Cattle Rancher Quotes

In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

Hannah is a vegetarian; Trace is a cattle rancher. Definitely, not a match made in heaven. “A horse with a sense of humor. Was that possible?

Trace, a cattle rancher, and Hannah, a vegetarian, had nothing in common until the accident.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, 'atheism' is a term that should not even exist. No one needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist.' We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

There will be no purple-haired feminists during the coming food famine. Soon, all women will find cattle ranchers to be the world's sexiest men.

He dug wells for a living and his customers were cattle ranchers and wheat farmers, which meant they were always about to go broke, except when they were rich.

Some do, but the big cattle ranchers don’t. They own the land now and it’s made them rich. They don’t care if the tribes are fenced in, starving, and destitute, as long as they can ship their beef.

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them... “When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.

We are duck farmers. We are The Overlooked. The most glamorous type of farmer is the cattle rancher, because they were made famous by cowboys. But people forget the humble duck farmer, and last time I checked, cows don’t lay eggs needed to bake superior cakes.

You can excuse these socialists all you want as "men and women of their times". But never forget that they were socialists and that they saw state planning of the family as no different than state planning of the economy or a rancher's planning for his cattle breeding.

Governments are not protection, they are protection rackets. National security is an excuse to defend exclusive taxation authority in their territory. Governments protect us like a rancher defends cattle. At home as abroad, governments use violence to expand their power.

I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

The top 10 percent of grazing-permit holders on federal lands own 50 percent of all livestock on those lands; the bottom 50 percent own just 5 percent.

The argument goes like this: even if public grazing contributes almost nothing to local economies and national food production, it nonetheless supports "an important western lifestyle and the rural west's social and cultural fabric." If we keep ranchers working on the range, on the big wide-open of the public domain, we ensure the historical continuity of a "custom" that has gone on for close to 150 years.

I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry youeras too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixten inches of rain. And then the dry yars would come, and sometimes thre would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

We had a second date that night, then a third, and then a fourth. And after each date, my new romance novel protagonist called me, just to seal the date with a sweet word. For date five, he invited me to his house on the ranch. We were clearly on some kind of a roll, and now he wanted me to see where he lived. I was in no position to say no. Since I knew his ranch was somewhat remote and likely didn’t have many restaurants nearby, I offered to bring groceries and cook him dinner. I agonized for hours over what I could possibly cook for this strapping new man in my life; clearly, no mediocre cuisine would do. I reviewed all the dishes in my sophisticated, city-girl arsenal, many of which I’d picked up during my years in Los Angeles. I finally settled on a non-vegetarian winner: Linguine with Clam Sauce--a favorite from our family vacations in Hilton Head. I made the delicious, aromatic masterpiece of butter, garlic, clams, lemon, wine, and cream in Marlboro Man’s kitchen in the country, which was lined with old pine cabinetry. And as I stood there, sipping some of the leftover white wine and admiring the fruits of my culinary labor, I was utterly confident it would be a hit. I had no idea who I was dealing with. I had no idea that this fourth-generation cattle rancher doesn’t eat minced-up little clams, let alone minced-up little clams bathed in wine and cream and tossed with long, unwieldy noodles that are difficult to negotiate. Still, he ate it. And lucky for him, his phone rang when he was more than halfway through our meal together. He’d been expecting an important call, he said, and excused himself for a good ten minutes. I didn’t want him to go away hungry--big, strong rancher and all--so when I sensed he was close to getting off the phone, I took his plate to the stove and heaped another steaming pile of fishy noodles onto his plate. And when Marlboro Man returned to the table he smiled politely, sat down, and polished off over half of his second helping before finally pushing away from the table and announcing, “Boy, am I stuffed!” I didn’t realize at the time just how romantic a gesture that had been.

We took the long way back toward his house and drove past the northernmost point of the ranch just as the sun was beginning to set. “That’s so pretty,” I exclaimed as I beheld the beauty of the sky. Marlboro Man slowed to a stop and put his pickup in park. “It is, isn’t it?” he replied, looking over the land on which he’d grown up. He’d lived there since he was four days old, had worked there as a child, had learned how to be a rancher from his dad and grandfather and great-grandfather. He’d learned how to build fences and handle animals and extinguish prairie fires and raise cattle of all colors, shapes, and sizes. He’d helped bury his older brother in the family cemetery near his house, and he’d learned to pick up and go on in the face of unspeakable tragedy and sadness. This ranch was a part of him. His love for it was tangible. We got out of the pickup and sat on the back, holding hands and watching every second of the magenta sunset as it slowly dissipated into the blackness underneath. The night was warm and perfectly still--so still we could hear each other breathing. And well after the sun finally dipped below the horizon and the sky grew dark, we stayed on the back of the pickup, hugging and kissing as if we hadn’t seen each other in ages. The passion I felt was immeasurable. “I have something to tell you,” I said as the butterflies in my gut kicked into overdrive.

The beef cattle industry provides a good example of how a fragmented industry can change in structure. The industry has historically been characterized by a large number of small ranchers grazing cattle on rangelands and transporting them to a meat-packer for processing. Raising cattle has traditionally involved few economies of scale; if anything, there could well be diseconomies of controlling a very large herd and moving it from area to area. However, technological developments have led to the wider use of the feedlot as an alternative process for fattening cattle. Under carefully controlled conditions, the feedlot has proven to be a far cheaper way to put weight on animals. Constructing feedlots requires large capital outlays, though, and there appear to be significant economies of scale in their operation. As a result, some large beef growers, such as Iowa Beef and Monfort, are emerging and the industry is concentrating. These large growers are beginning to be large enough to backward integrate into processing of feeds and to forward integrate into meat processing and distribution. The latter has led to the development of brand names. In this industry the fundamental cause of fragmentation was the production technology utilized for fattening cattle. Once this impediment to consolidation was removed, a process of structural change was triggered which has encompassed many elements of industry structure going far beyond feedlots alone.

I’d never been with anyone like Marlboro Man. He was attentive--the polar opposite of aloof--and after my eighteenth-month-long college relationship with my freshman love Collin, whose interest in me had been hampered by his then-unacknowledged sexual orientation, and my four-year run with less-than-affectionate J, attentive was just the drug I needed. Not a day passed that Marlboro Man--my new cowboy love--didn’t call to say he was thinking of me, or he missed me already, or he couldn’t wait to see me again. Oh, the beautiful, unbridled honesty. We loved taking drives together. He knew every inch of the countryside: every fork in the road, every cattle guard, every fence, every acre. Ranchers know the country around them. They know who owns this pasture, who leases that one, whose land this county road passes through, whose cattle are on the road by the lake. It all looked the same to me, but I didn’t care. I’d never been more content to ride in the passenger seat of a crew-cab pickup in all my life. I’d never ridden in a crew-cab pickup in all my life. Never once. In fact, I’d never personally known anyone who’d driven a pickup; the boys from my high school who drove pickups weren’t part of my scene, and in their spare time they were needed at home to contribute to the family business. Either that, or they were cowboy wannabes--the kind that only wore cowboy hats to bars--and that wasn’t really my type either. For whatever reason, pickup trucks and I had never once crossed paths. And now, with all the time I was spending with Marlboro Man, I practically lived in one.

One expert from this time estimated there were two million cattle in Wyoming in 1885, although an 1884 report to the Department of the Interior from the territorial governor varied quite a bit from that number and enumerated only 750,000 cows. During the open range era, very few ranchers supplied winter feed for their cattle; instead, they depended upon the ability of the range to nourish the cows year-round. In addition to the overstocked range, a particularly dry 1886 summer followed by an early, wet, and bitterly cold fall and winter led to the death of thousands of starving animals unable to dig through the ice-covered snow to reach the grass underneath.

he had reluctantly approved the shooting of a handful of Yellowstone wolves who had attacked livestock grazing near the park. Such culling wouldn’t normally have been allowed under the Endangered Species Act, but a special concession had been made to ranchers in the original reintroduction plan: any reintroduced wolves who preyed on livestock would be shot. The wolves’ overall impact on ranching hadn’t been severe; around two hundred cattle—out of roughly five million across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming—were lost to predation in an average year. (By comparison, tens of thousands of cattle were killed every year by winter storms, lightning, floods, or drought.) But some individual operations near the

Black Bean Burgers My husband and I have been married for many years, and I’d say as marriages go, ours is pretty darn good. We have four kids, work pretty hard, and spend a lot of time together, which is just fine with us since we really like each other and all that. Now, I will confess that there has been one steady source of marital conflict through the years, and that is the fact that I gosh darn love a good meatless burger. I can’t really explain it. It must be a throwback to my vegetarian days. I don’t know…I just love them. I’ll never, ever forget the time, very early in our marriage, that Ladd and I went out to eat and I ordered--gasp--a veggie burger from the menu. The look on his face--it is etched in my memory. From where he stood, he didn’t even know burgers without meat existed. In his experience, a burger was meat, much like rain was water. It sent shockwaves through his being, and rattled the very foundation of our marriage. Over the years, I’ve tried to help my beloved cattle rancher husband understand my position: that my love of meatless burgers has no hidden meaning. It doesn’t mean I don’t also love big, beefy burgers. It doesn’t mean I’m going to start making the family drink shots of wheatgrass juice every morning. I just like the taste of weird, mushy concoctions meant to resemble hamburger patties. Call me wacky! I love you, Ladd. But I also love meatless burgers. And I know in my heart that those two things can coexist.

The third was from a cattle rancher in Utah. He seemed to need a slave rather than a wife. Anna immediately dismissed him as a future husband. His views were even more archaic than most. But the fourth and fifth letters were particularly interesting as they both came from South Dakota. One was from a hotel owner whose advertisement for a wife

Do all the people here feel as you do about the Indians?” “Some do, but the big cattle ranchers don’t. They own the land now and it’s made them rich. They don’t care if the tribes are fenced in, starving, and destitute, as long as they can ship their beef. Anything else?

Far worse were the cattle: At a ranch outside Ashland, “dozens of Angus cows lay dead on the blackened ground, hooves jutting in the air. Others staggered around like broken toys, unable to see or breathe, their black fur and dark eyes burned, plastic identification tags melted to their ears,” the New York Times reported. A sixty-nine-year-old rancher walked among them with a rifle. “They’re gentle,” he said. “They know us. We know them. You just thought, ‘Wow, I am sorry.’ You think you’re done and the next day you got to go shoot more.

In the cattle industry, a federal lawsuit, Pickett v. Tyson Foods, had revealed that the company was using its captive supplies of cattle to drive down the cash market price. When the cash price was high, Tyson could buy cattle under contract, which reduced demand on the open market and eventually brought the price down. A jury found that the tactic depressed prices Tyson paid to ranchers and feedlots by billions of dollars, even as the cost of beef in the grocery store continued to climb.

Zilmax seemed to be the perfect drug to bend cattle’s physiology toward the needs of Tyson’s grid contracts. The grids encourage high yields and maximize the amount of beef that Tyson can sell for each animal it kills. So does Zilmax. But there are reasons Zilmax isn’t widely used. Zilmax-inflated steaks are less tender and it decreases the fat marbling that makes for a juicy steak. The meat is leaner and cheaper to produce. It’s more like chicken, in other words. Within the beef industry, there has been strong pushback against the use of Zilmax. Cattle ranchers have tried to distinguish beef from chicken by making it higher quality and stamping it with branded measures of flavor, like the Certified Angus brand. Zilmax undermines that trend and pushes beef toward the middle range of quality. In 2008, the man in charge of the Certified Angus Beef marketing campaign came out publicly against the use of Zilmax. As president of the Certified Angus Beef brand, it was John Stika’s job to ensure that beef was produced at a certain level of quality. An industry group launched the Certified Angus Beef brand in 1978 to set beef apart from chicken and pork, making beef a premium product. Stika sent an open letter to the popular trade magazine Beef, warning about Zilmax’s use.

Senior executives inside IBP realized that raising cattle was a waste of money. So at Garden City, IBP employed a new way to procure a steady stream of cows. It was called the “formula contract.” The formula contract created a way for IBP to lock in a steady supply of cattle without having to go out on the open market and haggle for them, as meatpackers always had. Instead, IBP signed contracts with a rancher or feedlot, agreeing to buy a set number of cattle at a set date.3 The price for those cattle, when they were delivered, was based on a formula rather than a competitive bid. IBP created a formula price that allowed the company to start controlling its cattle supply in a way that mimicked Tyson’s methods for controlling its chicken supply. IBP couldn’t simply dictate what kind of animals it slaughtered, the way Tyson did, but it could use contracts to exert influence over the ranches. IBP’s formula contained a series of discounts and premiums that rewarded some qualities in the cow while punishing others. These discounts were crude levels that IBP used to shape the kind of cattle ranchers raised. Early on, for example, IBP controlled the size of the cows ranchers delivered by discounting those that were too big and those that were too small. The formula acted as a market incentive all its own, slowly bending the characteristics of the cattle herd to IBP’s specifications. It was still a long way from the exacting control Tyson had over its chicken flocks, but the formulas would evolve over the decades.

The modern U.S. cattle business itself is also increasingly confined, beleaguered on all sides by the rising tide of cheap chicken and cheap pork. While the cattle industry has gotten bigger, more complicated, and more expensive to operate than at any time in U.S. history, it has also entered an era of brutal and relentless downward pressure on profits. This has driven about 11,000 ranchers out of business every year since 1996, and wiped out 30 percent of all U.S. feedlots. The rise of cheap chicken has perhaps hurt no business more than the beef business. Consumers have spent less and less on beef, pushing red meat off their plate in favor of chicken patties.

How to Tell the Truth and Get in Trouble I am a fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher. I grew up on a dairy farm in Montana, and I ran a feedlot operation there for twenty years. I know firsthand how cattle are raised and how meat is produced in this country. Today I am president of the International Vegetarian Union. Sure, I used to enjoy my steaks as much as the next guy. But if you knew what I know about what goes into them and what they can do to you, you’d probably be a vegetarian like me. And, believe it or not, as a pure vegetarian now who consumes no animal products at all, I can tell you that these days I enjoy eating more than ever. If you’re a meat-eater in America, you have a right to know that you have something in common with most of the cows you’ve eaten. They’ve eaten meat, too.

On Pine Ridge and Rosebud they had communal cattle herds and some Indians were becoming ranchers in a small way. But the government was quick to destroy our budding economy. World War I broke out and in 1917 the white superintendent sold off our cattle “because it was needed for the war effort.

Unable to farm the area where they now lived, many turned to logging and working in small sawmills. Some men raised cattle and became ranchers.

I have the solution to all my problems. I have money, position, the running of one of the country’s legendary cattle stations. I can even get the girl I want. I can’t buy her, of course. She’s got money of her own. But I’m pretty sure if I talk to her dad, he’ll give me the green light.

the seat of the chair. Aunt Lola was also a frequent visitor, and both Edward and Mr. O’Brien came by a couple of times each day to offer a cheery word. For the first few days, she slept much of the time, but as she was able to wean herself from the laudanum, she was awake more and more. Jacob wasn’t going out to work with the cattle. When he wasn’t with her, he tinkered in the barn or did odd jobs around the house. It was strange. Nothing had kept him from the

In another time and place, the Texeiras would have been hailed as model citizens, environmental stewards, exactly the kind of decent, hardworking settlers an Ohio-born nun named Dorothy Stang was organizing farther east in the state of Pará to resist powerful ranchers who were razing the forest to plant pastureland for their cattle, a crusade for which she would eventually pay with her life.

The Last Ride of Grayson “Grady” Hale In the heart of the wild west, under the vast expanse of the azure sky, rode Grayson “Grady” Hale, a cowboy known for his unyielding spirit and his trusty steed, Bess. Grady’s life was woven into the fabric of the frontier, a tapestry of cattle drives, campfire tales, and the pursuit of freedom that only the open range could offer. Grady was born to the saddle, learning to ride before he could walk, and to rope not long after. His father, a seasoned rancher, had instilled in him the values of hard work and respect for the land. Grady’s mother, a woman of strength and grace, taught him the gentle touch needed to soothe a spooked calf or mend a broken wing. As the years passed, Grady’s reputation grew. He wasn’t the fastest gun nor the richest rancher, but he had something more valuable—integrity. Folks from miles around would seek his help when rustlers threatened or when a neighbor needed a hand. Grady never turned his back on those in need, and his word was as solid as the mountains framing the horizon. One fateful day, a telegram arrived, calling Grady to a distant town. A band of outlaws had taken over, and the people were desperate. Grady kissed his wife, Emma, goodbye, promising to return once peace was restored. With Bess beneath him, he rode out, the dust of the trail rising like a storm behind him. The confrontation was inevitable. Grady, with a handful of brave souls, stood against the outlaws. Words were exchanged, and then gunfire. When the smoke cleared, the outlaws were either captured or fled, and the town was saved. But victory came at a cost—Grady had taken a bullet. As he lay there, the townsfolk gathered, their faces etched with concern and gratitude. Grady knew his ride was coming to an end. With his last breath, he whispered a message to be given to Emma, a message of love and a promise kept. Back at the ranch, Emma received the news with a stoic heart. She knew the risks of loving a cowboy, the same risks that made her love him all the more. She gazed out at the sunset, the colors painting the sky like the wildflowers of their meadow. And in that moment, she felt Grady’s presence, like the gentle brush of a breeze, telling her he was home at last. Grady’s tale is one of courage, sacrifice, and the enduring legacy of a cowboy who lived by his own code. His story, like the trails he once rode, winds its way into the legend of the west, reminding us that some spirits are as untameable as the land they love.

Ranchers don't care for gophers and their burrows that can break the leg of a horse, so cowhands shoot and poison the rodents even though their tilling, aerating and fertilizing the soil are most beneficial to the grasses and forbs and legumes cattle depend on.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.

Meanwhile, the conquest of the Great Plains had enabled ranchers to breed massive herds of cattle, without a corresponding population base of humans to feed. You could ship live cattle by train to the eastern states to be slaughtered locally, but transporting entire cows was expensive, and the animals were often malnourished or even injured en route. Almost half would be inedible by the time they arrived in New York or in Boston.

So, where did the town get the name Two Dot? It’s a pretty cool name.’ ‘From the cows,’ said one of the men. ‘The cows chose the name?’ I asked. ‘No, don’t be foolish. From a local cattle rancher named George ‘Two Dot’ Wilson. This all used to be his land. The branding iron he used for his cows was just two dots. And the name just sorta stuck.

Everyone who has a farmer or a rancher in their family knows they live out of their pickups. Everything important can be found in the cab, including wallets, bills to pay, cattle and seed records. The console is littered with dusty little notes about things that need to be done, jotted down on whatever may be handy---food wrappers, scrap paper, or cardboard from a tool package.

If you want to tick a Fillmore County rancher off, ask him how big his ranch is, how many cattle he has, and how many guns he owns.

One spring evening in 1896, a prominent Pennsylvanian named Hamilton Disston blew his brains out in a bathtub. He had become gravely depressed after depleting his inheritance on a grandiose campaign to drain 4 million acres of Florida swamp known as the Everglades. Although Disston died believing himself a failure, he was later proven a pioneer and an inspiration. In the years that followed, one version or another of his rapacious fantasy was pursued by legions of avaricious speculators—land developers, bankers, railroad barons, real-estate promoters, citrus growers, cattle ranchers, sugar tycoons and, last but not least, the politicians they owned.

The long line of Texan cattle ranchers he’d come from had no doubt programmed a whole lot of silent, brooding cowboy into his genetic code.

Arguably the first concrete example of “national socialism” in practice was the Cercle Proudhon in France in 1911, a study group designed to “unite nationalists and left-wing anti-democrats” around an offensive against “Jewish capitalism.” It was the creation of Georges Valois, a former militant of Charles Maurras’s Action Française who broke away from his master in order to concentrate more actively on converting the working class from Marxist internationalism to the nation. It proved too early, however, to rally more than a few intellectuals and journalists to Valois’s “triumph of heroic values over the ignoble bourgeois materialism in which Europe is now stifling . . . [and] . . . the awakening of Force and Blood against Gold.” The term national socialism seems to have been invented by the French nationalist author Maurice Barrès, who described the aristocratic adventurer the Marquis de Morès in 1896 as the “first national socialist.” Morès, after failing as a cattle rancher in North Dakota, returned to Paris in the early 1890s and organized a band of anti-Semitic toughs who attacked Jewish shops and offices. As a cattleman, Morès found his recruits among slaughterhouse workers in Paris, to whom he appealed with a mixture of anticapitalism and anti-Semitic nationalism.80 His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform. Morès killed a popular Jewish officer, Captain Armand Meyer, in a duel early in the Dreyfus Affair, and was himself killed by his Touareg guides in the Sahara in 1896 on an expedition to “unite France to Islam and to Spain.”81 “Life is valuable only through action,” he had proclaimed. “So much the worse if the action is mortal.