Book Review

In recounting the rise and fall of one of the largest land monopolies in North American history, David Igler weaves together a diverse host of actors rarely found in one historical narrative: Chinese workers, elk, San Francisco meatpackers, swamps, Chicago capitalists, California rivers, Mexican vaqueros, riparian forests, Italian immigrants, salty soil, lawyers, and of course cattle. The central focus of his monograph are the careers of two German butchers, Henry Miller and Charles Lux, who came to California during the gold rush and built an empire of cattle, rangeland, rivers, and meat-packing plants across three states over the next half century. Control of three ingredients was central to Miller and Lux's success: land, water, and labor in San Francisco's expanding urban hinterlands. First, Miller and Lux bought up, confiscated, and gained title to over three hundred thousand acres of grazing land between 1858 and 1870, much of it former Mexican land grants along northern California's San Joaquin and San Benito rivers. Second, they devised a system for controlling the cycles of drought and flooding in the region. In 1878, Miller and Lux acquired one of the largest canal companies in U.S. history, a former rival for water rights in northern California, and began irrigating a vast acreage of valley grasslands for cattle feed. And in 1884 Miller and Lux won a celebrated court case, Lux v. Haggin, arguing that the Buena Vista Swamp, headwaters of the San Joaquin River, was in fact a clearly defined waterway for which they possessed exclusive water rights.

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