Prologue

As a scholar of American West history and geography I have always been attuned – or so I thought – to the many actors and agents who encountered one another on the western U.S. frontier in the 19th century – among them Native peoples, escaped slaves, White settlers, farmers and miners, tourists and travelers, Army recruits, and colonial bureaucrats. One book that informed my early research and teaching on the interactions of these groups was Robert Dykstra’s The Cattle Towns (1968). The book examines the development of small western towns in the 1870s and 1880s, towns established along the route of the free-range cattle trade by small groups of local entrepreneurs. Cattle towns such as Dodge City, Kansas lay at the junction of livestock trails and the railroad, and they provided facilities to receive and sell herds driven up from the South, especially Texas, and a transportation hub connected to ranches and meatpackers in Chicago and beyond. Years ago I would have critiqued Dykstra’s book in my analysis of gender norms and colonial relations in the American West (Morin 2008 ). Today, I wonder more about the cattle, and the vast industrial infrastructure that developed to exploit their labor and make their bodies into meat. Dykstra’s themes of commercial development (cattle meat trade), cultural change (saloons, gambling, prostitution), in-migrations of transient worker populations (cowboys), and the rapid expansion of town police forces strikes me now as disconcertingly similar to other small, rural archipelagoes developed on the ‘trade’ in other lives exploited for profit – U.S. prison towns.

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