Land Wars

Introduction:  Where did the land come from to raise the millions of sheep whose wool fed the factories of Europe and the U.S.? For the most part, from lands that were taken by colonial powers, or at least co-lonial capital, at the expense of indigenous populations, and indigenous ecologies.

Settler societies needed meat for themselves, but also needed a marketable primary product for trade. Woollen textiles were in great demand by growing populations, which spurred the industrial capacity of woolen mills in Europe, Britain, America, and by 1900, Japan. Sheep met those needs: before refrigeration, meat was a local product, while wool could be transported long distances with little risk of damage or deterioration. But the spread of sheep pastoralism created conflict, often armed, sometimes deadly, over the land that made it possible, damaging the societies that were dis-placed by sheep, and altering the environments that they inhabited.

Scotland: Perhaps the first instance of the replacement of people with sheep occurred in Scotland beginning in the eighteenth century, and continuing well into the nineteenth. Landlords - often absentee landlords - in parts of the Highlands and Border districts dispossessed rural inhabitants and established large sheep flocks in their stead. One reason for this was the disruption of trade resulting from Britain’s series of wars during the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth. Donald MacLeod, who lived through the Sutherland clearances in the early 19th century, wrote in 1840 that years of war threw Britain back on domestic resources, making the mutton and wool from Scotland’s growing sheep flocks more profitable than the rents that could be collected from small farmers. Sutherland’s sheep population grew from about 15,00 in 1811 to 130,000 in 1820; sheep numbers in the rest of Scotland grew at similar rates. In the early Clearances, rural farmers were often resettled in coastal communities, but by the 2nd quarter of the nineteenth century, emi-gration was the goal. Along with the depopulation of the countryside, the Clearances must have had an impact on the land through the drastic increase in the numbers of sheep grazing.

ADD IMAGE: Painting, “The Last of the Clan.” 1865, Thomas Faed.  (Glasgow Museums)

North America: North America had seen the introduction of sheep from New Spain, with flocks established in New Mexico by the early 1600s. During the next 200 years, flocks would spread to Texas, Arizona, and California, through both large privately-owned ranches and Catholic missions. They provided both meat and wool; the wool for a relatively coarse cloth used primarily for local needs, including clothing the native peoples who inhabited the missions’ districts. By the 1830s, however, some wool was being sold to American settlers pushing west across the Missouri River.

(Placeholder Image) Navajo Blanket, 19th century. Sheep’s wool, Tapestry weave. (RISD Museum)

Settlers from Britain and Continental Europe also brought sheep with them in the 17th century, but in colonial British North America flocks were small and primarily for domestic purposes. Even after the American Revolution, imports of British-made woollen cloth overwhelmed US produc-tion. Efforts to breed better sheep resulted in several waves of imports of merino sheep, including by Pierre Du Pont in Delaware in 1804. Although the available land was not sufficient to support large flocks, and settlers moving across the Ohio River took sheep with them, in the 1840s more than half the country’s 19 million sheep were still concentrated in the Eastern states. Flocks num-bering in the thousands and tens of thousands would not arise until settlers moved further west-ward across the Great Plains in the 1840s and 50s.

ADD IMAGE: Caption: Factory label, Dupont, Bauduy & Co., Woolen Mill. Delaware, USA. ca. 1814. (Eleuthe-rian Mills Historical Library). The figure at right is riding on the back of “Don Pedro”, E.I. du Pont’s prize merino ram, which he had owned since 1804.

Flocks on the open ranges of the west, as well as their herders, suffered from Indian and bandit attacks, lack of water, native plants that were either toxic to grazing animals or whose foliage or seed heads got stuck in an animal’s fleece, and predators such as coyotes, wolves, and bears. Nev-ertheless, by the 1840s, sheep were established Texas, New Mexico, and California, and after the Mexican War of 1848, settlers brought merino sheep from Vermont and Germany to breed with the churro sheep of New Spain. These improved sheep would contribute to the further spread of sheep up into the northwest of the United States after 1850 - coinciding with the great rise in mech-anized wool textile production AND the increased market of wool for military consumption.

One of many stories in the American West follows the introduction of sheep into Indian treaty lands in Oregon and Idaho. A combination of Manifest Destiny ideology and the discovery of gold in the 1860s encouraged white settlers to move into the mountain country of eastern Oregon, and they brought their sheep and cattle with them. A disputed treaty, in 1863, and the Nez Perce War of 1877, diminished the reservation lands from 7.5 million to fewer than one million acres, and finally by 1890, to about 150,000. In 1891 the US Congress passed the Forest Reserves Act, bringing many acres under federal control for the leasing of various rights, including grazing rights. In 1906 the remaining reservation Nez Perce, who had, by custom, used those lands for seasonal hunting and grazing, were required to apply for permits to do so.

Another kind of grass war erupted in the American West: range wars in which sheep men and cattlemen fought bitterly over access to grazing lands. Both men and animals were killed in these conflicts, which erupted sporadically from the late 19th into the early 20th centuries.

ADD IMAGE: Photograph. Oregon sheep range, 1905 (NARA - US National Archives)

From the 1830s the so-called “Squatters”- white European settlers who moved beyond the approved boundaries of the various Australian colonies - co-opted vast swathes of the interior, building large sheep holdings.

Aboriginal peoples’land rights were not acknowledged, and conflicts over land and water access often resulted in violent dispossession of the Aboriginal groups. In addition to physical violence, they also suffered from the loss of native plant life, destroyed by the hard hooves of dense flocks herded progressively further west and north, and the sheep’s capacity to eat right to the ground. This would devastate both the food plants such as yams, vital to the Aboriginal diet, and the plants that sustained the animals they hunted. Aboriginal labor eventually became vital to the success of sheep runs in the interior - in many cases adding the insult of exploitative working conditions to the injury of dispossession.

New Zealand:  Differences in the environment, in human habitation patterns, and in forms of colonial settlement led to outcomes for New Zealand’s First Peoples in relation to sheep and wool distinctively different from Australia. The Polynesian Maori settled Aotearoa late in the 13th century CE. European incomers recognized Maori villages and vegetable gardens, underpinned by hunting, as a form of land tenure, unlike the Aboriginal economy in Australia. The British government and many Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. There were problems with this treaty, and British and Australian troops intervened in New Zealand in the Maori Wars of 1860-61 and 1863-72.

The Treaty, did, however, recognize Maori land rights, and when sheep were introduced in the 1840s, in the Wairarapa, a high plateau to the east of the first European settlement in Wellington, land was leased from the Maori. As in Australia, however, once sheep were established as basic to New Zealand's economy, Maori labor, especially as shearers, became essential to the industry.

ADD IMAGES:

Caption: “Soldiers”style pieced work bedcover or rug, made by a soldier of the 58th Regiment from one-inch squares of woolen cloth worn and used by his comrades. He gave the rug to Thomas Henderson, of Auckland. Museum # 1965.78.97, col.0821, ocm0334, Photographed by Daan Hoffmann, digital, 12 Sep 2018, ©Auckland Museum. Gifted to Old Colonial Museum by Mr John Henderson, Auckland, 1916, Collection of Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Caption:  Mustering sheep, probably in the Nelson region, New Zealand, circa 1900.   (http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=33001). Reference Number PAColl-3051. Reference Number: 1/1-009339-G.  Photograph taken by Frederick Nelson Jones.

Rapa Nui:      On Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the late 19th century, the Scottish-Chilean company Williamson Balfour was the driving force. Leasing the island not from its inhabitants but from the Chilean government, the company’s commercial base in shipping was central to the profitability of this particular enterprise. The islanders had been severely reduced in number in the 1860s, both by diseases brought by contact with Europeans and by slaving raids from Peru. The remaining population, whose labour was essential to caring for the sheep, was confined within the fenced-in town of Huanga Roa when their labor was not required. The sheep roamed free, grazingnative plants to the roots. As elsewhere in the lands that adopted sheep pastoralism,  the island’s ecology was drastically altered as native growth was replaced by imported feed grasses—in this case from Australia.

Hawaii (Sandwich Islands):  Before the 1850s, the Hawaiian Islands (also called the Sandwich Islands), had few sheep, descendants of those dropped off more or less in passing, as food sources, by explorers or whalers. A government-owned flock existed from the 1840s, enhanced in 1862 by a gift to the King of four Rambouillet rams from the French royal flock. In 1848, with the Great Mahele, the system of land tenure was fundamentally changed, allowing foreigners to purchase land. Investment in land suitable for agriculture or ranching become an important economic driver in the islands. The island of Niihau was purchased by the Sinclair family, emigrants from Scotland via New Zealand, in 1863. They moved about half of the 500 Indigenous inhabitants, and all the dogs, off the island, leaving the land clear for their flock of (by 1885) about 40,000 sheep. On the big island of Hawaii, several small holdings were established with varying success from the 1870s. The large and successful Parker Ranchran 12,000 merino sheep on the Humuulu Station, Mauna Kea, through the 1920s. The Molokai Ranch ran sheep with cattle through the late 1910s, but overgrazing damaged the land and the sheep count went from a high of about 17,000 in 1907 to about 200 in the 1920s.

ADD IMAGE:  Photograph, Niihau, 1885; photo by Francis Sinclair (Auckland War Memorial Museum; PH-NEG-4716 )

Although never of the first importance in the Hawaiian economy, Hawaiian wool was nevertheless exported for about 50 years. It was purchased during the American Civil War, for example, by the Stevens Woolen Mills in Massachusetts, producing textiles for the Union Army, and during World War I, although export quantity decreased, the wartime demand realized a high price per pound.

The land given over to sheep (and cattle) saw the same destruction ofnative plants, which were replaced by imported fodder species. And as in Australia and New Zealand, indigenous peoples, as well as new immigrants of color, became the wool industry’s workforce.

UNDER DEVELOPMENT: SOUTH AFRICA & SOUTH AMERICA