Revolutions in the Grass: Politics and Food Systems in Continental North America

In 1781, just two months after the British conceded defeat to the United States at Yorktown, Spaniards also surrendered to the Quechan leader Olleyquotequiebe on the banks of the Lower Colorado River in present-day California. In several days of bloody skirmishes, the Quechans decisively rose up and completely destroyed two missions, abruptly halting the northwestward spread of Spanish colonialism. The battle proved to be the most successful indigenous uprising in colonial New Spain. Spaniards never returned to the Colorado Basin, and the region remained Indian territory for the next eighty years.

While several political-economic factors led to the Quechan victory, one spark more than any other ignited the uprising: livestock. Spanish cattle and horses devoured and trampled Quechan farms and water sources. Livestock frontiers would come to dominate Native ecologies across the continent in the coming decades as the power of New Spain waned and political revolutions erupted. The Mexican Revolution, for example, initiated corresponding ecological revolutions in North America, transforming the food systems along its northern borders—regions that would later attract American farmers and ranchers inheriting land use practices forged during the age of revolutions. Thanks to these political upheavals shaking the Atlantic World, millions of large herbivores now grazed on a substantial portion of North America. Political independence brought regional and global demands for hides, food, leather, tallow, and coerced labor. These markets relied upon the extensive use of grasslands, which acted as energy reservoirs for new food systems emerging during the Enlightenment.