Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination by Kathryn Cornell Dolan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination by Kathryn Cornell Dolan Tom Hertweck Kathryn Cornell Dolan, Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 342 pp. Hardcover, $60; e-book, $60. Beef. It’s what’s for dinner. Even those outside the area of western American literature know this to be true (in a cultural-ideological sense), as it has been the well-used slogan of the National Livestock and Meat Board for thirty years. But nothing about beef’s ascendance in the United States—and especially in the West—was a foregone conclusion. Rather, it was a concerted effort undertaken by various land interests, capitalist groups, government subsidies, and geographic particularities that made such a thing possible. And, as you are reading this review in Western American Literature and may be interested in such agricultural history, you likely already know that the historical record is laid out clearly in works such as Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire or Christopher Knowlton’s Cattle Kingdom, or even Walter Prescott Webb’s seminal The Great Plains. Rightly or wrongly the United States became a global leader in beef production based on an industrialized agriculture that has been replicated the world over. As we assess this state of affairs on capitalist, ethical, and environmental grounds, understanding clearly the total picture of that history will become essential. Less well understood are the cultural forces that aided, abetted, and (equally often) critiqued cattle’s rise. Picking up from her Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850–1905 (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), Kathryn Cornell Dolan helps us with this, expanding on her time period but narrowing her field of vision to explore the literary history of American cattle rearing in its developmental stage, and she takes pains to integrate the various facets of identity and place-making that reflected on it. In briefest terms, Dolan shows, creative works of the long nineteenth century contain not just insistent reference to cattle but also a multitude of ways of thinking about cattle’s trampling [End Page 75] over extant foodways in many expected—but also surprising— ways. Her organization works at a canonical level, making chapters of authors so invitingly familiar to Americanists that they can be listed by surname (Irving, both Coopers, Thoreau, Winnemucca, Ruiz de Burton, and Chesnutt) while a coda-like final chapter moves the conversation into the twentieth century (Sinclair, of course) and the adjacent-global beef market (the Chinese Canadian Winnifred Eaton). Pointing out Dolan’s canonical take is no slight but rather an important point of departure for such an era; these authors wielded remarkable cultural power during their time and after and make accounting of them required. In each chapter aspects of American cattle culture emerge unique to their focal author, tracked by the direct invocations of livestock, usually meaning bovids, but with the occasional pig, chicken, donkey, or horse making their way in. However, Dolan is careful to point out several key similarities that become tropes to reaffirm or undermine the livestock imaginary: a transposition of Euro-American identity onto cattle and its regulated industry (versus the wildness/unruliness of bison or game hunting, which stands most often for Native American culture); the ways in which cattle culture bulldozes (almost literally) the landscape and peoples it contacts; and the complicated identity politics that regularly energize these texts. These general observations will be integral to any future analysis of how we eat now, requiring as it does to know why this came to be. All chapters offer much in defining a new territory of understanding. The most surprising are those on Thoreau (a kind of local foodie whose disdain for cattle is palpable) and Chesnutt (who wrestled with an outlier agricultural South not dependent on cattle the way the West emerged). Scholars of western literature stand to gain the most from the chapters on Winnemucca and Ruiz de Burton. The ways these two undermine or essentialize Native American (both) and Mexican identity (the latter) in the name of strategic forms of cultural and material survival are sensitive and fruitful. Dolan deftly locates, for example, three different...