Jeff Roche
speaker
654 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Jeff Roche’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
You could make this money.
They built a kind of a code.
It was a code, really.
It was a set of industrial standards that allowed them to...
to function as an industry with a minimum of violence.
As you can imagine, if you don't have title to property and everything you own is out just wandering around, you need to have some kind of a cooperative measure to make the industry work.
Otherwise, you're going to involve the state.
And this is a very entrepreneurial culture, and entrepreneurial cultures try to operate as far outside of state control as they can just because when you introduce the state, it makes things a lot more expensive.
So this was the industry.
This was the Texas panhandle, and most of West Texas was governed by this cattle business until literally the 20th century.
And it's a cattle business that it's governed because these people cooperate with one another.
So it's really a technological revolution.
Three things are going to happen that are going to make the cattle business change away from the range.
And despite all this sort of elevation of protecting the range in dime novels, really by the last decade of the 19th century, ranching had shifted toward a fenced model.
So barbed wire is super cheap.
So you're able to fence in cattle so you don't really need, you don't let them wander around as much.
You can get them fatter faster.
The windmill comes in and the windmill allows them to draw water up.
So you could literally move a pasture anywhere because you're drawing, you don't rely on this, on some natural ground source of water.
And the ranchers figure out that they don't need as many acres.
Showing 141–160 of 654 · page 8 of 33
← Previous
Next →