As today is Halloween, I couldn’t resist echoing Dr. Royden Loewen’s “Tick or Treat” title suggestion for Dr. Claire Strom’s recent talk at the University of Guelph’s informal Rural History roundtable. She presented a chapter and general methodology for her upcoming book Making Cat Fish Bait out of Government Boys: Politics, Class, and Environment in the New South. The story uses Max and Will Carter’s murder of local cattle inspectors as an example of southern yeomen resisting the eradication of tick borne babesiosis.

The disease also known as Texas fever began to spread with the internationalization of the cattle trade and the close confinement of cattle herds. Some of the early efforts to eradicate the disease include the scientific research of Theobald Smith, and the USDA Bureau of Animal Industry’s establishment of a quarantine line (essentially along the Mason-Dixon line) which marked the northern boundary of the disease’s cure. A common treatment involved dipping cattle in vats of arsenic to eliminate ticks, but this solution was expensive, extremely time consuming, and environmentally problematic.

Yeomen opposed eradication because they disbelieved the diagnosis and saw little benefit for the high costs of treatment. Murdering inspectors was only one form of violence employed as a solution. Inspectors were threatened, attacked, and even arrested for trespassing, and state owned dipping vats were dynamited regularly – as many as 63 were destroyed in one night. The federal government had to force counties and states to continue with eradication campaigns, and sometimes the only way to lessen opposition was to employ ringleaders themselves as inspectors. The first major inroads against babesiosis were made during the Depression as a result of the New Deal and by the 1940s the disease had been generally removed from cattle in the south. It is a triumphant story for progressive science, but in the end it failed to make the South a competitive livestock region.

The talk was very well attended by grad students and faculty from History and other departments such as Animal Science. The interest generated by Dr. Strom’s talk and the discussions that followed are testament to her research but also to the international and interdisciplinary scope of the discourse in rural history. To me it suggests Guelph may be an excellent place to one day host the increasingly stimulating symposium of the Agricultural History Society.