of this country has always been based on a close cooperation between business and government.

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.

This is a new release of the original 1923 edition.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

The harsh business realities of driving cattle are separated in this book from the mythology and folklore of the cattle-trailing era. Jimmy M. Skaggs focuses on the transportation agents who contracted the delivery of cattle for Texas ranchers and drove the animals northward for sale. He reveals them as shrewd ""hip-pocket"" businessmen.

Red meat--it's as American as apple pie. In a world where most hunger is alleviated with an occasional handful of grain, red meat's daily appearance on most American tables is a vivid symbol of national prosperity. The red-meat industry is also a powerful symbol. Undulating with the waves made by entrepreneurs and monopolies, shortages and gluts, scandal and government regulations, the industry mirrors the nation's turbulent economic history.
Author Jimmy M. Skaggs traces the development of the red-meat industry from forest-foraging razorbacks in colonial days to genetic engineering of tender, disease-resistant beef cattle.
Scholars and persons interested in livestock raising, agriculture, and America's marketplace will find "Prime Cut" to be an unflinching account of one of our nation's most volatile, most quintessentially American industries. With the extensive bibliography accompanying this work, the only modern comprehensive study of American livestock raising and meatpacking, readers will have access to countless details of the meat industry.

Hundreds of miles from its supply center in Chihuahua and just freed from the grip of Spain's mercantilist colonial policies, New Mexico was ripe for foreign commerce when the first of the Missouri traders arrived in Santa Fe in 1821. For the next forty years trade flourished between Americans hawking anything that would sell, often at incredible profit, and New Mexican buyers hungry for all types of manufactured goods. But the frontier moved inevitably westward, goods became more readily available and consequently less expensive, and the railroad at last replaced the mulewhackers who had long plied the Santa Fe Trail.
"Broadcloth and Britches" is the first account to synthesize an abundance of primary source material--the reminiscences of traders, the impressions of journalists and soldiers, the unpublished manuscripts of both literate and semiliterate observers--and serious scholarly journal articles and monographs of the Santa Fe Trail and trade. In this detailed and lively narrative, the authors trace the origins, development, and decline of the trade: the early expeditions; the route and its hazards; transport, financing, and profits; the effects of complex political shifts in Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States; and the economic consequences of increasingly efficient supply to a relatively fixed market.