Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
There's an old adage that says, “you are what you eat.” And while that's likely talking
mostly about the health of your diet, it does illustrate the fact that what a culture eats,
says much about that culture, and likely impacts that culture's history. And when
we look at the confluence between diet and culture in America, one food looms large.
One food that we eat in larger quantities than almost any other country on Earth. One
food that is the primary ingredient, in one of the most quintessential of American foods,
the hamburger. Beef cattle arrived with the earliest European settlements in the Americas,
and beef production, and consumption has been a primary driver of American history ever since.
Although there were wild bovines in the Americas, notably the American bison,
the cattle we use for beef originated in Europe, and were brought to the Americas almost as soon
as Europeans arrived. On the second expedition in 1493, Christopher Columbus brought some cattle,
primarily intended as draft animals. Some of these cattle escaped, and feral herds were established.
More were taken on Spanish expeditions to Mexico, and South America. These cattle were wiry, thin,
fast, had long horns for defense, and were hardy, and drought resistant. In North America,
cattle arrived with some of the earliest European colonists. Cattle were important
to Virginia's Jamestown Colony in 1611, and were imported to the Plymouth Colony in 1624.
These were English breeds, especially the Devon, which is one of the oldest breeds
of domesticated cattle. Cattle were not just used for beef, they were used also for milk,
leather, and as beasts of burden. As Americans went west, cattle went with them.
But the demand for beef steak grew as populations,
and wealth grew. Due to the relatively easy availability of land in the United States,
meat generally, and beef specifically, was far more available in America than it was in Europe,
where the economics of meat production meant that most meat was consumed by the wealthy. In
the United States, there was enough room that herds could be grown near and around cities,
and that created a thriving market from early on in the nation's history.
That availability of meat was also a driving force in American immigration. When the immigrants wrote
letters back home in the early 19th century, their relatives often expressed disbelief when they were
told that in America, people ate meat almost every day. Meanwhile, in the great Southwest,
the descendants of the cattle brought by Columbus moved north. Herds may have been grazing in what
is now Texas, as early as the 16th century. As Spanish settlers and explorers did not
fence their cattle, many easily escaped. On the great plains had no natural predators,
and they thrived. For the most part, even Native Americans left them alone, as bison were actually
tamer, and easier to kill. European settlers brought European breeds to Texas in the 1820s,
and those interbred with the wild Spanish cattle, creating the distinct breed called
the Longhorn. Mexicans had adopted the Spanish tradition of herding cattle on horseback,
and that method was adopted by European settlers. After the Texas Revolution in 1836, many Mexican
cattle ranchers left, leaving the cattle behind. European settlers took over the herds. As there
was no method for refrigeration, those herds were raised for their leather, and tallow, largely
used in the making of soap, but not generally for meat. Still, ranching was a profitable business,
and by 1855 there were ten head of cattle in Texas, for each person. But the US Civil War
changed the beef industry in the United States. Previously, beef in the US came from a local
butcher who was butchering fresh meat. While packing plants have been producing tinned meat,
preserved in brine, in the United States since the 17th century. The demand wasn't particularly high,
because fresh meat was usually available. But the huge number of troops involved in the US
Civil War led to a great demand for tinned meat to feed those troops. And that demand was central
in establishing the cattle feeding industry on the great plains, in places like Nebraska.
But the war had the opposite effect in Texas. When the Union cut off the Mississippi River in 1863,
the Confederacy had no access to the Texas herds. Moreover, much of the population that tended the
cattle in Texas left to fight the war. Untended, the herds grew. When the war ended, demand in the
east, fed by population growth and increasing wealth, was outstripping supply. Meanwhile in
Texas, millions of feral Longhorns wandered the Great Plains. Clearly there was a great deal
of money to be made for anyone who could bring those cattle to market. Thus began the era of the
cattle drive. But there was a problem, farmers in Kansas, and Missouri didn't like the Texas cattle,
which damaged their farms. And Longhorns carried a kind of tick that caused disease,
usually fatal to European breeds, but to which the hearty longhorn cattle were resistant.
An enterprising businessman named Joseph McCoy came up with a solution. McCoy realized that
rail companies wanted more freight business, and the stockyards in Chicago were perfect for feeding
the growing demand in the East. McCoy invested it in a small town along the railway called Abilene
Kansas, where he built stockyards and motels. Abilene was west of most of Kansas farming,
and at the end of the trail that had been established to help supply the Confederacy,
called the Chisholm Trail. Ranchers in Texas could drive huge herds of cattle up the Chisholm Trail
to Abilene, where the cattle would be taken by rail to Chicago, slaughtered, and shipped
in refrigerated cars to eastern markets. Cow towns gained reputations as raucous places,
where cowboys who had been riding for months, spent their pay on liquor and prostitutes.
Everyone got rich. The railroads, the ranchers, the stockyard owners, and Joseph McCoy. Based on
his vision, more than two million cattle were moved from Abilene to Chicago between 1867,
and 1881. The success of his vision is the genesis of the term, the Real McCoy.
Cattle ranchers expanded across the Great Plains, a trend that was made
easier as Native Americans were driven onto reservations, and the great buffalo herds
were hunted to extinction. Cattle funded railroads, which facilitated emigration,
and further drove the wars to remove the native peoples. Ranchers raised huge herds from Texas,
to Canada. The Great Plains became known as, The Cattle Kingdom, amid the cattle boom.
But the time of the Cattle Kingdom, and the cowboy, was short-lived. Initially,
excessive demand meant that the herds competed with each other,
and the land became over grazed. And then in 1885, a recession reduced demand,
and then repeated droughts, and harsh winters decimated herds. The time of
open range grazing was coming to an end, and that was facilitated by two new technologies.
In 1874, Joseph Glidden, a businessman from Illinois, developed a method to mass-produce
barbed wire. The new wire allowed a revolution. Fencing was expensive in the West since they were
usually made of wood, which is scarce on the Great Plains. Wire fences were less expensive,
but they tended to break when pushed by something as big as cattle. Barbed wire was stronger,
as it twisted two pieces of wire together, and the barbs kept the cattle from pressing
against the wire. Barbed wire allowed the Great Plains to be fenced. But another
technology was needed to move from the era of open range, to the era of ranching. In 1854,
an engineer and inventor named Daniel Halladay, invented the first commercially successful design
for a self-governing windmill. By the 1870s, the invention was spreading across the Great Plains.
The windmill allowed a farmer, or rancher, to retrieve water from underground aquifers,
freeing them from competition over water sources. A college dissertation in 1895
concluded of the windmill, “Without them we must emigrate. With them we can irrigate.”
The transition was not smooth. Larger and wealthier ranchers were the first to start
to use the fencing to cut off large tracts of land, sometimes well beyond their legal claims.
So-called fence cutting wars erupted, and often became a form of class warfare between wealthy
ranchers, and smaller herdsmen, and farmers. Probably the most famous of these was the
Johnson County War, fought in Wyoming between 1889, and 1893. Nearly 40 people were killed
in the conflict between large ranchers, and smaller settlers, over range and water rights,
and the army was sent to intervene. Eventually the rangeland was regulated, with laws that governed
the use of public lands. Cattle ranching moved largely to fenced ranches, rather than open range.
In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote the book, The Jungle, revealing abhorrent conditions in the
US meatpacking industry. While he was trying to address working conditions, the public was most
revolted by the description of the sanitary conditions. The book resulted in the creation
of many US consumer protection laws, and a federal Meat Inspection Act, to ensure that meat, and meat
products are slaughtered, and processed under sanitary conditions. Demand for better quality
meat led the US Department of Agriculture to start grading meat in 1926. By the 1980s, over 90% of
beef sold in the US was graded. But the grading system favors well marbled meats, meaning grain
fed. So today, most meat is raised on ranches but finished in feed yards, who fatten the cattle on
grain. The great ranches largely disappeared as the ranchers now centred on breeding alone.
The shift of feed yards also changed the way that meat was packaged. Instead of shipping
live cattle in trains to stockyards in Chicago to be slaughtered, packaging houses were built near
the large feedlots where the cattle were being raised. Now cattle were being slaughtered right
next to the place where they were being grown, and only the frozen cuts needed to be shipped.
The meat changed too, as the demand for better quality beef,
and ranching practices changed. Scottish Aberdeen Angus cattle were first imported
into the United States in 1873. They were found to intermix easily with Longhorns.
The result was called a Black Angus, now the most popular beef cattle breed in America.
The ready availability of beef gave rise to the food that most defines American cuisine today. In
the early part of the 19th century most immigrants from Northern Europe came through the German port
of Hamburg, and they brought with them local recipes for minced cooked meat. That dish
became popular in American restaurants under the title, Steak Hamburg Style, or Hamburger Steak.
There are many claimants in the 1880s and 1890s, for who invented the idea of putting
hamburger steak inside two slices of bread. Who you think invented the hamburger today,
depends upon where you live. But whoever it was, the idea sold. Americans eat an estimated 50
billion hamburgers each year, averaging more than three hamburgers a week, for every man, woman,
and child in the country. McDonald's alone, sells an average of more than 1,500 burgers a minute.
Per capita, meat consumption in the United States doubled between the 1930s, and the 1960s,
and reached its peak in the 1970s. Although it has declined some since, Americans are still
among the highest per-capita consumers of beef in the world. The US Department of Agriculture
attributes recent declines to product shortages, which have increased the price of beef relative
to chicken. But the USDA predicts that the price of beef will be declining in the next decade, and
demand will increase again. There are significant indications though that culture has changed,
and per-capita consumption will never reach the highs that it had in the 1970s. The beef industry
is facing new challenges, for example, demand for hormone and antibiotic-free beef, and new threats
from ever improving plant-based, meat substitutes, which are becoming more popular, And, in the most
dramatic innovation in the industry, in 2013, for the first time, lab-grown beef, that is beef
muscle grown in a petri dish, was ground into a hamburger and eaten. And that new technology
might be available in stores in the near future, as several startups are pursuing the technology.
Beef production, and consumption has been a large driver of American history,
as economics and culture are always great drivers of history. But the effect of the beef industry,
and American history really does prove the adage, we really are what we eat.
I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
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