Imposition of Salmon and Cattle:

Controlling People and Environment through Farmed Animals

Liam Cornwell

Hist 4411: History of the North American West

December 3, 2021
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Introduction

In Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and

Hawai’i, John Fischer argues that introductions of Old-World domestic livestock, mainly cattle,

were essential to helping the Spanish and other European settlers to impose themselves upon

their new environment as well as the people within them, in the eastern Pacific. The book's six

chapters I focus on the first two and final. The chapter’s divide into Hawaiian and Californian

expeditions and experiences and here I also narrow my focus mainly on Spanish, Mexican, and

American experiences in California, focusing a small amount on English explorer ideology.

These chapters focus on the introduction of cattle into the New World, the changes they had on

the landscapes, and how political and economic changes created new conceptions of property in

the west between the late 18th century and mid-19th century.

In Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis, Joseph

Taylor demonstrates the complicated problems facing salmon and fights against a history of easy

solutions and scapegoats. The chapters I focused most on were chapters two, three and seven

which focus on the history of overfishing, misconceptions of science as a definitive answer to

salmon decline, and attempts to remake salmon through pond hatching, spanning from the mid-

19th century up until the late 20th century when the book was released.

After a more in-depth summarization of each text in the next section of the paper I will

draw comparisons through shared themes. The themes identified are propagation and

domestication, and the Imposition of ideology through farmed animals. Salmon and cattle both

now occupy the American west and have distinct and connected histories. While pacific salmon

are indigenous to the pacific northwest, and cattle were brought during conquest by Spaniards in

the 18th century, each animal has a history of being artificially propagated to suit human needs.
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These propagations are paired with the imposition of a particular ideology in which a group of

people saw themselves, or claimed to see themselves, as enacting a higher mission which would

help humanity at large.

Summaries

Cattle Colonialism

Chapter one of Cattle Colonialism begins with cattle’s introduction into the New World.

Expeditions sponsored by England and Spain in the late 1700s brought the lands of California

and Hawai’i into European awareness. Captain James Cook for England and Juan Bautista de

Anza for Spain. The contact that these Europeans and their successors would have would forever

change the landscape and culture of these regions.

Along with new animals and flora, the Europeans brought with them ideologies about the

hierarchy of human civilizations and their own prime positioning in that hierarchy. Being able to

explore and colonize new lands required this ideology of superiority to function in the first place.

Fischer distinguishes between English ideas of “improvement” of land and Spanish ideas,

brought about by Missions, to turn the people’s they encountered in their New World into “gente

de razon” or “people of reason” essentially, civilized peoples. Pastoral lifestyle was central to

Spanish understanding of civilization.1

The introductions of new plants and animals had practical reasons behind them, like the

planting of lemons to help with scurvy, or the use of cattle to create a familiar food resource for

the Spanish settlers, but there was also a hidden “psychology of imperialism,” which allowed

such ecological disruptions to be made. The English believed in a hierarchy of nature which

1
John Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i, (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 25-26.
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placed humans at the top and below them, domesticated animals, in the second echelon because

they directly served humanity. Then, bringing this ideology to the New World, the English saw

the introduction of cattle as an essential step to civilizing the new people of the land, which also

meant, that they saw themselves as acting paternally, towards semi-sedentary peoples who had

not yet achieved the final apex of civilization, like the English, and were therefore inferior.

Spanish missionaries had similar beliefs and a shared goal, to make the California hunter-

gatherer Indians into farmers to organize them into a centralized space where they could make

them into civilized Spanish subjects.2

Cattle were crucial to Anza’s establishment of a new settlement in the San Francisco Bay

by serving as food for the journeymen and women and to be made into the backbone of the

economy once they arrived. The cattle provided sustenance to the Anza’s party as they traveled

the long overland journey up from Tubac thousands of miles over dry, treacherous land. New,

virgin-soil epidemics wiped out Indians and led to mass depopulation, which meant that land

opened to be grazed on, the scarce labor pool also favored cattle ranching. Mission instruction

emphasized learning a trade and many Indians became ranchers. Unfamiliar ecology and

different seasons affected crop yields, as well as scarce labor, whereas cattle could transform

grasses and herbs into immediate food sources.3

The Spanish moved up the coastline of California. By the late 18th century, Spanish

settlements in San Diego and Monterey had grown significantly and new missions were still

being founded. In the expeditions of Anza and other contemporaries, around 350 cattle typically

moved with the settlers for months long journeys starting in more established settlements. Cattle

expanded rapidly and once populated the hills of a settlement, seen as the marker of a successful

2
Fischer, Cattle Colonialism, 14.
3
Fischer, Cattle Colonialism, 30.
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civilizing force. In Introducing cattle to the land, the Europeans were either unbothered by the

changing of the landscape or actively encouraged the cultural and ecological shifts taking place.4

In Chapter two, Fischer examines how the introductions of cattle proceeded to affect the

landscapes of the eastern Pacific. Before Spanish colonization, and to an extent during, Indians

had developed and used complex hunting and gathering techniques and mastered the ecology of

their surroundings. The burning of grass is one example of Indian ingenuity in the San Francisco

region. The grass burned to dry grain into to consume but also removed insects and promoted the

growth of certain plants like oak trees which dropped acorns, a staple of the California Indian

diet. Spanish settlers admired Indian knowledge of their prey, noting instances of Indians tying

the heads of deer on top of their own heads and mimicking them to approach the game closely, to

where their arrows were more effective. Before Spanish involvement, there was also hardly any

agriculture. Of all Californian tribes, only one, the Yuma, grew certain corn, beans, and squash.

Others survived off salmon runs and harvested acorns. 5

Why then, asks Fischer, did the Indians, who had their own means of survival, end up in

Spanish Missions? Older theories state that cattle and sheep introduction forced Indians into

missions because they so dramatically disrupted the lands of any area that the ecology could no

longer provide enough for clans living off of it. However, Fischer holds off on accepting this

simple narrative, instead choosing to explore the various effects cattle did have. Cattle, while

possibly eating certain herbs and medicinal plants, would not have been able to eat many acorns

because Indians typically took them off the oak tree before they fell. Cattle in the late 18th and

early 19th century would not yet have a significant effect on the quality of water in the streams

of salmon. Cattle did have indirect impacts as well. Cattle chewed up and uprooted native

4
Fischer, Cattle Colonialism, 28.
5
Fischer, Cattle Colonialism, 41.
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grasses which were not evolved to handle grazing. Cattle spread wild oats and allowed invasive

weeds to spread more easily by uprooting native grass. These changes, however drastic in the

long term, were too slow to have pushed California Indians into missions. More likely, Fischer

claims, sanctuary from outside tribal warfare had a greater impact on the shift.6

Later, at the end of the book, Fischer describes the process by which the edicts of land

ownership started to come about in California. Under Spanish rule, there were hardly any private

land grants, only 20 from 1784 until Mexican rule beginning after independence in 1821. The

government of Mexico, influenced by the Enlightenment, hoped to encourage settlement through

granting of individual land ownership. Missions, which held land in trust for the Indians within

them, sat on valuable land, near ports and with good pastures, were desired by Mexican residents

who wished missions would be broken up so that they might have access to the land. Liberals in

Mexico sought to secularize the missions to recirculate the land. In the Secularization Act of

1833, the mission lands were to be divided and Indians were to be emancipated and given a lot of

land on which they had worked, without rights to sell cattle or land. However, mission fathers

sensing that secularization was imminent, often sold off most of the cattle before it could be

redistributed. After Californios retook control over land distribution in 1835, California

authorities appointed ranchero class individuals to distribute the mission lands. Of these

appointees, several repurchased cheap Indian land and managed to acquire much of the mission

lands. In other cases, Indians had acquired the debt of the missions after secularization but not all

the resources of the mission itself. While Indians had attained the skills of vaqueros they had

been under the control of missionaries until emancipation and did not have the economic skills to

run the ranches or traverse the legal and economic Mexican systems. Large rancheros ended up

6
Fischer, Cattle Colonialism, 47-52.
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dominating the Pacific hide and tallow trade because the trans-pacific trade favored large

suppliers.7 Land commissioners and rancheros worked to keep Indians uninformed on their rights

and took their property for as cheap as possible, often forcing Indians to give up land ownership

and to become wage laborers, most Indian ranchers did not survive in the business long. 8

Making Salmon

In Making Salmon, Joseph Taylor focuses on the Pacific Northwest and tells the

complicated history of pacific salmon. The book offers insights into the various communities

over time who have attempted to “speak for Salmon” while actually only expressing their own

needs indirectly. Taylor takes aim at the oversimplified narratives and pinning of blame onto

singular groups or factors. Taylor emphasizes that in several points throughout American history

between 1877 to 1991, the alarm had been sounded that salmon were suddenly disappearing,

ignoring the longer history of decline in habitat by an inability to see losses as part of a long-term

process.9 I am especially interested in one of Taylor’s arguments developed throughout the

book, which is that the public and professional faith in science and technology to solve the

multitude of problems facing salmon habitats in America has significantly harmed salmon as a

species and prevented more pragmatic solutions for habitat restorations to be realized. This

argument is centered in chapter three, “Inventing a Panacea,” but is present throughout the book

and relevant throughout the timeline that Taylor explores, generally the 1850s to 1990s.

First, Taylor historicizes overfishing in chapter two. He describes the traditional narrative

which is told of salmon. That Indians in the west lived in a kind of Eden and were pushed out by

7
Fischer, Cattle Colonialism, 176.
8
Fischer, Cattle Colonialism, 194.
9
Joseph Taylor, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1999), 4.
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white settlers who created industrialized fishing, who then created modern civilization, and then

built dams all over, forever dooming the salmon. Despite the resonance of the story Fischer

dispels any sense of its accuracy. Indians were not pushed out easily by white settlers moving

west, they were largely succumbing to disease through virgin soil epidemics and population

began to decline around 1775. By the start of the 20th century the Indian population in Oregon,

Washington and Idaho had depleted around 95% and American settlers had increased

exponentially. Demographic shifts led to reorganization of the economic structure of Oregon.

While Indians had consumed large quantities of salmon, it was only for sustenance. Capitalism

drove Euro-Americans to harvest not only for themselves but for external markets. Miners,

farmers, grazers, loggers, and fishers all exploited the Oregon country and sold their goods

elsewhere. Wheat production increased after 1850 in Oregon, which required flour mills to

process the wheat (other industries required mills as well, such as logging). These mills needed

nearby dams for power which greatly reduced salmon runs who had no fish-ladders to migrate

the Spokane River. Cattle damaged spawning beds through their heavy reliance on watering

holes which eroded and polluted stream banks. Industrial fishing arrived in 1866 on the

Columbia River which established canneries that would greatly escalate the pressure on the

salmon. Due to less government interference in markets, canneries “had to increase production

and reduce costs to remain competitive.”10

All these factors, as well as hydraulic mining and irrigation away from streams and so on,

reveal how many factors played into the degradation of salmon reproduction. The popular use of

“overfishing” as a blanket statement to explain salmon run declines places the blame solely on

fisheries while other industries are acquitted. Not only are fisheries and canneries solely blamed

10
Taylor, Making Salmon, 65.
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but they are labeled as greedy when, in order to succeed in the laissez-faire economy at all, they

needed to have production at a certain level in order to tap into international markets.11

The Panacea, or cure-all, was science. 19th and 20th century Americans believed science

could mitigate the damages they had been observing to the salmon and their habitats. While

civilization might have caused the damages to salmon, it could also solve them. Capitalist 19th

century ideals prevented legislatures and courts from limiting profitable enterprises. It was also a

time where political culture favored minimal regulation and legislators wanted popular

solutions.12 So despite 19th century public understanding of the deterioration of Salmon habitats,

the losses were viewed as part of the price for the development of society. As conservationist

George Perkins Marsh put it: “The unfavorable influences which have been alluded to are, for

the most part, of a kind which cannot be removed or controlled.”13 Science which came with

civilization, would allow for humans to compensate for the destruction it caused.14

These ideas hinged on the belief that mankind’s duty was to finish nature or take

advantage of the abundance which it provided. American fish culturalists claimed themselves as

civil servants on a righteous cause who were going to “bring blessings to millions of people”

when fish culture was ultimately realized.15 Spencer Baird, commissioner of the United States

Fish Commission, contrasted natural hatch rates of a half percent to propagation rates that went

above ninety percent. The promises of fish culture were so abundant that between 1872 and

1887, under direction of Baird, the USFC went from a small commission of scientific research

which was meant to present research to states and offer suggestions, to one that was mostly

11
Taylor, Making Salmon, 39-67.
12
Taylor, Making Salmon, 96.
13
Taylor, Making Salmon, 70.
14
Taylor, Making Salmon, 68.
15
Taylor, Making Salmon, 78.
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funded to promote fish culture. After Baird died in 1887, Marshall McDonald was appointed

commissioner and emphasized blatantly the role of USFC to solely promote artificial

propagation. McDonald noted the importance of fish culture allowing the government to ease

restraints on commercial fishing. McDonald also eliminated all non-utilitarian scientific research

and only focused on “the discovery of facts… which possess an economic value.”16

Taylor then poses the question: “But did fish culture work?” The answer is a definite no.

Harvests of fish declined steadily in the 1880s to 1890s. In 1899, runs sunk all along the pacific

and failure was acknowledged but only privately. The USFC employees relied on their salaries

which relied on fish culture being a success. Then commissioner Bowers, reprimanded

superintendents who spoke about the situations at their hatcheries without his permission. Taylor

concludes that fish culture became the preferred tool of the USFC because it had promised the

most, an unlimited supply of fish, which made the strange and difficult problems of salmon

decline less daunting and ignorable.

Fish culturists and scientists had also imagined a new solution to salmon populations,

making salmon in ponds. Pond-raising, discussed in chapter seven, attempted to control the

environment of salmon and manage their life cycles, essentially domesticating them. These

efforts arose from a specific evaluation of nature where economically valuable animals like

salmon were victimized against their natural predators and other forces which prevented their

abundance. Hollister McGuire called salmon, “poor little salmon.”17 In the 1950s scientists

began to note the changes in size, behavior, and genetics of pond-reared salmon. Ponds harbored

diseases which made fish weaker and genetically more similar over time. Though fish culture

16
Taylor, Making Salmon, 88.
17
Taylor, Making Salmon, 205.
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remained politically popular because it appeared to resolve issues but was an ecological and

fiscal disaster.18

Themes

Domestication and Propagation

Both Taylor and Fischer are concerned with their respective animals on their own and as

catalysts for other forces. Domestication of animals to suit human needs is a major theme which

the books share. Cattle, who had been successfully domesticated in the Old World, along with

sheep, pigs, horses and so on, were brought to the New World, where there are hardly any

domesticated species, and none like cattle. The use of domesticated animals was essential to

Anza in the exploration and conquest of California. Domesticated animals could be moved in

herds by the hundreds and consumed grasses which humans did not, therefore not competing

with settlers for food but instead producing foodstuffs, hides and tallow through otherwise

unusable resources. The domestication of cattle is what allowed them to be transported and used

as a basic, familiar resource for Spanish colonizers.

The attempts to domesticate and farm salmon as if they were cattle might come from a

pastoral ideal that fish culturist Livingston Stone testified to when he remarked that there was an

excess of nature waiting to be used and that the “sagacity of man should utilize it.”19 Attempts to

pond-rear fish in the 19th and 20th centuries came from a naive evaluation of nature from fish

culturalists who ignored ecologists warnings about environments being interconnected and

complicated. Instead, fish culture pushed on, attempting to domesticate the unmalleable pacific

salmon by dividing nature into categories of friends and enemies to the fish and attempting to

make salmon without any disturbances. This approach, Taylor notes, worked well for other

18
Taylor, Making Salmon, 203-236
19
Taylor, Making Salmon, 78.
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domesticated animals, but salmon could not be domesticated.20 The ponds ended up rearing

genetically damaged fish that were small and weak.

Salmon’s inability to be domesticated revealed the complexity of factors which affected

salmon, and how delicate they are. Pacific salmon have complex life cycles where they are

hatched in freshwater, mature in the Pacific, and return to their birthplace when they are about to

die. Whereas cattle were easily made to fit into California pastures and brought with them Old

World flora which transformed the ecology of grasslands. Cattle transformed the landscape and

salmon were transformed by the landscape, often by cattle whose pastures required irrigation and

who depleted and infected spawning beds.

Ideology Imposed Through Animal Farming

In each case of attempted farming, one successful the other not, both American fish

culturalists and Spaniards settling the coast of California thought that they were enacting control

over nature to bring about a higher benefit for humanity. For fish culturalists, it was the almost

divine imagining of themselves as scientists who would through artificial propagation be able to

create endless, cheap, overabundant food for consumption and end hunger. The ideology of

science being that every problem civilization produced could eventually be solved through

science, which is of civilization too. This reliance on science made fish culture such a valuable

solution in the age where new environmental problems were too complicated, and industry was

so heavily promoted and adored that it could not hope to slow down. Men like Marsh really did

believe what they were saying but the solutions they spoke of were promised before they were

actualized.

20
Taylor, Making Salmon, 235.
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Similarly, the Spanish settlers in California brought with them their cattle and idea of

civilization which imagined themselves above the peoples they encountered who were semi-

sedentary. Grazing cattle, the domination of domesticated species, was central to Spaniards'

vision of civilization. Thus, by reducing nearby Indians onto missions and into the ranching labor

force, the missionaries, whether they truly believed it or not, were saving the Indians and

converting them into people of reason.

In each condition there ended up being a large amount of hypocrisy. The Spanish claimed

to be aiding the Indians and later, the Mexican government claimed to be freeing the Indians

from the missions but, outside of the already visible conflict between those statements, the

Indians ended up with largely nothing after emancipation. Though Indians learned skills of

vaqueros, and many received land grants after secularization, they were viewed as an inferior

ethnicity and rancheros and other Californios made a point about keeping Indians in ignorance of

their legal rights, attempting to acquire their land for cheap and forever instating them into the

labor force. The missionaries who had claimed to give Indians valuable skills, did not leave them

with any economic knowledge that would have allowed them to be a part of the trans-pacific

trade and to run the ranches of the missions themselves. Instead, many Indians opted to sell their

land, if they even had any, and earn limited financial security by working on other Californio

ranches.

In the case of fish culture. The promises of science and technology had been so sweeping

that the large problems which they hoped to ignore festered, and salmon runs continued to

decline. Fish culturists also thought they could completely alter the environment of salmon by

hatching them in ponds, which only remade salmon into a weaker, genetically homogenous

breed, leaving other salmon by the wayside.

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Potential Further Study

Faith in science is dealt with in the third chapter of Taylor’s Making Salmon. In the

introduction of the chapter, Taylor remarks that to understand Americans' faith in science as an

inevitable solution to salmon, it is needed to “trace the historical development of ideas about

science” and why there is the extent of faith that there is. That selected quote could be made into

its own book. To observe the faith in science and its downfalls in other areas of ecological study

such as climate change would be quite interesting. The belief that humanity can innovate its way

out of environmental catastrophe saw itself backfire in the case of salmon, but would it also

backfire at a much larger and more critical global scale with climate change? Future areas of

study assessing the idea of restoration and the reversal of civilization in some respects against the

ideology of capitalist innovation solving the problems it creates could be quite valuable.
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Bibliography

Fischer, John R. Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California

and Hawai’i. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Taylor, Joseph E. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis.

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.