Saturday, October 14, 1876. Construction starts at Cantonment Reno.

Construction of Cantonment Reno commenced, after the location of the post having been established two days prior.

Cantonment Reno (Ft. McKinney)

This is really interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it shows a real change in the Army's strategy for defeating the Sioux.  Ever since the end of Red Cloud's War in the 1860s the Army had not maintained a post in the Powder River Basin.  Indeed, Cantonment Reno is just a couple of miles away from where Ft. Reno had been.  Ft. Reno, Ft. Caspar and Ft. Phil Kearney had all been abandoned after that successful Sioux campaign, ceding hundreds of square miles to Sioux and Cheyenne control. Red Cloud had been enormously successful.

But now the Army was back, and a post like Cantonment Reno was a major interdicting presence on the southeastern edge of the Basin.  

Red Cloud's War had concluded in 1868.  The Sioux and Cheyenne dominance in the Powder River Basin had been brief.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 12, 1876 . Cantonment Reno established.

1870s, 1876, Army, Blog Mirror, Frontier Wyoming, Great Sioux War, This Day In Wyoming's History, Wyoming, Wyoming (Johnson County)

The Agrarian's Lament: Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Process Their Own Food

The Agrarian's Lament: Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Proce...: Trump tries to backstep after a major screw up. Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Process Their Own Food While this will aid beef...

Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Process Their Own Food

Trump tries to backstep after a major screw up.

Trump Moves To Allow Ranchers And Farmers To Process Their Own Food

While this will aid beef producers, it doesn't address the existential problem of the packing industry monopoly.  Breaking that, and particularly breaking that on Distributist principals, would have a massive impact.  That won't be happening, however.  

Instead, this basically would allow producers to sell their own beef across state lines.  While some people will buy beef in that fashion, most people won't, and that doesn't do much at all for the cost of beef sold at restaurants and the like.

As noted, applying the Sherman Anti Trust Act to the meat packing industry would have a real impact.  A bigger one would be limiting corporate ownership to a single packing facility.

All of this will have no immediate impact on meat prices. The US cattle inventories, i.e.., the herd size, have not been this low since 1941.  The reasons for that are varied, by herd reduction due to drought caused by climate change is a major part of it.  In some ways, this is just a minor way of trying to repair the damage done by Trump allowing the importation of foreign beef, which has the added theater element of being introduced, supposedly, by Glenn Beck in an interview, something that just screams out the entire thing being something that is pitched towards farmer and rancher ignorance.

Small herd size is a problem, but it will take years to address.  By that time, given the very small herd size, we may very well be seeing a meat production climate that hasn't existed since the introduction of refrigerated rail cars in 1878.  The massive increase in the Western herd during the Civil War and the invention of the refrigerated rail car shifted the American diet from pork to beef.  Various factors have been making inroads on beef for years, and the price at the counter, which this will certainly not immediately address, is shifting it once again, and has been for many  years.

Whether this will serve as a salve on farmers and ranchers so they can justify voting for a party that has screwed them for years is yet to be seen.

Related thread:

The GOP's useful idiots in agriculture.

Labels: 1920, 1929, 2020s, 2026, Agriculture, Bureau of Land Management, Chuck Gray, Donald Trump, Great Depression, Ignorance, Kevin Christensen, Predictions, Republican Party, Stupidity

Friday, August 4, 1876,. Death of an American commander in Cuba.

Henry Mike Reeve Carroll, who went by Henry Reeve, died in combat against Spanish troops in Cuba at age 26, where he had gone from revolutionary volunteer in 1869 to the rank of general in a Cuban revolutionary army.  He was a prior child soldier in the Civil War, in which he's served as a drummer.

The Ten Years War was the cause he died in, which lasted from 1868 to 1878.  The Cuban revolutionaries would lose the war and Cuban independence would come about, instead, as a result of the later Spanish American War, which up until the current war with Iran stood as the war fought by the US on the least justifiable grounds.

The 5th Cavalry arrived at Goose Creek in Wyoming to reinforce a resting up Crook's command.

Last edition:

August 3, 1876. All were invited to attend.

Labels: 1870s, 1876, 2020s, 2026, 44th Congress, Colorado (Durango), Colorado (Leadville), James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok, National Rifle Association, Panama, Personalities, South Dakota, South Dakota (Deadwood), The Frontier West

October 15, 1878. Edison Electric LIght flips on the switch.

 A long time ago I started a series of posts that riffed off a George F. Will column, in which he stated:

In many ways, the world of 1870 was more medieval than modern. Three necessities — food, clothing, shelter — absorbed almost all consumer spending. No household was wired for electricity. Flickering light came from candles and whale oil, manufacturing power from steam engines, water wheels and horses. Urban horses, alive and dead, complicated urban sanitation. Window screens were rare, so insects commuted to and fro between animal and human waste outdoors and the dinner table. A typical North Carolina housewife in the 1880s carried water into her home eight to 10 times daily, walking 148 miles a year to tote 36 tons of it. Few children were in school after age 12.

I can't recall if I ever expanded on the whale oil lighting specifically, but I did generally, in this post here:

I don't dispute the details that Will recites here, but I do doubt the "more medieval than modern assertion.  Indeed, some of these things argue, I think, the other way around.  Still, it taps into what we're discussing here.  This is just the sort of thing that this blog exists to explore, particularly given that the time frame that Will is discussing, 1870 to 1970, fits right in with the time frame, sort of, that this blog is looking at, as earlier noted. 

Whale oil chandelier, photo from the Library of Congress.  Up until the Will entry, I'd never even considered there being such a thing as a whale oil chandelier.

What Will noted was quite true, but was this Medieval in character?  I'd assert not.  I don't really know, however.  Whaling has taken place to some extent since ancient times, but the widespread use of whale oil, I suspect, didn't come about until well after the Medieval period.  Indeed, it doesn't seem to have been done in an appreciably large manner until maybe the 17th Century, although whaling itself does go back much further than that.  Whale oil, once it became a common commodity, did see use in lamps in candles in an appreciable manner.   Starting in the 19th Century, however, kerosene began to come in.  Whale oil reached its peak in 1845 and then began to fairly rapidly decline thereafter as kerosene became more common, although whale oil would continue to see some use up until electrical generation replaced it in the early 20th Century, a fairly remarkable fact.

That post was entitled:

They could get by without electricity

Well, today is the day that started changing, in 1878.  Today is the anniversary of the Edison Electric Light Company commencing business.

To put this slightly in context, George A. Custer and the men under his immediate command at Little Big Horn had only been in their graves in Montana for two years at this point.  Most of Central Wyoming completely remained Indian territory and the big Texas and Oregon cattle drives to that region of the state hadn't yet commenced.  Rail transportation hadn't penetrated into most of Montana and was only in Southern Wyoming.

Put a slightly different way, for context, when this anniversary reached its centennial, I was in high school.