Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920

Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller and Lux, a vast meatpacking conglomerate started by two San Francisco butchers in 1858. Industrial Cowboys examines how Henry Miller and Charles Lux, two German immigrants, consolidated the West's most extensive land and water rights, swayed legislatures and courts, monopolized western beef markets, and imposed their corporate will on California's natural environment. Told with clarity and originality, this story uses one fascinating case study to illuminate the industrial development and environmental transformation of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. David Igler examines the broader impact that industrialism--as exemplified by Miller and Lux--had on landscapes and waterscapes, and on human as well as plant and animal life in the West. He also provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller and Lux, from the dispossession of Californio rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force. The book also covers such topics as land acquisition and reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. Above all, Igler highlights essential issues that resonate for us today: who holds the right and who has the power to engineer the landscape for market production?

"Ambitiously conceived, abundantly researched, effectively plotted, elegantly composed, and concisely argued, Igler's study of the rise and fall of Miller and Lux will be hailed as a landmark contribution. No other work on late nineteenth-century California so stylishly and convincingly brings together the social, economic, and ecological dimensions of the state's post-Gold Rush development."and#151;Stephen Aron, author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

"David Igler writes this intriguing history at the intersection of landscape, work and industry. He places the emergence of Western resource based corporations at the center of a set of cultural, economic, and natural changes that intersect and ramify in unforeseen directions."and#151;Richard White, author of "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West

David Igler is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.