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Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920

Online ISBN:
9780520938939
Print ISBN:
9780520226586
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920

Published:
20 September 2001
Online ISBN:
9780520938939
Print ISBN:
9780520226586
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller and Lux, a vast meatpacking conglomerate started by two San Francisco butchers in 1858. This book examines how Henry Miller and Charles Lux, two German immigrants, consolidated the West's most extensive land and water rights, swayed legislatures and courts, monopolized western beef markets, and imposed their corporate will on California's natural environment. It uses one case study to illuminate the industrial development and environmental transformation of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. The author examines the broader impact that industrialism—as exemplified by Miller and Lux—had on landscapes and waterscapes, and on human as well as plant and animal life in the West. He also provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller and Lux, from the dispossession of California rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force. The book also covers such topics as land acquisition and reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. Above all, it highlights essential issues that resonate for us today: who holds the right and who has the power to engineer the landscape for market production?

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