. . . droves of black cattle from distant Goyáz, animals with huge outstretching horns, fierce of aspect . . .
—James Wells, Three Thousand Miles Through Brazil
By the 1820s in Goiás, interest increasingly focused on stock raising as a means to revive the cash economy. Horses and mules were the more valuable animals, but the province’s conditions of abundant land, scarce labor, and expensive capital favored cattle. Over time these had adapted themselves successfully to the harsh conditions of the cerrado, reproducing well with little attention or investment. For the same reasons, however, the industry as it developed in Goiás was condemned to wasteful techniques, low productivity, and uncertain profits, and because of such constraints it expanded slowly. But if humble creole cattle might not soon make the province wealthy, they could link the local economy and population to a developing national and world economy as nothing else at that point would.
Origins of the Industry
Cattle preceded Luzo-Brazilian settlers and their African slaves to Goiás.1 By the late sixteenth century the animals had penetrated the sertão of Bahia along the upper Rio São Francisco and were spreading north into the interior of Piauí, pushed out of coastal areas by the sugar industry and its attendant food production: an 1701 Royal Letter, for example, prohibited cattle raising within ten leagues of the coast,2 and subsequent cotton cultivation displaced stock raising further toward the interior. Left to their own devices, animals from Bahia and Piauí worked their way through passes in the Serra Geral and into Goiás seeking water and pasture.
Similarly, cattle pressed down from the north through the interior of Maranhão to Pastos Bons and across the Rio Tocantins. Other animals arrived with the Jesuits when they entered the northern and north-central parts of what would become the captaincy, seeking Indians to evangelize or to take to the coast.3
Its interests fixed on gold, the Crown was initially as hostile to cattle as to sugar, and for the same reasons. Applicants for land received only relatively small grants suitable for subsistence or local production but not for commercial stock raising.4 One result was to inflate the cost of meat and stimulate contraband trade, as well as the illegal occupation of land and clandestine ranching. This developed first in the northern part of Goiás near the fading mines; in 1804, for example, the parish of Cavalcante alone produced more cattle than the entire southern half of the captaincy.5 Initially ranchers simply squatted on Crown land, but as the gold gave out and the miners and their slaves abandoned the towns, the state bowed to the changing situation and made larger grants available, hoping to fix a presence in the area and stimulate new sources of revenue.
Miners that did not leave the area altogether retreated to the countryside and to ranching and subsistence agriculture for survival. Most were lucky if at first they earned a bit trading animals, hides, and meat to the remaining mining centers, but soon some of them discovered more promising markets in the coastal sugar plantations of Bahia and neighboring provinces.
Disadvantaged by the enormous distances involved, the ranchers of the northern Goiás nevertheless found that because nature largely spared them the droughts that repeatedly devastated the interior of the northeast, their ranches provided an alternative for coastal consumers to those on the upper São Francisco. Few among Goiás’s ranchers actually trailed their cattle to market but instead sold them to buyers or drovers (boiadeiros), who either resold the animals at fairs in the interior of the northeast or took them in stages to the coast, where they were fattened for resale. However, the traffic offered at best a pale alternative to the hoped-for riches of gold mining, and even these markets faltered as the late eighteenth-century sugar boom declined.
The first region in Goiás to develop a reputation for successful stock raising had been the Vão do Paranã, along the Rio Paranã near the province’s eastern boundary. Centered on the town of Flores, but with sales outlets through Santa Maria Taguatinga to Bahia and through Couros/Formosa to Minas Gerais, the area actually bridged the north and the south of the captaincy. Already by the 1780s the Vão was well known throughout the center-west for the quality of its cattle and horses, and in the last years of the colony and for several decades after independence it was Goiás’s most important supplier of livestock to neighboring provinces: in 1819, for example, a German traveler, Johan Baptist von Spix, noted that “the raising of animals is almost the only occupation of those living along the Paranã and each year they send to Bahia a considerable number of cattle and horses, these latter being the best in Goiás.” A few years later Cunha Mattos, on a tour of inspection of the province’s militias, confirmed that the Vão “has the largest number of cattle ranches of any municipality” in Goiás.6 For stock raising the Vão had several natural advantages, including good pastures, plenty of water, natural salt deposits, and a location on the main routes for interprovincial trade.
The perceptive Cunha Mattos, however, also hit on what would become the valley’s chief problem, the repeated flooding of the Rio Paranã. This not only drowned animals and sometimes humans but left large areas of standing water that trapped surviving cattle in muddy sloughs and contributed to endemic fevers among the human population. And the situation was worsening, largely because of the annual burning of agricultural land and pasture. Although some ranches belonged to elites who lived much of the year in Formosa and thus avoided the worst health problems, most of the population consisted of free blacks and mulattos who farmed and raised cattle on small and medium-sized properties, and on community land, and who felt directly the effects of the floods and disease. Although at mid-century the Vão continued to provide large numbers of cattle and horses for export, its comparative position within Goiás was declining.
The valley had become a victim not only of disease and ecological degradation but, and perhaps more importantly, of a shift in the orientation of the provincial economy after mid-century, from the coastal northeast to Rio de Janeiro and the expanding southern coffee frontier.
In contrast, cattle production in much of the rest of the province’s north suffered from a relatively arid climate and the thin pasture this supported, weakening the animals and keeping their weight down. Disease and predator attacks, the cost of salt, and, as with the Vão, problems caused by the reorientation of national markets in the mid-nineteenth century slowed the expansion of production in the north.7 In the 1830s, for example, the region was said to sell more than 12,000 head of cattle and almost 8,000 hides a year, compared to the south’s 3,000 head and slightly less that 4,000 hides, but the individual value of these commodities was markedly higher in the south. At least as late as the 1870s the north still had larger herds and probably continued to export more cattle that did the south, but the poorer quality of these animals and distances to markets kept prices and producers’ returns low.8
Ranching developed after some delay in the south and southwest of Goiás and initially on a smaller scale than in the north: for example, a 1796 count of fazendas found 401 properties in the north as against only 121 in the south, and by 1828 the difference had actually widened, to 546 versus 156.9 Stock raising lagged in the southern part of the province because viable gold mining survived there longer, because the availability of good land in western Minas Gerais slowed immigration, and because initially there were few markets for the animals comparable to what the sugar and cotton economies of the northeast offered. But as such markets began to develop with the urbanization of Rio de Janeiro and then the expansion of coffee production during the third and forth decades of the century, ranching in the south of Goiás adopted forms different from those of the north.
On the average the properties here were not so large but more highly capitalized and stocked with better-quality animals, and ranchers were more willing, or able, to adopt improved production techniques as these became available.
Of course, this was all relative, and compared with even the “backward”10 cattle industry of Rio Grande do Sul, for example, all of Goiás lagged.
Within a provincial frame of reference, however, southern and southwestern Goiás by mid-century had taken and would continue to hold and to increase a technological lead over the north: for example, a 1912–13 cattle census revealed that whereas in southern municipalities new Zebu-cross cattle varieties predominated, in the north only at Boavista had any significant number of ranchers abandoned their “degenerate” creole animals.11
As early as the 1820s, therefore, and despite continued attempts to develop commercial agriculture and reanimate mining, it was more and more clear that if Goiás was to recover even a modest prosperity, cattle would be the likely vehicle. President Miguel Lino de Moraes in December of 1827 ruthlessly laid out the province’s options: mining, trade with Pará, and cattle raising, and at the moment only the last of these showed any real promise. Cattle “go easily on their own feet” to distant markets, he suggested, and recommended the development of larger properties, to exploit economies of scale. The province’s General Council agreed, arguing that the population should be “obliged . . . to apply themselves to ranching.” And a few years later another provincial president, consciously or unconsciously, echoed Lino de Morais when he advanced the case for expanded cattle raising, because, he said, “they go with their own feet to look for money for the province.”12
Technology
These government representatives, however, as well as travelers, and even some of the ranchers themselves, at the same time that they advocated increased production bemoaned the backward state of a local cattle industry that “even today [1858] depended on the abundance of the countryside where the herds wander as they will, without the ranchers of this province having understood the need to improve the quality of the animals or to perfect their system (if there is one) of raising these animals.” The quality of the province’s cattle was said to be low: “Fazendeiros make no efforts to improve the quality of their animals or the treatment given them. A third of annual production is lost because of this unforgivable lack of attention.” A judge complained in the 1870s that “cattle are raised in a savage state” and claimed that ranching techniques had not improved since Saint-Hilaire’s visit fifty years before. With the century coming to an end, a governor pointed out that Goiás’s cattle industry had failed to keep pace with Argentina’s modernization or even with some of the other parts of Brazil.13
Such harsh self-criticism notwithstanding, the techniques employed by Goiás’s nineteenth-century ranchers corresponded well to conditions they confronted. Because the province had much, if poor-quality, land but was short of capital and labor, logic favored extensive production. For most of the century local mixes, called pé duro (tough foot), chino (Chinese), curraleiro (of the corral), or simply criollo (creole) predominated among the local bovine population. These were descendants of cattle introduced into Brazil from Europe and Africa over the course of several centuries and allowed to mix indiscriminately.14 What resulted were small, rugged animals with long legs that let them see over the scrub, tough hides to protect them from brush and thorns, and long horns, but they yielded comparatively little meat.
They were well adapted to the cerrado, however, and their sharp horns made them opponents to be respected by potential predators. Among ranchers there remained well-founded doubts as well, expressed in a debate that extended over several decades, as to whether pure-blooded or controlled cross-bred animals were necessarily better suited to local conditions than were the creole mixes, or likely to be more productive.15 In truth, before the general availability of barbed wire late in the century, selective breeding on a large scale would have been impossible in any event, and many could not afford the wire even then, making the question moot.
The province’s cattle passed most of the year in the bush, with those belonging to different ranchers mixing promiscuously and reproducing according to their own interests, not those of science or property. Periodically cowboys rounded up the animals and drove them to a corral near the main house, to be culled, marked, checked for problems, and some held for sale. A rancher, with nostalgia, remembered such a vaqueijada (roundup), indicatively also called a caçada (hunt), on a large fazenda: On the day of the hunt the cowboys, dressed all in leather, came in early from the outlying stations, and gathered in front of the main house, drinking coffee and swapping boasts and challenges. When the boss came they mounted their small creole horses, carrying iron-tipped prods16, and, followed by a pack of trained dogs, rode out to find the cattle. All day long they searched the scrub. At a gallop the horses crisscrossed the brush, jumping ditches and penetrating where the cattle hid.
One by one the animals were found and prodded into a circle guarded by the older men and boys. At the end of the day the cowboys slapped their whips against their saddles and singing softly moved the cattle back toward the main corral.17
On a poorer ranch the roundup would have been a less elaborate affair.
Once the cattle were got to the corral the cowboys cut their tail hair for sale, castrated male calves, and marked the animals in two ways: a brand on the haunches indicated the owner and a series of notches on the ears recorded the date of birth.18
Ranchers occasionally practiced transhumance19 or took advantage of the grass left when agriculturalists moved on or where rivers flooded their banks or islands, but generally they limited their efforts to improve grazing to the infamous annual burnings. Without fencing it was as pointless for an individual to invest in upgraded pasture as it was to buy blooded stock.
To the end of the century, then, the cattle industry in most of the province remained remarkably simple in its techniques and low-quality in its product and would have been easily recognizable to a colonial rancher. But the methods employed entirely suited the conditions of the time and the province and the available markets.
The capital requirements of extensive ranching were minimal: residences for the owner and the employees; a few tools such as knives, prods, and branding irons; horses; and several timber corrals. The main house of a substantial fazenda could be quite imposing, at least in the context of the sertão, with a number of rooms and outbuildings.
The grandest and best-known of these in the 1820s and 1830s was Comendador Alves de Oliveira’s São Joaquim: “The body of the house is prolonged in a series of constructions that form two sides of a patio, in which are installed the saddle shop, the saw mill, the cobbler, the harness room, and the coach house.
On the other side is the housing for the married slaves. Dependencies include the pig sty, the store house, the flour mill, the area where the manioc is scraped, and that where they clean and spin cotton.”20 But Fazenda São Joaquim was exceptional. More typical would be a modest low building, whitewashed and roofed with tiles, perhaps with a front porch and a garden in the back. According to a survey of a number of such structures, “houses followed a more or less standard architectural pattern. Generally the materials employed were found on the property itself. Construction was of adobe or beaten mud laid over sticks. They were very rustic, with foundations and braces of aroeira wood, unfinished roof timbers, massive doors and windows without glass and closed by a single shutter, painted blue and with hinges of wrought iron.”21 Curtains and full or half walls divided a sparsely furnished interior, and typically the main corral butted up against one side of the building.22
Owners of large properties, and this was particularly common in the north where poor pasture spread cattle and people thinly, commonly organized these into strings of fazendas, each in the care of a foreman or vaqueiro. Here the buildings were simpler still and the roofs thatched.
The English traveler James Wells described the housing that one vaqueiro shared with his wife as an open shed or lean-to, backing onto a corral that was “knee-deep in black fetid mud that extended to the floor of the . . . shed.”23 Built with available materials and labor, even more appealing facilities could not have cost much to erect, and less to repair, when, for example, fires got out of hand. The value of rural dwellings registered in the wills of even the province’s better-off inhabitants rarely amounted in value to more than a few dozen cattle and almost never approximated that of even an inexpensive slave. Thus, it was easy to pick up and move, and the ruined properties travelers encountered may have been less an indication of provincial “decadence” than the result of decisions to shift to better pasture or perhaps to move to avoid conflicts with neighbors or the attentions of the law.
Salt
The biggest expense that most ranchers faced if they attempted to care properly for their animals was that of salt. Cattle needed the mineral for proper digestion, and without it they lost weight and energy and might turn to eating harmful plants or fall victim to disease. But given salt’s price in most of the province, to adequately supply an animal typically cost more than the beast was worth.24 As one result, these were commonly underprovided and desperate for salt. Cattle and pigs, for example, aggressively tried to get at travelers’ sweat-soaked leather saddles and boots and licked the ground where someone had urinated.25
A few of the more fortunate ranchers benefited from access to natural deposits of salt, either mixed with earth (barreiros) or in saltwater springs (salinas). Travelers reported seeing cattle with their muzzles buried deep in salty soil. But dirt eating could break the animals’ teeth, making it impossible to chew properly and leaving them to die slowly of starvation.26 The salt springs were less common but easier on the cattle. In some cases private owners or the state worked these, extracting the mineral by evaporation.27
The result typically was a mixture of salt and other chemicals such as magnesium sulfate, making it unfit for human consumption but fine for cattle. Alternatively, the animals might be brought to drink the water directly. The engineer Wilhelm von Eschwege, for example, visited several such salt springs in the Araxá/Desemboque region when this was still part of Goiás. Here the ranchers surrounded the spring with a fence and introduced the animals a few at a time to drink from large troughs into which they diverted the water.28
For those without access to natural deposits of salt, and this would have included most of the Goiás’s ranchers, as well as for human consumption, salt had to be imported from outside the province.
Apart from the salt brought into the north by river from Pará, this traffic followed three principal routes, each with its peculiar difficulties and expense. The oldest, and one that had endured for several centuries, brought the commodity by mule train overland from the Rio São Francisco valley. This salt, whether from overseas or produced in pans on the coast or along the river itself, moved up the São Francisco to trading centers such as Januária and São Romão. There ranchers and merchants from Goiás obtained it in exchange for food products, hides and cattle, and gold dust: already by 1780 the captaincy was said to be importing nine to twelve thousand surrões (a surrão = thirty to forty pounds) a year over this route.29
More than a half-century later Santa Luzia’s câmara described the municipality’s trade with the river towns as “exporting surplus food and importing money of gold, silver and copper, as well as salt for the animals”; in the same year merchants of Formosa also reported doing a “great business” importing manufactures and salt from the São Francisco.30
Late in the century salt still arrived over this circuit, but already by the 1850s there were signs that the trade was leveling off, perhaps because the more dynamic part of the province’s cattle industry was shifting south and southwest to Jataí and Rio Verde.31
For these ranchers there were other sources of salt. In the southwest the mineral arrived by water at the river port of Coxim in Mato Grosso, where carts from as far away as Bonfim picked it up, in exchange for hides, food products, and sugar and alcohol. According to an 1866 newspaper article, the route had several advantages over its chief competitor in the south, the cart road that led to Uberaba via the porto of Rio Grande on the Rio Paranaíba: salt at Coxim was up to 20 percent cheaper that at Uberaba, Goiás’s fazendeiros received better exchange value for their products in Mato Grosso, and the road was easier. In the early 1880s some 250 carts worked the Coxim route, bringing in more than 30,000 alqueires of salt annually. But by the middle of the next decade traffic had fallen off, and the provincial president was writing of the need to “reopen” the Coxim route.32
In fact, well before the 1890s the Coxim salt trade was losing out to commerce controlled by the merchants of Uberaba. Certainly the Paraguayan War was a blow to the Mato Grosso riverport, but it was the credit offered by the Uberaba merchants, together with their more general dominance of much of the wholesale commerce of Goiás, that gave them the edge.33
Before completion of the railroad to Uberaba, salt arrived via the “salt road”: by cart from Santos through São Paulo, Jundiaí, and Campinas to Porto de São Bartoloméu, then up the Rio Pardo and the Rio Grande to Porto da Ponte Alta, and from there in carts again to Uberaba. The towns’ merchants distributed the salt throughout Mato Grosso, southern Goiás, and western Minas Gerais.34
Mule trains served areas carts could not reach, but efforts to move salt by water further up the Rio Paranaíba did not prosper.35 The penetration of railroads into northern São Paulo in the 1870s and 1880s initially reinforced Uberaba’s trade position, but extension of the Mojiana Railroad to Uberlândia in 1895 and then to Araguarí in 1896 provided the merchants and ranchers of southern Goiás alternative destinations and sources of supply. Overall, however, and until the railroad crossed into Goiás in the early twentieth century and the use of trucks began to spread in the 1920s, most cattle ranchers in the province never effectively resolved their difficulties with salt supply.36
Pests, Predators, and Disease
Salt’s contribution to the cattle’s health was important not only for best weight and sale value but also so that the animals would have the strength and energy to ward off parasites and diseases. Most dramatic among the former were vampire bats.
Local residents took these in stride, but foreigners and Brazilians arriving from the coast were uniformly horrified to learn that swarms of the creatures attacked animals, and sometimes people, sucking blood while they slept. Pohl described attacks near Crixás as “very dangerous for cattle . . . and other creatures, and on some occasions decimating domestic animals,” and when Castelnau chided the residents of nearby Carretão for not raising horses they responded that bats invariably killed the colts.37
Another region particularly afflicted was that between Arraias and Santa Maria Taguatinga, on the flanks of the Serra Mestre. Here the bats lived in caves in the mountains and so persecuted young cattle that it was almost impossible to ranch; all the local animals and some of the people showed the scars of attacks by bats that reached as much as two feet in wingspan.38 And in the late 1880s a newspaper reported that a “monstrous band” of vampire bats was advancing down the Tocantins toward Porto Imperial.39
Here was truly a biblical plague upon the ranchers and their animals.
Rather than the vampire bats, what terrified local populations, though travelers dismissed the threat as greatly exaggerated, were tigres, a generic name for various large cats.40 Commonly these could be heard prowling about at night, but instances of attacks on humans were rare,41 and despite the fears of ranchers, the threat was more to pigs or dogs than to cattle.
An adult curraleiro was no easy mark for a tigre. Calves, of course, were more vulnerable, and large cats certainly contributed to the 30–50 percent attrition rate among cattle in their first years. But even these attacks were isolated, and fear seems to have outpaced the real damage done.
Ranchers fought back by employing specially trained hunting dogs and paying boun ties, which attracted professional cat killers. Cunha Mattos encountered one of these near Carretão: “Adão José da Silva, dark-skinned, scarred by the jaguars of which he was the most famous hunter in the province and surrounded by his trophies [cats’ skulls] which he kept stuck on stakes around his shack.”42
By far the most effective, if inadvertent, tactic in ridding the province of the cats, however, was the indiscriminate destruction of their habitat through the burning and cultivation of the forests.
Bats did not kill adult cattle and a healthy pé duro had a good chance of fighting off a tigre, but cattle had no effective defense against snakes or poisonous weeds, probably their greatest killers. The rancher’s only recourse to rid his fields of snakes, apart from the temporary reprieve that fire brought, was to employ a rezador, who attacked the reptiles with prayers and charms. A writer described one as “an aged caboclo, burned by the sun, white-haired, who spoke unintelligibly through the few broken teeth he still had and who [with his incantations] knew how to clear pastures of all poisonous snakes.”43
Of the weeds, most toxic were erva de rato (rat weed) said to kill within twelve hours, and the sweet smelling, attractive cafezinho (little coffee). Poisonous plants could be a particular problem toward the end of the dry season, when pasture was becoming sparse, and along the trails that cattle followed to market, where the animals might encounter unfamiliar foliage.44
Among the diseases that afflicted Goiás’s cattle during the nineteenth century the most serious was the mal triste or tristeza (“sadness disease” = Texas tick fever).45
Late in 1830 word began to circulate in the province of a new plague that was attacking animals on the coast, to the point of slowing or even stopping the sugar harvest, and the disease was said to be advancing now through Minas Gerais. Transmitted by an unfamiliar variety of tick that multiplied rapidly and almost literally sucked the life out of the animal, mal triste caused cattle to waste away and eventually die.46 As late as April 1831 there was still hope that Goiás might be spared, but by July Meiaponte’s town council was issuing regulations requiring the quarantining of any animal discovered with the tick and the inspection of properties suspected of harboring the disease. Such measures availed little, however, and by the middle of the decade the ravages of mal triste were contributing to transportation problems and food shortages across the province, as well as undercutting state revenues.47
The disease slowed the development of a local cattle industry that had only just begun to gather momentum in the late 1820s. The tough creole cattle soon shook it off, however, and by the early 1840s herds were increasing again. Indeed, a century later writers could argue that one of the advantages of local mixes over imported animals was precisely their acquired resistance to tristeza.48 Still, the events of this decade had burned themselves into popular memory: late in the 1880s the wife of a rancher living near Piracanjuba remembered that her father had lost “four thousand” cattle “in the year of the ticks.”49
Of course, the most ingenious and persistent predators to fix themselves on Goiás’s cattle were not the bats or cats, or the alligators or large constrictors that inhabited the lakes and rivers, but rather human thieves.
These came in several varieties. In the countryside members of a floating population of the poor and transients (vagos = vagrants) sometimes supplemented their income or diet by taking the odd animal: “These vagrants weigh upon the working class, seeking stray animals that they take to sell.”
Crossing the Gerais region along Goiás’s border with Minas Gerais and Bahia in the early 1840s, George Gardner encountered a family that, he said, lived by stealing an animal or two from each passing herd.50
State agents railed that the ease of this sort of theft sustained vagrancy and contributed to labor shortages, but they made little effort to prosecute such crimes.
In fact, complaints and accusations notwithstanding, how many vagrants there actually were and what effect these had on cattle production is unclear.
Most ranchers knew only approximately the numbers of their animals and one or two gone missing might not even be noticed. Too, looking the other way to allow the appropriation of an occasional animal was part of the unspoken patron-client bargain that large ranchers struck with their retainers and poorer neighbors.
More serious was the systematic theft of cattle by professional rustlers.
There was, and is, a tendency in Goiás to blame antisocial behavior generically on baianos (people from Bahia), but at least in north and central parts of Goiás ranches do seem to have suffered from the attention of bands of thieves that crossed the border from the sertões of Bahia and Piauí to prey upon their cattle. They drove these back through the mountains using trails pioneered by eighteenth-century gold smugglers.51 As early as the 1820s, for example, the new provincial government was reporting that rustlers from Bahia used these hidden passes through the Serra Mestre to enter Goiás, steal cattle, and escape before they could be detected: “There is no way to stop them,” the military commander at Santa Maria Taguatinga protested, and a half-century later another beleaguered official at the same border crossing repeated the same confession.52
These outlaws did not always limit themselves to cattle and horses but also carried off slaves, kidnapped and enslaved free persons, and raided fazendas and settlements.53
Indians, too, stole or killed cattle, for food and hides and to harass settlers.
The Krahó, for example, described by one writer as “cattle predators,” for much of the century allied themselves with nearby ranchers, shifting the blame for their animal thefts to other indigenous groups.
Once the ranchers and the state had killed or displaced these populations, how ever, they turned on the Krahó and destroyed them.54 Of those Kayapó who accepted settlement in the aldeias of Maria and São José de Mossâmedes, most showed little interest in agriculture and were said to live instead by stealing cattle, disguising themselves as “wild” Indians for their excursions.55
Early mining activities in the north had remained confined to relatively small areas and impacted little on the day-to-day lives of most of the province’s indigenous groups, but the spread of cattle ranching necessarily provoked more frequent and more intense confrontations. Cattle were the leading edge of the Luzo-Brazilian invasion of the countryside and as such logical targets for Indian violence. Raiding parties not only burned buildings and killed settlers but carried off or destroyed animals as well.
During the 1830s and 1840s much of this struggle centered on the “sertão of Amaro Leite,” a vast area of cerrado and scrub in the north central part of the province. Located adjacent to several decayed mining towns, Amaro Leite attracted ranchers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and became known for its “fertile pasture” and “fat” cattle.56
But beginning in the 1820s, apparently in part as a response to a particularly vicious bandeira in 1819, and continuing for the next several decades, Canoeiro and Xavante ravaged wide areas of the north, virtually depopulating the plains of Amaro Leite: in September of 1833 the Matutina Meiapontense reported that their attacks had forced abandonment of some sixty fazendas in the region and left “great numbers” of cattle to run wild. By the end of the decade the president was explaining that “the settlers, intimidated by this scourge, have fled leaving their land and cattle,” and a few years after another noted that “the area called Amaro Leite that incontestably is among the best in the province today is abandoned because of the attacks the residents there have suffered from the savage Canoeiros.” A generation later a judge passing through the area described it still as largely “uninhabited,” a lasting result of the Indian attacks.57
More valuable than cattle in nineteenth-century Goiás were horses, said to bring higher prices locally because of limited supply than in Rio de Janeiro. Ranchers, for example, sometimes protested that they were unable to round up their cattle or gather animals to pay taxes because they could not obtain the mounts they needed.58 There were several reasons for such shortages.
Only a few areas of the province, most notably the Vão de Paranã, provided adequate conditions for the animals. Horses suffered more than did cattle from the province’s poor-quality pasture, sparse salt, and parasites and predators, and for proper growth and health they demanded supplemental corn rations. Horses, too, were not as self-sufficient as cattle, and proper care and training for human use required skilled labor that was not always available.
At least until late in the century, however, the province’s horses escaped the worst affliction to attack these animals in the center-west, the mal das cadeiras (hindquarters disease) or quebra bunda (butt breaker). This was a disease caused by a parasite that invaded a horse’s bloodstream and attacked its rear haunches and legs, weakening and eventually paralyzing these and killing the animal.
Apparently mal das cadeiras entered Brazil from Bolivia in the 1850s and quickly destroyed the equine population of Mato Grosso;59 it greatly hampered, for example, the movement of the Brazilian Army during the Paraguayan War. The only possibilities for cattle ranchers in Mato Grosso were either to use saddle steers for roundup, generally not very satisfactory, or to continually import expensive replacement horses from other provinces: in the 1850s a mount worth 30$–60$000 réis in Goiás brought 100$–200$000 réis in Mato Grosso.60 For this reason, and despite continuing shortages in Goiás, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the province regularly sent horses west.61
How many is impossible to know, since a number evidently evaded the provincial export levy: for example, the tax agent responsible for Rio Verde at one point reported that just that month three herds totaling more than three hundred horses had passed through the town headed for Mato Grosso, but the drovers had refused to pay export duties.62
An incomplete animal census from the early 1870s showed the south of the province to be producing annually some 6,000 horses and selling 1,500, whereas the north claimed to raise 4,500 but to sell only about 200; these must have been substantial undercounts, reflecting particularly the fiscal weakness of the state in the north.63
Then, in the 1880s newspapers reported local cases of a previously unknown horse “cholera” that “manifests itself in the lower part of the horse’s spine, taking from the animal the ability to move the legs.”64 “Butt breaker” had arrived in Goiás.
The Cattle Trade
When ranchers sought to sell cattle they had limited choices. Most disposed of animals when they needed money or goods or simply when the opportunity presented itself, with little attention to herd size or sustained reproductive capacity. The nature of extensive ranching made such calculations, in any event, almost impossible and largely unnecessary.
Success did not hinge on systematic reinvestment, and because few stock raisers operated with mortgages or borrowed money they were not driven by the cost of capital or the need to make the average rate of profit.
On the ranch itself meat and cattle products were essentially free goods, and the practices this encouraged greatly exercised those who saw the province’s fortune in an expansion of its herds. Not only did ranchers commonly kill cows rather than steers for their own consumption, but they sometimes specifically butchered pregnant cattle, to consume the meat of the unborn calf, considered a delicacy.65
Despite this availability of cheap beef, the lack of suitable transportation blocked development of a dried meat (charque) industry until the next century,66 and the limited purchasing power and small populations of the towns restricted demand for fresh meat.
At mid-century, for example, legal meat consumption in the capital amounted to some fifteen to eighteen carcasses a week, in Meiaponte two or three, and in Jaraguá or Corumbá no more than one.67
Even if we double these figures to allow for meat slaughtered and sold illicitly, it is clear that local markets could not sustain an expanding cattle economy.
The best return for the fazendeiro was had when he sold his cattle on the hoof to wholesalers or directly to consumers. But few ranchers had the time or the knowledge to trail animals to distant markets such Rio de Janeiro or Feira de Santana (Bahia).
Where they tried, as likely as not they ran up against the infamous marchantes, monopoly merchants who controlled the meat supply of the major cities and used their power to force down prices paid suppliers.68
Similar problems faced owners who sought out regional fairs in Minas Gerais such as at Bambuí or São João del Rei. There local merchants bought up or otherwise controlled the land and water around the town, denying arriving drovers access and forcing them to sell cheaply or see their stock wither away.
Instead, many ranchers dealt with passing drovers or developed relations with buyers in the smaller trade centers and sent their cattle there.
Residents of Flores, for example, carried out a lively exchange with Januária on the Rio São Francisco, an option that offered a relatively easy road, better prices for their animals than those available in nearby Formosa, and a wider selection of products for purchase. The traffic took about two weeks each way and functioned largely on the basis of barter.69
Apart from Flores, the towns of Posse, São Domingos, Sítio de Abadia, São José do Tocantins, Pilar, Cavalcante, and Fortes were said also to have found an outlet for their cattle in Januária; Arraias, Chapéu, Santa Maria Taguatinga, Palma, and Peixe trafficked with Barreiros (Bahia); and Duro, Natividade, Conceição, and Porto Imperial also sent animals to Barreiros and to São Marcello, far in the northwest of Bahia.70
Nevertheless, President José Martins de Alencastre suggested in the early 1860s than many of the difficulties inherent in the existing system of cattle sales might be overcome by creating state-supervised provincial fairs, one in the north at Santa Maria Taguatinga and the other at Bonfim in the south.71
The usual method of drovers and peddlers going from fazenda to fazenda purchasing a few head at a time, he argued, “was a poor business.”
Without competitive bidding the seller received lower prices for his animals, and the buyer had the expenses of travel and paying his workers while he slowly built up a herd large enough to warrant taking to market.
The state suffered too because without accurate records of sales or any certain way of collecting taxes on these it had to rely instead on an inefficient and much-abused export tax. President Alencastre anticipated that periodic fairs would provide the seller better prices, simplify the buyer’s task, and, by improving efficiency of collection, allow the state to both lower taxes and gain increased revenues.
Put into effect during 1862, the fairs failed to draw sufficient numbers of buyers or sellers, and a new president let the scheme lapse. In part the causes for failure were contingent: for example, an unusual drought left little pasture to support the Bonfim fair.72
More broadly, though, buyers preferred existing methods for obtaining cattle, both because these gave them more bargaining power and because they expected to be able to evade much or all of the export tax when they took animals from the province.
For the rest of the century most transactions between ranchers and cattle buyers continued to take place “at the mouth of the corral.” The fazendeiros “await patiently the annual arrival of the cattle buyers, who [purchase cattle] here and organize their herds, putting these on the road for Minas Gerais.”
Not uncommonly, however, such transactions involved a degree of dishonesty: “The boiadeiros show up with their new schemes for deception and usurpation to cheat the unorganized and defenseless ranchers, who are at their mercy.”
A drover might, for example, arrive at an isolated fazenda accompanied by a crew of armed cowboys and try to intimidate the rancher into selling at a low price. Others simply stole the cattle: “Some evildoers have entered the province claiming that they want to buy animals but instead have committed robberies at São Domingos, Santa Maria, and Flores.”73
Sellers sometimes received cash for their cattle, though this was unusual and not without its difficulties. Not only was there a general shortage of money, but, as we saw, much of that in circulation was of poor quality.74
Most ranchers were unequipped to recognize counterfeit or chipped currency.
The provincial chief of police in July of 1850, for example, warned local officials at Arraias and Natividade to be wary of merchants from Santa Rita do Rio Preto and Campo Largo (Bahia) reported to be in the area buying cattle with false gold coins, coins recognizable, he went on, because although they bore eighteenth-century dates they still were bright.
In another case, an unfortunate riverboat pilot found himself under arrest at Boavista when he unwittingly tried to use a false gold coin he had received from the sale of cattle.75
Instead, most trade in the sertão took place on the basis of barter or credit, on the exchange of cattle for merchandise or promised goods.
A rancher sometimes obtained manufactures and salt from a merchant in one of the small towns or from a peddler, agreeing to pay for this with cattle or hides at some point in the future.
Alternatively, a drover would appear at the ranch, perhaps on a more or less prearranged schedule, to purchase cattle with the stock of merchandise he carried or against the promise to return the following year with agreed-upon goods.
Or he might advance merchandise to the fazendeiro, receiving payment later in cattle or hides or other animal products. Such transactions left the small rancher vulnerable. Not only did they depend on the word of the boiadeiro, a contract the seller might find difficult to enforce if the buyer died or defaulted, but it opened the way for differing interpretations and, again, possibly for coercion: “With force and aggression the buyers from outside the province approach the ranchers when they come to collect,” a tax agent explained.76
Nevertheless, selling “at the mouth of the corral” offered the smaller ranchers certain advantages. Above all, to market their cattle they did not have to absent themselves from their properties, leaving their families and animals unprotected. Nor had they the costs of a cattle drive, with wages and food expenses and subject always to dangers and losses along the way.
By developing ongoing relationships with one or more drovers, the rancher guaranteed himself both an outlet for his animals and credit when he needed it.
Of course, such sales bypassed the towns, contributing to the “ruralization” of the province about which state officials complained. And because most of the animals needed to winter for six months to a year on fattening ranches in Bahia or Minas Gerais before sale to urban slaughterhouses, drovers had to pay taxes to those provinces too, further depressing the price they were willing to give Goiás’s ranchers. Cattle trailed to markets in the northeast had a particularly difficult time.
Here the distances were greater and the travel conditions much harsher than in the south, so that animals arrived at coastal fairs “crippled, exhausted, and nearly finished by the rigors of the long journey.”77
Most had to recuperate for extended periods before they could be profitably disposed of, but the returns might be substantial: early in the century, for example, a boi (steer) worth 2$000 réis in eastern Goiás fetched 8$000 réis at a coastal fair, and in 1820 a single animal could bring 14$000 in Rio de Janeiro; a hundred years later, though ranchers complained that competition from the Rio de la Plata region had driven prices down, drovers still found it profitable to buy Goiás cattle and walk these to the coast.78
The cattle drives headed out chiefly in the first months of the rainy season (September–December) when new grass was available and, hopefully, before the rivers became impassible: “In the two months before the rains begin, groups of cowboys accumulate at the entrances to the sertão, with their horses, awaiting the orders of their bosses to buy cattle and drive them back.”79
The cowboys, under the direction of the drover, accompanied the animals on foot and horseback, controlling them with long prods.
The march was slow, “walking, each day three or four leagues,” and served the double purpose of calming the semi wild animals through hunger and exhaustion and bringing them to market.
Cattle attempting to break from the herd were run or ridden down, caught by the tail, and thrown hard to the ground, to discourage such behavior.80 If the cowboys at the rear of the herd suffered from all-enveloping dust, those at the front risked being trampled in a stampede. By night they patrolled the perimeter of the encampment, to calm the animals, catch strays, and drive off predators. At each river the boiadeiro risked his fortune and sometimes his life.
Animals could be swept away and drowned in the current or attacked by alligators, and others became trapped “up to their muzzles” in muck along the banks or in the chutes used to funnel animals into the river.
Some of these were trampled to death in the press from behind and those that survived had to be laboriously jacked out, usually with a line tied to their horns and wound around a tree. A cattle drive was hard, dangerous, and dirty work: “In this manner they crossed leagues and leagues under the sun, in the rain, in dust and in mud, in danger at every river crossing, betting their fragile lives behind the cattle.”81
How many cattle did Goiás sell, to whom and from which parts of the province, and how did sales change over time? Before the twentieth century there were few attempts to enumerate animals in the province or to track sales, apart from state efforts to tax these, with the evident problems this provoked.
Ranchers always suspected fiscal motives in efforts to count their animals and commonly resisted or refused to cooperate: late in 1846, for example, when the province asked each municipality for information on the numbers of cattle in their jurisdiction, most ignored the request.
Boavista, however, protested hotly that not only did owners not know how many cattle they had and that it would be expensive to attempt to find out, but they doubted that the state had any right ask for this information.82
Because ranchers sold animals on an as-needed or as-possible basis rather than in any regular scheme, herd size, rate of reproduction, and sales bore no necessary or consistent relationship one to another. Add to this the very uneven carrying capacity of the Goiás countryside, with the resulting productivity differences, and the difficulties involved in coming up with reliable estimates of production or sales are evident.
In the first decades of the century commentators put sales of cattle out of the province at 10,000 to 20,000 head, and by the 1850s they had raised this to 30,000, 20,000 from the north and 10,000 from the south.
All agreed, however, that these numbers were probably well below the actual figures, due to smuggling and tax evasion. Approximate as they may have been, the numbers do remind us again of the predominance of the north during these years. By contrast, the relative growth of the industry in the south is evident in an estimate produced by President Alencastre in the early 1860s (Table 5.1).
Again, however, Alencastre admits that these numbers were likely “very far from the truth.”83 Apart from the suspect accuracy of estimates carried to the last digit, the ratios involved do not seem appropriate, at least not in the long run. Under the conditions of nineteenth-century Goiás sustained reproductive rates could not have been higher than 10-15 percent,84 and most years these were probably lower, yet President Alencastre puts them close to 30 percent. On the other hand, his figures for sales do approximate the 10 percent of the herd that Bell suggests was common for Rio Grande do Sul in these years.85
But much of what Rio Grande sold went to a fairly predictable market, the charque industry, whereas Goiás’s markets were anything but: some years poor demand meant few sales, while in others high prices “emptied the province” of cattle.86
Overall, it seems likely that Alencastre underestimated herd size and sales and overestimated rates of reproduction. More broadly, though, it makes clear that in comparative terms while the north was still outproducing and out-exporting the south, the margin had narrowed dramatically.
Finally, in the early 1870s the provincial regime again called on the municipal councils for counts of the production and sales of cattle and horses, in an effort to implement a production tax to substitute for the export levy.87
Not all of the municipalities responded but many did, though how accurate their answers were is open to speculation. If we are to believe these numbers, both production and sales had fallen off from the previous decade. This is possible, of course, and it may just have been a bad few years, but it seems more likely that the apparent poor performance was related to the fiscal purposes of the count.
By contrast, according to newspaper reports from the mid-1880s the municipality of Rio Verde alone each year sent 5,000–6,000 animals to Minas Gerais, Jataí exported 5,000, and Rio Bonito, 2,000 (Table 5.2).88
A good part of the apparent regional differences in production and sales was certainly due to more successful tax evasion in the less-policed north, but access to more dynamic markets89 and a growing attention to quality clearly stimulated the industry in the south. Prices reflected this (Table 5.3).
Thus, fairly consistently over the century cattle from the south enjoyed a near two-to-one price advantage over those sold in the north.
Taxes
Across region and time the problem about which ranchers and buyers complained most consistently was taxes, and particularly the hated dízimo, the same tax that burdened agriculture. In this case, however, rather than local boards the central administration set a province wide price for calculation of the cattle dízimo, a clear disadvantage for those in the north, or generally those in isolated parts of the province where the animals had less value.
Just as farmers resisted the system of assessments, ranchers and the state clashed repeatedly over how and when to count cattle and horses: at birth or when the ranchers branded the animals, two or three years later?
To impose the dízimo at birth was to tax animals many of which would die before reaching saleable age. As part of the dízimo debate in the late 1820s and early 1830s provincial officials agreed instead to collect the cattle tax at branding.
But over time this actually evolved into a split system, with the larger producers, labeled fazendeiros, paying at branding, while smaller ranchers and those that specialized in breeding (criadores) paid for each calf born, but at a lower rate.90 Not surprisingly, stock raisers attempted to shift themselves back and forth between categories depending on what was most advantageous at the moment.
Also, because ranchers faced the same problems as did farmers in acquiring cash to pay the dízimo, debts for that tax paralleled those of agriculture.
By the 1840s other provinces were abandoning the cattle dízimo, and in 1844 a commission appointed by the president recommended that Goiás also replace the tax, with an increased and more rigorously collected provincial export levy.91
Local conditions did not permit this yet, however, and the state remained too dependent on the income from the cattle dízimo to give it up easily. But protests continued, as did complaints by provincial authorities about evasions and the relatively poor returns the dízimo generated: in April of 1846, for example, the Treasury wrote to the tax collector in an unidentified town, noting, with some sarcasm, that from his returns it appeared that there was not a single ranch in the district, when, in fact, everyone knew that hundreds of animals were born there annually.
The following year the Traíras agent found himself at a loss to explain why his predecessor for more than a decade had failed to collect the dízimo.92
Further complicating the situation were tax exemptions granted ranchers, either to compensate for losses suffered in Indian attacks or, as with agriculture, to encourage settlement in underpopulated or dangerously exposed parts of the province.93
Notwithstanding the cattle dízimo’s shortcomings, by mid-century income from the levy was overhauling that collected on agriculture.
This attracted the attention of state authorities and revived the debate on how best to tax cattle and horses.94 If the dízimo had the advantage of tradition, as other provinces adopted more modern and more efficient taxation systems, critics argued, its survival in Goiás hampered the province’s ability to attract settlers.
95 After considerable public worrying, the president in 1855 requested that the Provincial Assembly abolish the dízimo altogether, replacing it with the 5 percent tax on food sales and an increased export levy on cattle and horses.
Two years later the annual budget law installed these changes.96 Apart from revenue, the export tax on animals had another purpose, evident in the differential rates of 10$000 réis on cows and heifers but only 1$200 réis on steers.
As far back as the turn of the century the state had attempted to stop or restrict what many saw as the foolish practice of selling reproductive stock to other provinces, rather than keeping it in Goiás to increase the size of local herds.97 When an effort to ban altogether the export of cows failed, the provincial government sought to use taxes to discourage the practice: in January of 1830 the General Council voted an export tax of 1$500 réis on cows and 3$000 réis on mares, and then in the middle of the decade the province raised these to 2$400 réis and 4$800 réis respectively and added a revenue tax of 1$500 réis on steers.98 These initially had little impact, however, because of the state’s inability to enforce them effectively.99
Smuggling
If export taxes were to function successfully as economic development measures and/or revenue sources, the provincial regime had to be able to collect them.
During the colonial period the Crown maintained a series of checkpoints, or registros, on the main roads. These inspected goods entering and leaving the captaincy to make sure they paid the required taxes, as well searching cargos for contraband, such as gold dust and diamonds.
With independence the Empire abandoned interprovincial import duties and the regístros withered.100 In theory, provincial export taxes such as those Goiás now sought to impose on cattle were to be paid at the nearest municipal coletoria (agency for internal taxes), but merchants and cattle drovers were not always assiduous in doing this, and fiscal agents had few means available to make them: “Immorality and fraud escape the attention of the collectors,” a president complained. A coletor himself was more blunt: “It would be as much as [my] life is worth,” he said, “to try to enforce the export tax.”101
The 1844 law that extended the export tax to steers also revived import duties and provided for the reestablishment of collection points at key border crossings.102
By the mid-1850s the imperial government had ruled that the Additional Act specifically forbade duties on goods brought into a province, but the situation of export duties was less clear. The act made no specific reference to these, although on at least one occasion the Council of State ruled against them. Nevertheless, from the 1830s to the 1850s one province after another enacted such taxes, and few could have survived financially without the income these brought in. So Goiás’s export duties on cattle and horses remained, de facto if not entirely de jure.103
But if the province was now to abandon the cattle dízimo for dependence on an export tax, provincial leaders would have to give more serious attention to how this might be collected. Key were the rivers and mountains that marked much of Goiás’s borders.
Because there were only a few crossing points where the boiadeiros might easily or safely pass their cattle, or so the authorities reasoned, the state could place recebedorias (export tax agencies) at these choke points to monitor the traffic and collect taxes and fees. At river portos, for example, in addition to canoes and rafts for travelers, the province planned to build corrals and chutes to aid in getting cattle across. The narrow passes of the Serra Mestre were to serve the same fiscal purposes as the portos, funneling trade into a stream that the state could more easily control.
Armed troops stationed at the tax collection points would assist the agents in enforcing the laws and patrol the surrounding areas against smuggling and contraband. The hope was that exporters would find the improved facilities and the safety of using these legally sanctioned crossing points a worthwhile trade-off for paying taxes.
But collection of the new export levies proved more difficult than a simple recitation of laws and policies might suggest. The sheer size of Goiás, its dispersed population, and the limited presence of the state in the countryside facilitated tax evasion.
A harassed agent at Formosa summarized his many problems: drovers, he said, escaped his attention by taking advantage of small, little-used crossing points or they “made arrangements” with local officials to avoid taxes. Ranchers pastured cattle beyond the checkpoints, sold these to Minas Gerais, and then claimed that the animals had died or strayed, or justices of the peace in Minas Gerais provided false documents certifying that the cattle had been raised in that province.104
Further north, the problems of the administrator at Santa Maria Taguatinga were similar: cattle buyers from Bahia and Piauí, he said, carried out a “scandalous” trade purchasing cattle in Goiás and leaving the province via the ravine at Salto, avoiding the Duro agency.
When he ordered troops to suppress this traffic they refused, pointing out that it had been some time since they had received their wages.105
On those rare occasions when a government patrol did catch up with cattle smugglers the troops typically found themselves outnumbered and outgunned by the cowboys and the guards that drovers sometimes hired to protect the herd.106
Illegal crossing points seemed easy enough to find, at least for everyone but agents of the state: “The closer you get to the place the less you hear about it,” one explained, “because the inhabitants of the area have an interest in keeping hidden the points where they do their smuggling.”107
Near Catalão the collector reported that drovers were crossing over into Minas Gerais “wherever, using rafts or dangerous portos in deserted areas” or simply walking across in low water, because “everywhere there is free passage.”108
Ranchers bought land on both sides of the Rio Paranaíba and shifted cattle back and forth as best suited their interests. Criminals and deserters infested the forests along the banks of the river and used canoes and rafts to transfer cattle and goods illegally across it, and they threatened local fazendeiros and government officials if these tried to interfere.
In other cases ranchers themselves ran illegal crossing points, and the more enterprising built bridges where the river narrowed.109
In March of 1857, for example, an inspector dispatched by the Treasury reported on his efforts to close an illegal crossing operated by João Chrysostomo. When the agent ordered it shut down and the cattle diverted to legal portos, Chrysostomo stirred up the local population against the government and secretly reopened the crossing, exporting several thousand cattle to Minas Gerais. The district military commander then sent soldiers to confiscate Chrysostomo’s equipment but on arriving at the porto they encountered a large cattle herd in the process of crossing and accompanied by many armed cowboys and were helpless, or so they reported, to intervene.110
For those unwilling to go out of their way it was often possible to work out an “accommodation” with an official at the border checkpoint. Perhaps the simplest way was to bribe the tax collector to undercount the cattle passing through: “The drover, once the counting was done, pocketed his receipts with a 50 percent discount on his tax, according to the long-standing personal agreement he had with the administrator”; others paid no taxes at all.111
The more brazen among the agents advertised in the newspapers offering the boiadeiros “special attention,” and sent representatives around to ranches soliciting business.112
The province appointed and reappointed tax officials known to be corrupt or incompetent to these posts, for want of anyone better or because these were well connected: “evidently the son of someone important, though not too bright,” was the description of one recent hire.113
to enforce the export laws could bring down upon themselves a world of trouble: one of these readily admitted that recently he had passed the herd of a local boss without collecting the required taxes, “so as not to have to carry on my back so heavy an enemy.”114 The powerful demanded favors for themselves and their friends, and protected smugglers or helped these obtain false documents.115
Enforcement was difficult, and given the small number of regular troops and police in the province, often the only assistance available to help or protect tax officials was National Guard soldiers, of dubious reliability.
Early in the 1870s, for example, the agent at Mão de Pau sent guardsmen to close down an illegal crossing operating upstream, but when he followed to check on the situation he discovered the men living in the offender’s house and “of no use whatsoever.”116
Honest collectors found the work frustrating, or dangerous, and many quit, leaving agencies untended; smugglers quickly identified these and ran cattle through.117 But paying work of any sort was rare in rural Goiás, and only the most miserable of subsidiary agencies failed eventually to attract applicants.
Cattle drovers without the patience or tolerance for negotiations sometimes simply forced their way through: “The boldness of the smugglers is such that many times they pass in the presence of the collector many cattle . . . without paying taxes, counting on the lack of support available at the agencies and helped by their gunmen whom on such occasions they always have with them, and wel armed.”118
Large-scale smugglers almost always either were themselves local elites or enjoyed the protection of these and had little to fear from the law, and less respect for it. For example, a tax official at Catalão late in 1847 reported rampant smuggling of cattle along the Rio Paranaíba, because, he claimed, no one could be found to man the crossing points for fear of the smugglers’ violence.119
The provincial government was always suspicious of such excuses, but in fact the records are peppered with reports of real or threatened attacks on tax collectors. And the law aside, there rarely were sufficient troops or police available to protect them.
Large-scale smugglers almost always either were themselves local elites or enjoyed the protection of these and had little to fear from the law, and less respect for it. For example, a tax official at Catalão late in 1847 reported rampant smuggling of cattle along the Rio Paranaíba, because, he claimed, no one could be found to man the crossing points for fear of the smugglers’ violence.119
The provincial government was always suspicious of such excuses, but in fact the records are peppered with reports of real or threatened attacks on tax collectors. And the law aside, there rarely were sufficient troops or police available to protect them.
Typically, in March of 1861 when the agent at the porto Santo Antônio do Solidão attempted to examine what drover José Ruiz Chavez claimed was a tax receipt, Chavez ignored him and with his cowboys forced his way through; “far from any help,” the collector could do nothing.
When another official at the important crossing of Santa Rita do Paranaíba attempted to count the cattle of Manoel Martins Marques, the drover refused “even if as a result someone had to die,” and ordered his men to throw the agent in the river.
At Cachoeira Dourada a boiadeiro would not pay export taxes, and when the agent refused to let him pass “he removed the gate and threatened to beat him, and with two armed cowboys pushed his animals into the river to swim to the other side.” And the tax collector at São Jeronimo reported a nervous conversation with a drover who repeatedly demanded a “discount” while openly toying with his knife. “Better to give a discount,” another rationalized, “than get nothing at all.”120
Efforts to control crossing points and collect taxes were complicated by a series of long-running border disputes between Goiás and neighboring provinces.121
Most serious were those with Minas Gerais. Goiás lost political control of the Triângulo in 1816 but retained the right to collect taxes in the region until the 1830s, a certain recipe for conflict.122 Worse, the provinces failed to mark or even agree upon the resulting boundary. Whereas Goiás claimed possession up to the Rio Paranaíba, Minas for decades argued that its control extended further west to the Rio São Marcos. Thus, both provinces claimed but neither effectively controlled the territory between the rivers, making it an ideal hiding place for criminals and smugglers who remained “unpunished.”123 In the 1850s Paracatú’s (Minas Gerais) town council protested that Goiás had opened collection points in the disputed area and was attempting to charge residents of Minas Gerais export taxes when they were merely traveling from one part of the province to another.
Goiás backed down, blaming the problem on an overzealous agent, “truthfully of little intelligence,” and promising to correct the mistake. 124 But problems and uncertainties persisted.
To the southwest similar jurisdictional disputes over what Goiás called the “sertão dos Garcias” and Mato Grosso labeled “Santa Anna do Paranaíba” plagued relations between the two provinces for decades.125
As cattle production expanded, ranchers took advantage of the conflict to evade taxes, and in the 1890s struggle for control of the porto at Manoel Nunes threatened to bring the states into armed conflict.126 But perhaps the most notorious nest of smugglers, border bandits, and cattle rustlers was the northern salient of Jalapão, at a point where Goiás extended east to meet the boundaries of Bahia, Piauí, and Maranhão.
As cattle production expanded, ranchers took advantage of the conflict to evade taxes, and in the 1890s struggle for control of the porto at Manoel Nunes threatened to bring the states into armed conflict.126 But perhaps the most notorious nest of smugglers, border bandits, and cattle rustlers was the northern salient of Jalapão, at a point where Goiás extended east to meet the boundaries of Bahia, Piauí, and Maranhão.
By mid-century settlers from various provinces were moving into the area, raising cattle and horses and doing business where they pleased, with no regard for provincial taxes or laws.
Not until the 1860s did residents even open a trail to the nearest settlement in Goiás, São Miguel e Almas, but the other provinces continued to dispute control of the region. The “gerais de Jalapão” remained infamous for contraband, violence, and “anarchy” well into the twentieth century.127
Pigs and Sheep
Finally, it is worth mentioning that cattle and horses were not the only livestock raised for sale in nineteenth-century Goiás. More humble but more pervasive were pigs, and some ranchers also had sheep. The latter served almost exclusively for wool, and countrymen expressed horror at the idea of eating mutton.128
Pigs, on the other hand, were valued especially for toucinho (fatback), a staple of the local diet, and could be found underfoot almost everywhere. President Alencastre in the 1860s estimated a population of some eighty thousand of these animals in the province, with commercial production concentrated in the south; Catalão and Santa Cruz, for example, exported pigs and pork products to neighboring towns and to Minas Gerais.129 Raising the animals required little capital, and they were commonly found not just in rural areas but in towns as well, where their owners turned them out into the street to forage as best they could.
A traveler reported that “it is necessary to be careful as they will tear open bags hanging from the saddle and pull the saddle blankets and straw off the horses.
They are so hungry that they probably would eat any child or even a man if they caught him sleeping. On one occasion as a mule of mine lay dying from disease the pigs threw themselves upon it while it still was breathing.”130 In the capital they competed with the dogs to root up and eat cadavers in the old cemetery.131
Notes
1. Bartoloméu Bueno encountered cattle in the “Goyáz” region during his 1722–26 bandeiras: Informaçáo Goyana, 15 March 1920.
2. See chapters by Manuel Correia de Andrade, Maria Yedda Leite Linhares, and Francisco Carlos Teixeira da Silva in Szmrecsányi, ed., História Econômica.
3. On the early history of cattle in Goiás see Informaçáo Goyana, 15 Jan. and 7 Feb. 1918; Bertran, História da Terra, 159–62; Melatti, Índios e Criadores, 18– 21; Hemming, Red Gold, Chap. 16. More generally, see Abreu, Chapters, 115–20 and Goulart, Boi e do Couro, 36–44. On the expansion of the cattle “front” into the interior, see Velho, Frentes de xpansão, 22–34.
4. Salles, Economia, 68; Castello Branco, Arraial, 25 n. 29. On sesmaria grants see Silva, “Sesmarias.”
5. Salles, Economia, 69.
6. Spix and Martius, Viagem-2, 108; Bertran, Notícia-1, 91, 188. See also AMB, “Saídas”; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-2, 134. The original name for Formosa was Couros (Hides) “because of the large quantity of wild and tame cattle collected there to be sent to Rio de Janeiro and other places”: Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 38.
7. AHEG, Municípios, Taguatinga, Câmara–Presidente, 8 Jan. 1874; Natividade, Câmara, report, 14 July 1886. See also Tribuna Livre, 21 May 1881.
8. BN, I-9, 4, 21, Doc. 164; Salles, Economia, 280–81. For comments on the “abandoned north” see Palacín, Coronelismo, 13–14.
9. Salles, Economia, 259–60.
10. Bell, Campanha Gaúcha, “Introduction.”
11. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 246, Presidente–Ministério de Negócios do Império, 11 Feb. 1857; Tribuna Livre, 28 June 1879; Relatório-1902, 39; Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse.
12. BN, I-28, 32, 27; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 17, “Comissão Permanente Encarregada do Interior,” 8 Jan. 1830; Matutina, 10 June 1830; Relatório- 835, 17.
13. AHEG, Doc. Div., box 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério de Império, 1857–1860,” 11 March 1858; Relatório-1862, 121; Mello Franco, Viagens, 41–42. Compare Rausch, Tropical Frontier, 17: “Absolutely no care is bestowed upon the animals.” On the development of a “modern” cattle industry in the south of Goiás, see Correio Official, 11 July and 14 Nov. 1874; Tribuna Livre, 28 June 1879; Publicador, 9 Oct. 1886; Governador, Mensagem- 1899, 12.
14. Nogueira, Mestre Carreiro, 34–36, 155–57; Informação Goyana, 15 Jan. and 7 Feb. 1918; Goulart, Boi e do Couro, 236. Chino cattle were said to have come from South Africa, brought to Brazil on a ship that also carried Chinese contract laborers: Informação Goyana, 11 June 1922.
15. Informação Goyana, 11 June 1922, 12 July 1927, and 6 Jan. 1928. Defenders of creole cattle argued that the yield was not, in fact, all that different: Informação Goyana, 8 March 1931; Barreto et al., Indústria Pecuária. On the debates about the zebu, see Goyáz, 21 April 1892; Relatório-1906, 27. For a municipality-by-municipality discussion of predominant breeds, see Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse.
16. Most descriptions emphasize the use of prods. The only known drawing of a “Goiás cowboy”—by someone who apparently had never been to Goiás—is reproduced in D’Alincourt, Memória, 97 and shows both a prod and a lasso. The lasso was used in the corral to cut out animals for marking or castration.
17. Adapted from Castello Branco, Arraial, 189–96. Compare Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching,” 338–39; Da Cunha, Rebellion, 98–101.
18. Mello Franco, Viagens, 41–43; Goulart, Boi e do Couro, 131–35.
19. AHEG, Municípios, Cavalcante, “Informação Circunstanciada,” 1828; Flores, Coletor–Provedor da Fazenda, 3 July 1850.
20. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 98–99. For a description and architectural drawings of the surviving buildings, see Castello Branco, Arraial, Part I. On housing in general in the sertão see travelers accounts and Audrin, Sertanejos, 62–71.
21. Castello Branco and Ferreira Freitas, “Antigas Fazendas,” 117, 125.
22. For information on the interiors and furnishings of houses in the towns, see Rabelo, “Excessos,” 108–10; Parente, “Avesso,” photographs following pp. 76, 82–96; Oliveira, “Uma Ponte para o Século XIX.”
23. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 12. See the descriptions in a survey of land holders at Santa Maria Taguatinga: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 224, Taguatinga, 18 Jan. 1873.
24. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 187, Catalão, report, 11 April 1869; Informação Goyana, 15 March 1918.
25. Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 110–11; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-1, 194–95; Leite Moraes, Apontamentos, 82. For the same reasons animals licked the ashes after fires: Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization, 13.
26. Spix and Martius, Viagem-2, 87. See also Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 74, 90 and Nascentes, 121. For a similar situation in Mato Grosso, see Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching,” 340.
27. AHEG, Restaurar, 1812–1860, “1812–1815, Ofícios do Governo,” Fernando Delgado Freire de Castillo–Conde de Gálvez,” 20 Dec. 1813; Pohl, Viagem, 135, 185; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-2, 106; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 261–62.
28. Von Eschwege, Pluto Brasilienses-2, 195. See also Saint-Hilaire, Nascentes, 131–32; Mata-Machado, História do Sertão, 72–73, 76, 79–80.
29. “Subsídios,” 134; Bieber Freitas, “Marginal Elites,” 72; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 123; Bertran, História, 26; Funes, Goiás 1800–1850, 30; Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 27; Spix and Martinus, Viagem-2, 114–15.
30. AHEG, Municípios, Luziânia (Santa Luzia), Câmara, 31 Jan. 1848; Formosa, Câmara, 13 Jan. 1848. For a description of São Romão in the mid-nineteenth century see Burton, Explorations, 244. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-1, 407– 1, describes Januária.
31. Cruls, Relatório da Comissão, 166.
32. Correio Official, 2 June 1866; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 205, draft report, Presidente, 1871; box 482, draft message, Governador, 15 April 1896; Tribuna Livre, 19 March 1881; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 198.
33. On the Uberaba salt trade see Rezende, “Uberaba,” 35–38; Mello Franco, Viagens, 96; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência com o Ministério do Império, 1857–1860,” 21 Jan. 1859.
34. Correio Official, 1 Feb. 1881; Publicador, 23 Oct. 1886.
35. Relatório-1879-1, 34–36; Informação Goyana, 15 Dec. 1917.
36. The problem most consistently remarked upon (Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse) was the high cost of salt: e.g., Alemão, Pouso Alto, Goiás, Curralinho, and Mineiros.
37. Pohl, Viagem, 185; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 246.
38. Gardner, Viagem, 178; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 116.
39. Publicador, 9 July 1887.
40. Holanda, Fronteiras, 92; Taunay, Goyáz, 32–35; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais- 1, 280; Couto de Magalhães, Viagem, 180.
41. AHEG, Doc. Div, vol. 702, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial com o Ministério da Justiça, 1881–1884,” 9 July 1883. But see Audrin, Sertanejos, 14.
42. Cunha Mattos Itinerário-1, 181. A century later, see Audrin, Sertanejos, Chap. 1.
43. França, Pioneiros, 126. An incantation to drive snakes away was: “Santana é mãe de Maria e Maria é mãe de Jesus. Palavras santas, Palavras certas. Fique esta casa de cobras deserta. Saiam de nove a oito, de oito a sete, de sete a seis, de seis a cinco, de cinco a quatro, de quatro a três, de três a duas. De duas a uma até ficar cobra nenhuma.” (Saint Anne is the mother of Mary, Mary is the mother of Jesus. Holy words, correct words. Make this house free of snakes. Leave nine to eight, eight to seven, seven to six, six to five, five to four, four to three, three to two. From two to one, until none remains.) Teixeira, Folclore Goiano, 331.
44. AHEG, Municípios, Flores, Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 22 July 1886; Cruls, Relatório da Comissão, 252–53; Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse: for example, Anápolis (4) and Corumbaíba (46).
45. On Texas tick fever see Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching,” 352–54.
46. Bieber, “Marginal Elites,” 44; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 105, “Correspondência dos Juizes de Paz, 1829–1833,” circular, 6 Sept. 1830; Matutina, 2 Sept. 1830. afetosa, or hoof and mouth disease, does not seem to have entered Goiás until after the turn of the century.
47. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 17, “Opiniões dos Seres. Conselheiros sobre Dízimos . . . 19 April 1831”; Matutina, 21 July 1831; Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas apresentadas ao Conselho Geral, 1829–1838,” 10 June 1835; Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), 25 Nov. 1838 and 31 Jan. 1839; Relatório-1839, 32.
48. Relatório-1841, 9; Informação Goyana, Oct. 1921.
49. Leal, Terras Goyanas, 168. Four thousand seems an unlikely large number for one rancher in the 1830s, but memory is not history.
50. Relatório-1836, 9; Gardner, Viagem, 145.
51. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 130, “Presidência da Província—Correspondência e Portarias Dirigidas às Câmaras Municipais e Juizes de Órfãos, 1835–1836,” Palma, 8 May 1837; Relatório-1839, 6, and 1854-1, 5–6.
52. AHEG, “1823–1825 Originais dos Comandantes dos Registros e Presídios da Província,” Comandante, Registro Taguatinga–Cunha Mattos, 2 April and 2 May 1824; Doc. Av., box 370, Coletor, Taguatinga–Inspetor da Fazenda, 21 Jan. 1888.
53. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 139, “Correspondência da Presidência para Autoridades de Fora, 1836–1845,” Presidente de Maranhão, 22 Nov. 1839; Municípios, Ipameri, 26 and 29 Feb. 1884; Tribuna Livre, 3 April 1880; O Commércio, 24 April 1880.
54. Melatti, Índios e Criadores.
55. Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-2, 99.
56. AHEG, “1832, Livro de Documentos Diversos (fragments),” ?–José Rodrigues Jardim, 28 Sept. 1832.
57. Matutina, 25 Sept. 1833; Relatório-1839, 24, and 1846, 14; Mello Franco, Viagens, 62.
58. Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 78; Matutina, 12 May 1831. This was not unique to Goiás: see Bell, Campanha Gaúcha, 39; Riviere, Forgotten Frontier, 49.
59. Taunay, Goyáz, 38–39; Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching,” 103, 356–57, 360–64; Relatório-Mato Grosso-1859-1, 33, 1862, 125, and 1880, 43–44.
60. Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching,” 361. See a picture of a saddle steer in Bertran, História, 160.
61. For reported exports 1862–1882, see AHEG, Doc. Div., vols. 299 and 588.
62. AHEG, Municípios, Rio Verde, Recebedor, Rio Verde–Inspetor da Fazenda, 28 May 1881 and Procurador–Inspetor da Fazenda, 25 April 1882.
63. AHEG, Municípios, Taguatinga, “Quadro do Recenseamento do Gado Vaccum e Cavallar Organizado em Vista das Tabelas dos Distritos.1870–1872.”
64. Publicador, 9 July 1887. Many of the municipalities in Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse complained of the effects of mal das cadeiras: for example, Arraias (8) and Cavalcante (30). But as late as the 1930s the newspaper Informação Goyana was claiming that the disease did not attack animals in Goiás: May 1931.
65. AHEG, Municípios, Paraná (Palma), Câmara, Palma, n.d.(circa 1848); Silva e Souza, “Memória,” 184.
66. Compare Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching,” 139–45. Frank sees this industry as the basis of “protoindustrialization” in Mato Grosso, well ahead of any similar possibilities in Goiás: Frank, “Brazilian Far West,” Chap. 4.
67. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 91, “Dízimos, 1850–1853”; anexo 1800, box 33, “Conta Corrente com a Coletoria de Jaraguá, 1850–1878.” See similar records for Duro (Doc. Div., vol. 647), Catalão (vol. 268), Boavista (vol. 271), and Vila Bella do Paranaíba (Morrinhos) (vol. 300).
68. Brown, “Internal Commerce,” 499; Goulart, Boi e do Couro, 105–9.
69. Informação Goyana, Nov. and Dec. 1928; Ataídes, “Flores,” 52–56.
70. Informação Goyana, Oct. 1923.
71. Relatório-1861-2, 31–32, and 1862, 123–24.
72. Relatório-1863-1, 8.
73. Cruls, Relatório da Comissão, 171; Artiaga, História de Goiás-2, 92; Relatório-1839, 6. See also Goulart, Boi e do Couro, 103–5.
74. AHEG, Doc Div., vol. 36, “Correspondência dos Negócios do Reino, 1820–1824,” 4 Jan. 1821; Doc. Av., box 144, Recebedor, Duro–Inspetor da Diretoria das Rendas, 28 Jan. 1862; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 70, 82–93.
75. AHEG, Doc Div, vol. 179, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial às Autoridades Policiais, 1842–1851,” circular, Chefe de Polícia; vol. 202, “Secretaria da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 1 Aug. 1850. See also vol. 248, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial para as Autoridades Judiciais e Policiais, 1851–1858,” Chefe de Polícia, circular, 9 Dec. 1851; AN, Ij1 671, Ministério de Justiça, 1869– 1871, 19 April 1871.
76. AHEG, Municípios, Paraná (Palma), Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 4 Feb. 1837.
77. Informação Goyana, Nov.–Dec. 1928.
78. Pohl, Viagem, 220. On page 123 he suggests a more unlikely rate of profit: an animal worth three or four florins in Goiás brought sixty florins in Bahia; Brown, “Internal Commerce,” 500; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 174–75; Soares, Notas Estatísticas, 294; Lobo, História Político-Administrativa, 48; Informação Goyana, Oct. 1923, Nov.–Dec. 1928, Feb. 1929, April 1929, and May 1935.
79. Calógeras, “Transportes Arcaicos.”
80. França, “Povoamento do Sul,” 156–57; Audrin, Sertanejos, 109.
81. Elis, Veranico, 23.
82. AHEG, Municípios, Tocantinópolis (Boavista), Coletor-?, 24 March 1847; Santa Cruz, Coletor–Coletor das Rendas Provínciais, 24 Jan. 1847; Catalão, Coletor– Provedoria, 23 Jan. 1847.
83. Relatório-1862, 143.
84. Chasteen, “Background,” puts the rate at 25 percent for Rio Grande do Sul; Wilcox estimates 20 percent for nineteenth-century Mato Grosso: “Cattle Ranching”; Chandler, The Feitosas, suggests 10 percent for the interior of the northeast; and Riviere, Forgotten Frontier, finds 7 percent for 1960s Roraima.
85. Bell, Campanha Gaúcha, 55; Brown, “Internal Commerce,” 485–88. Frank uses a higher figure of 20 percent for turn-of-the-century Mato Grosso: Frank, “Brazilian Far West,” 191.
86. Cruls, Relatório da Comissão, 154.
87. Regarding 1870s/80s efforts to replace or supplement the export tax with production tax: Relatório-1875, 51–53, 1876, 39–40, and 1877, 36.
88. Publicador, 9 Oct. 1886. For (incomplete) cattle exports by porto for 1871–88 see AHEG, Series 1800, anexos 57, 60, 69, 70.
89. Relatórios in the 1870s complain repeatedly of a drastic falling off of sales to Bahia because of declines in that province’s cotton and sugar exports: for example, Relatório-1876, 38.
90. AHEG, Municípios, Sylvânia (Bonfim), Coletor, Bonfim–Provedor de Fazenda, 12 July 1840.
91. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 177, “Ordens da Provedoria Provincial para os Coletores das Rendas, 1842–1846,” circular, 3 Oct. 1844.
92. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 177, “Ordens da Provedoria Provincial para os Coletores das Rendas, 1842–1846,” 30 April 1846. Similar: vol. 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Provedor–Coletor, Conceição, 17 Aug. 1847; and Municípios, Traíras, Coletor–Provedor da Fazenda, n.d. (circa March 1847).
93. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 150, “Registro das Leis Provinciais, 1837–1842,” Law N. 11, 5 Sept. 1838; vol. 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Provedoria-Coletor, Pilar, 28 March 1847; vol. 246, “Presidência–Ministério dos Negócios do Império, 1851–1857,” 10 Nov. 1852.
94. Relatório-1850-1, 53.
95. AHEG, Municípios, Catalão, Coletor–Provedor da Fazenda, 7 July and 28 Oct. 1839; Arraias, Coletor–Provedor da Província, 13 April 1842; Doc. Av., box 28, Coletor, Carolina–Provedor da Fazenda, 1 Oct. 1839.
96. Relatório-1855, 86, and 1859-1, 59–61; O Tocantins, 22 Oct. 1857.
97. Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 231; Silva e Souza, “Memória,” 184.
98. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 5, Carta Régia, 15 April 1801; IHGG, Documentos, Pasta 002, Doc. 52, “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangeiros e Marinha, 1829–1831,” Pres. Miguel Lino de Moraes–Ill. Sr. José Clemente Pereira, 29 July 1829, includes a summary of all the laws to that date. Some municipalities passed similar laws: AHEG, Municípios, Crixás, “Informação Circunstanciada do Julgado do Arraial de Crixás, 1829.” The province reduced the tax to 500 réis for a period in late 1840s/early 1850: AHEG, Doc Div., vol. 177, “Ordens da Provedoria Provincial para os Coletores das Rendas, 1842–1846,” Provedor–Coletor, Conceição, 29 Jan. 1846; Relatório-1851, 62–63. And then to 320 réis in 1855: AHEG, Municípios, São Domingos, Coletor–Provedor da Fazenda, 11 April 1855.
99. AHEG, Municípios, Paraná (Palma), Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 4 Feb. 1837; Relatório-1837, 39–40 and 1838, 33; Doc. Div., vol. 177, “Ordens da Provedoria Provincial para os Coletores das Rendas, 1842–1846,” circular, 3 Oct, 1844; Doc. Av., box 43, Coletor, ?–Provedor de Fazenda, 29 Oct. 1844; Municípios, Flores, Coletor–Provedor de Fazenda, 6 Nov. 1844. The purpose was not so much revenue as to stimulate local industry: Relatório-1855, 88.
100. Salles, Economia, 125–26; Matutina, 13 July, 10 and 21 Aug. 1830; Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 21–22.
101. Relatório-1837, 40; AHEG, Municípios, Arraias, Coletor–Provedor de Fazenda, 28 April 1846.
102. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 177, “Ordens da Provedoria Provincial para os Coletores das Rendas, 1842–1846,” circular, 3 Oct. 1844, and circular, 24 March 1845; Municípios, Flores, Coletor–Provedoria de Fazenda, 6 Nov. 1844.
103. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 214, “Correspondência da Secretaria do Governo
de Goiás para o Ministério da Fazenda, 1848–1860,” 30 March 1857; Doc. Av., box 116, Ministério da Fazenda–Presidente, 7 April 1857.
104. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 294, Recebedor, Formosa–Presidente, 20 Feb.1880. For a similar report from the same area almost twenty years later, see Municípios, Posse, Ten. João d’Abbadia–Diretor da Diretoria de Finanças do Estado,12 Jan. 1898.
105. AHEG, Municípios, Taguatinga, Administrador–Provedor da Fazenda, 4 Oct. 1855; Destacamento, Taguatinga–Administrador, 24 May 1858. On a lack of troops to enforce the law, see AHEG, Municípios, São Domingos, Coletor– Inspetor da Tesouraria, 16 April 1887 and 15 Jan. 1889, and Recebedor–Director Geral das Finanças do Estado, 18 May 1894.
106. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 217, Subdelegado ?–Chefe de Polícia, 8 June 1872.
107. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 146, Recebedor, Mão de Pau–Director Geral da Administração Provincial, 31 Jan. 1863.
108. AHEG, Municípios, Catalão, Coletor–Provedor da Fazenda, 20 Jan.
1846 (sic—in fact, 1847). For a description of an illegal river crossing on the northern Tocantins near Boavista, see Paternostro, Viagem, 154–55.
109. Relatório-1856, 20; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 186, Recebedor, Lagoa Feia– Diretor Geral da Administração da Fazenda, 10 Jan. 1868.
110. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 116, Inspetor da Tesouraria das Rendas Provinciais– Presidente, 4 March 1857. See also Municípios, Custódio Lemus, Recebedor– Inspetor da Tesouraria de Fazenda, 4 Nov. 1886.
111. Carvalho Ramos, Tropas e Boiadas, 138; AHEG, Municípios, Santa Cruz, Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria de Fazenda, 2 July 1878; São Domingos, Juiz Municipal–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 31 July 1883.
112. Goyáz, 30 Sept. 1892; AHEG, Municípios, Itumbiara (Santa Rita do Paranaíba), “Termo de Declarações . . . Administrador de Santa Rita do Paranaíba,” 12 Feb. 1913.
113. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 266, “Correspondência com o Governo, 1853– 1859,” Inspetor, Tesouraria–Presidente, 30 Jan. 1856.
114. AHEG, Municípios, Taguatinga, Administrador–Administração das Rendas Provinciais, 2 Feb. 1863.
115. AHEG, Municípios, Posse, Ten. João d’Abbadia–Diretoria de Finanças do Estado, 12 Jan. 1898; Flores, Agência Arrependidos–Inspetor de Tesouraria, 8 Dec. 1879, and Itumbiara (Santa Rita do Paranaíba), Recebedor–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 1 Nov. 1880; Doc. Av., box 294, Presidente–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 24 Sept. 1880.
116. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 207, Escrivão, Barreiros–Inspetor Tesouraria, 21 Nov. 1871.
117. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 266, “Correspondência com o Governo, 1853– 1859,” Provedor da Fazenda–Presidente, 27 Sept. 1854; Municípios, Morrinhos (Vila Bela do Paranaíba), Coletor–Director Geral da Renda Provincial, 9 July 1863.
118. Relatório-1865-1, 12.
119. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Provedoria–Coletor, Catalão, 29 Dec. 1847.
120. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 137, Recebedor, Catalão–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 6 March 1861; box 146, Agente, Cachoeira Dourada–Coletor, Santa Rita do Paranaíba, Nov. 1863; Municípios, Rio Verde, Coletor, sub-agência São Jerônimo–Diretor Geral da Administração da Fazenda, 10 Oct. 1864, and Coletor– Inspetor, Tesouraria, 12 May 1874;Relatório-1863-1, 4–5.
121. Artiaga, História-2, 53–63, and Governador, Mensagem-1903, 5–30, for summaries of the conflicts. See also Brasil, Pela Terra Goyana.
122. Relatório-1836, 50.
123. APM, SP/PP 1/33 box 175, Câmara, Paracatú–Presidente MG, 31 Jan. 1848.
124. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 109, Ministério da Negócios do Império–Presidente, 28 Sept. 1855; Doc. Div., vol. 266, “Correspondência com o Governo, 1853–1859,” Inspetor, Tesouraria–Presidente, 30 Jan. 1856.
125. Relatório-1836, 4–5; AHEG, vol. 207, “Correspondência do Governo com Diversos—1848,” Francisco de Azevedo Coutinho, 6 Sept. 1848.
126. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 89, Ministério dos Negócios do Império–Presidente, 11 Aug. 1852, and attached correspondence; Municípios, Sumidouro, Administrador Manoel Nunes–Diretor de Finanças do Estado, 15 Oct. 1898.
127. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 217, Subdelegado, São Miguel e Almas–Chefe de Polícia, 8 June 1872; Municípios, Natividade, Câmara, 14 July 1886; Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Juiz Municipal, 28 March 1891; and Dianópolis (Duro), Coletor, 14 Dept., 1907; Relatório-1873, 11–12; Informação Goyana, 4 Nov. 1918.
128. Leal, Terras Goyanas, 182; Holanda, Fronteiras, 229.
129. Relatório 1862, 122; BN, I-31, 19, 17, “Descrição de Catalão, Goiás, 1881”; Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse, 86.
130. Mello Franco, Viagens, 56.
131. Relatório-1842, 9.
*By David McGreery in the book ‘Frontier Goiás, 1822-1889’, Stanford University Press, Stanford- California, 2006, chapter V –‘Stock Raising’ p. 130-154. (full text edited/adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa)
Se possível gostaria de obter informações quanto à cidade de Jaraguá. Principalmente sobre a passagem de Gardner?
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