Research notes #1: 'Industrial Cowboys'
Research notes #1: 'Industrial Cowboys'
Finally some snow, and another storm on the way.
Hello, and welcome to a new edition of Western Water Notes.
I’m rolling out a “research corner” feature with this newsletter. From time to time, I’ll share findings from books, reports, data and any other reading materials that might be interesting.
This week, I finished reading a book that I’d been meaning to dive into for a long time. It’s a history on the rise of Miller & Lux, an industrial cattle firm that controlled vast amounts of public land from California’s Central Valley to eastern Oregon. I found the book fascinating for several reasons, but particularly the scope of Miller & Lux’s vast control of public land.
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Cheers, Daniel
Much has been written about Henry Miller, the “Cattle King of California.”
But the extent of Miller’s influence and concentration of power — wielded through his firm Miller & Lux — is on full display in “Industrial Cowboys” by historian David Igler. The book follows the development of the firm, a partnership with Charles Lux, while also tracking Miller’s rise to prominence. Miller, born in southern Germany in 1827, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1840s and came to San Francisco as a butcher by way of New York. In the decades following, Miller & Lux acquired massive amounts of land. By the early 1900s, Miller & Lux was an industrial giant with cattle across about 1.25 million acres of land, according to Igler, and in control of valuable water rights.
How Miller & Lux did it reflects a larger story about concentration of power — as well as the engineering of the natural environment — during this period of history. What struck me was the breadth of Miller & Lux’s holdings. The book goes well beyond the firm’s influence in California, looking also at how it operated in Nevada and Oregon.
In Nevada, I first heard about Miller & Lux in connection with the Walker River. The firm played a major role in the watershed, initiating a lawsuit against a firm operated by Thomas Rickey, a rival and the “Cattle King of the West.” The book does not focus as much about the Walker, but it does highlight Miller’s holdings in other parts of the Great Basin (the firm, for instance, was quite active in the Quinn River Basin).
The book is worth reading in its entirety, and I can’t capture all the historical context I walked away with in just one post. But here are a couple of takeaways that stuck out:
How federal land laws enabled the consolidation of land by big firms: A recurring theme was how Miller & Lux, in addition to other cattle barons, deployed lobbyists and used a suite of federal land laws — meant to privatize public land often for small homesteads — to amass a large consolidated portfolio in which they controlled vast amounts of land. Igler recounts an often-repeated story of Henry Miller “sitting in a rowboat perched atop a horse-drawn wagon that he drove across entire townships of grassland” as people would watch him claim this land under the Swamp Land Act.
The firm, as did others at the time, benefited from other federal land laws. One was the Desert Land Act, meant to encourage the development and irrigation of arid land in the West. Igler reveals how James Ali Ben Haggin, another major Central Valley landowner, helped get the act passed through Congress, only to then pay “hundreds of San Francisco residents to file ‘dummy’ claims on Kern County’s desert lands.”
The scope of the operation: I’d long thought of Miller & Lux’s ranching operation confined to the Sierra Nevada — largely in the Central Valley of California but with interests throughout the Walker River Basin in the eastern Sierra. The book dispels that notion, showing stretched Miller & Lux’s influence went further into the Great Basin. Indeed, Miller & Lux played a role in the landscape north of Winnemucca into the Steens Mountains of eastern Oregon. Through a subsidiary known as the Pacific Livestock Company, they acquired large amounts of land in the northern Great Basin.
Taking advantage of an uncertain, risky and arid climate: The book documents the ways in which Miller & Lux saw business opportunity in floods and drought. It was not all about acquiring vast amounts of federal public land. Igler notes that in the Great Basin, as was the case in the San Joaquin Valley, “initial investments coincided with environmental crises in the region, allowing the firm to consolidate massive land and water rights.” The book documents how Miller & Lux purchased land from large Great Basin ranchers who were hit hard by two harsh winters from 1879 to 1881.
The role of the courts: One of the most interesting chapters in the book focuses on Lux v. Haggin, a landmark California case involving the role of riparian water rights in California and what constituted a connected water body. The conflict focused on Lux and Haggin’s conflicting interests on the Kern River and the Tulare Basin. It captured a key piece of history about how water was manipulated there, one that felt especially relevant today, after Tulare Lake returned last year, with big landowners in the middle.
Related to the Tulare Basin and a harbinger of things to come, the book later makes note of the rapid rise of groundwater pumping. “Groundwater pumping by irrigators increased exponentially as their pumps penetrated deeper into the earth,” Igler writes. “Farmers’ artesian wells stopped flowing in the Tulare Basin by 1990; steam- and gas-powered pumps next assumed the task of mining the subsoil water supply.” Miller & Lux “scaled back,” Igler says, due to a dwindling aquifer and issues with soil salinity.
He writes: “After decades of intense landscape exploitation, nature showed its limits.”
We got a big storm in Reno on Saturday, and it made for a little improvement in the snowpack, which is still below-average (see the map below). It’s sunny from where I write right now, though another storm is forecast to roll into Reno later today. The L.A. Times wrote about the Sierra Nevada snowpack and the latest winter storms.
Another health reason to avoid bottled water sold in single-use plastics. This from CNN: “In a trailblazing new study, researchers have discovered bottled water sold in stores can contain 10 to 100 times more bits of plastic than previously estimated — nanoparticles so infinitesimally tiny they cannot be seen under a microscope.”
Arizona’s governor pledges to address groundwater laws, via InsideClimateNews.
Scientists discovered a dumping ground for World War II-era munitions off the Pacific Coast, findings that were recently made public. More from the L.A. Times, which reports that “it remains unclear what risk they might pose to the environment.”
