Clerk

@cyberredacted

Joined May 2026

730 Following

26 Followers

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cyberredacted retweeted

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

about 5 hours ago

The year is 1833. You are on a rise above the Platte and the herd below takes three days to pass. Everything you can see was made by them. Grass that evolved to be bitten, sod four feet deep, dung feeding the beetles that feed the birds. Graze it and the plants multiply. Rest it and they thin. You are standing on the richest ground on earth and an animal built it. The year is 1843. You are Cheyenne and you live off that herd: hump, tongue, marrow cracked from the bone, the rest dried and pounded with fat for winter. Your men stand five foot ten in a century when the white American stands five foot seven. Nobody has thought to measure you. When they do, it will turn out you were the tallest people on earth. The year is 1871. A Pennsylvania tannery learns to cut a bison hide into factory belting, and the machines of the east start running on your herd. A worthless hide is worth three dollars. The railway reaches the grass, the Sharps rifle reaches the railway, and the army hands free ammunition to anyone going west. The meat is left where it falls. The year is 1874. The Secretary of the Interior has put it in writing: the civilisation of the Indian is impossible while the buffalo remains. Sheridan tells the Texas legislature the hide men deserve a medal, a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other. Both houses pass a bill to stop it. Grant leaves it on his desk. The year is 1889. A naturalist goes looking and finds eighty-five wild bison in the country. Your food comes off a government wagon: white flour, sugar, salt pork, weighed into a ledger. The men raised on the herd are measured three years later and found the tallest on earth. Their sons, raised on the wagon, never reach their fathers' shoulders. That was the object of the exercise. The year is 1919. Wheat is at wartime prices, the government hands out three hundred and twenty acres a time, and the pamphlets promise that rain follows the plough. So you break the sod, and so does everyone. Ten thousand years of root turned over in twenty, with nothing holding the plains down but a crop that stands one dry season. The year is 1935. On the fourteenth of April the sky goes black at noon and you cannot see your hand on the rail. Eight hundred and fifty million tons of topsoil leave the plains, and enough lands on desks in Washington to move somebody at last. The government buys the ruined ground back, sows it to grass and leases it to men with cattle. Put the ruminant back and the land holds. The year is 1976. You are American and you eat ninety-four pounds of beef a year, more than anyone has eaten anywhere. Your country has sat at the top of the height tables since it was founded, taller than every nation in Europe, on cheap beef and cheap milk. Nobody thinks the two are connected. It is simply what being American looks like. The year is 2019. A commission convened in Europe publishes the diet the world is to eat, and your ration of red meat is fourteen grams a day. One small burger a week. It goes out everywhere as science, written by people who have never held a farm through a dry summer. The year is 2026. The herd is the smallest since 1951 and you are down from ninety-four pounds of beef to fifty-six. American men are no taller than the ones born in 1950, and the country that topped the table now sits fortieth, under the Dutch, who were the shortest people in Europe when your great-grandfather was born. Now it is today. The grass needs something with four stomachs on it. So do you. Take the animal off the land and the soil goes. Take it off the plate and the people shrink. It has been done once, deliberately, and the paperwork survives with the names on it. They are doing it again and calling it a diet.

SamaHoole's tweet photo. The year is 1833. You are on a rise above the Platte and the herd below takes three days to pass. Everything you can see was made by them. Grass that evolved to be bitten, sod four feet deep, dung feeding the beetles that feed the birds. Graze it and the plants multiply. Rest it and they thin. You are standing on the richest ground on earth and an animal built it.

The year is 1843. You are Cheyenne and you live off that herd: hump, tongue, marrow cracked from the bone, the rest dried and pounded with fat for winter. Your men stand five foot ten in a century when the white American stands five foot seven. Nobody has thought to measure you. When they do, it will turn out you were the tallest people on earth.

The year is 1871. A Pennsylvania tannery learns to cut a bison hide into factory belting, and the machines of the east start running on your herd. A worthless hide is worth three dollars. The railway reaches the grass, the Sharps rifle reaches the railway, and the army hands free ammunition to anyone going west. The meat is left where it falls.

The year is 1874. The Secretary of the Interior has put it in writing: the civilisation of the Indian is impossible while the buffalo remains. Sheridan tells the Texas legislature the hide men deserve a medal, a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other. Both houses pass a bill to stop it. Grant leaves it on his desk.

The year is 1889. A naturalist goes looking and finds eighty-five wild bison in the country. Your food comes off a government wagon: white flour, sugar, salt pork, weighed into a ledger. The men raised on the herd are measured three years later and found the tallest on earth. Their sons, raised on the wagon, never reach their fathers' shoulders. That was the object of the exercise.

The year is 1919. Wheat is at wartime prices, the government hands out three hundred and twenty acres a time, and the pamphlets promise that rain follows the plough. So you break the sod, and so does everyone. Ten thousand years of root turned over in twenty, with nothing holding the plains down but a crop that stands one dry season.

The year is 1935. On the fourteenth of April the sky goes black at noon and you cannot see your hand on the rail. Eight hundred and fifty million tons of topsoil leave the plains, and enough lands on desks in Washington to move somebody at last. The government buys the ruined ground back, sows it to grass and leases it to men with cattle. Put the ruminant back and the land holds.

The year is 1976. You are American and you eat ninety-four pounds of beef a year, more than anyone has eaten anywhere. Your country has sat at the top of the height tables since it was founded, taller than every nation in Europe, on cheap beef and cheap milk. Nobody thinks the two are connected. It is simply what being American looks like.

The year is 2019. A commission convened in Europe publishes the diet the world is to eat, and your ration of red meat is fourteen grams a day. One small burger a week. It goes out everywhere as science, written by people who have never held a farm through a dry summer.

The year is 2026. The herd is the smallest since 1951 and you are down from ninety-four pounds of beef to fifty-six. American men are no taller than the ones born in 1950, and the country that topped the table now sits fortieth, under the Dutch, who were the shortest people in Europe when your great-grandfather was born.

Now it is today.

The grass needs something with four stomachs on it. So do you.

Take the animal off the land and the soil goes. Take it off the plate and the people shrink.

It has been done once, deliberately, and the paperwork survives with the names on it.

They are doing it again and calling it a diet.

147

Clerk

@cyberredacted

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