This document reader, part of the Broadview Sources Series, gathers forty-two documents—including published accounts, newspaper articles, photographs, and advertisements—concerning a wide array of issues related to the management of cattle and horses in the American West. In the introduction, the collection’s editor Susan Nance succinctly states the book’s theme as “the transformation of animals and the land from beings and entities with intrinsic value to entities taken to be property or commodities” (1). The sources do stretch beyond this framework to include issues surrounding the ethnicity and gender of ranch owners and laborers, different cultures’ understandings of cattle and horses, and the lives and behaviors of the animals themselves. Altogether, Nance’s documents tell the story of an animal-driven colonial transformation of the American West through the horses, cattle, and people that enabled it.
Nance groups the sources into six parts, beginning with European introductions of animals and Native American horse...
University of California Press