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

by David Igler

Book Overview

Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller & 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520245342
• ISBN13: 9780520245341
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 281 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

A path breaking work

This is a fine book that provides important new insights not only into the history of big cattle ranching in California, but also into our broader understanding of the settlement of the American West and the meaning of American industrialization. Igler's concept of the "industrial cowboy" who works, in essence, in a factory without walls in which the landscape of nature itself becomes part of the technological system should force all American historians to rethink their understanding of what constitutes an industrialization. Likewise, Igler's work adds to the growing body of evidence that one of the best ways of defining and thinking about the American West is a place where a relatively pristine environment interesected with an advanced industrial society.