furious dispatch of animals to feed New York, Boston, Paris, London and the increasing industrial armies, and military armies too, that desired to eat meat. In these years between 1807 and 1865 - the opening of the Union Stockyards in Chicago - was perfected the production-line slaughter of living creatures, for the first time in the history of the world.

At one end of the trail lay the prairies, the open range, the boisterous pastoral of the cattle drive, where the cowboys sometimes spared a longhorn: Reed Anthony, Andy Adams's cowman, tells in J Frank Dobie's The Longhorns how he and other Confederate soldiers guarding a herd of Texas steers saved the life of one because he would "always walk out and stand attentive to the notes of Rock of Ages sung by his herders".

Spared were two or three or ten or a hundred or a thousand from among the millions and millions of creatures that plodded to railheads like Abilene, and thence eastward, or to abattoirs nearer at hand and then were bought up by government agents to be sent to the reservations to feed Indians who no longer had buffalo to hunt.

In less than a century, California’s pastroal Utopia had been destroyed

By the 1880s, so Terry Jordan writes in North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers, free grass greatly encouraged over-stocking, as did a serious misreading of the pastoral capacity of the fragile short-grass plains and the speculation-fueled, hyper-commercialised cattle boom of the early 1880s.

Across the years, the cattle grazed on the tall grasses - big and little bluestem, particularly where ranchers fenced off the water-courses and springs from their competitors. Ironweed and goldenrod invaded, along with Kentucky bluegrass. Short grasses and annual weeds took over.

In the late 18th century, when the first cattle herds arrived in what the Spanish colonists called Alta California, the region presented itself as a Mediterranean landscape, but of a sort that had been extinguished in Europe for many centuries. There were meadows with perennial bunchgrasses, beardless wild rye, oat grass, perennial forbs: 22m acres of such prairie, and 500,000 acres of marsh grass. Beyond this, there were 8m acres of live oak woodlands, and park-like forests; beyond and above these, the chaparral.

By the 1860s, in the wake of the gold rush, some 3m cattle were grazing California's open ranges and the degradation was rapid, particularly as ranchers had been over-stocking to cash in on the cattle boom. Floods and drought between 1862 and 1865 consummated the ecological crisis.

In the spring of 1863, 97,000 cattle were grazing in parched Santa Barbara County. Two years later, only 12,100 remained. In less than a century, California's pastoral Utopia had been destroyed; the ranchers moved east of the Sierra into the Great Basin, or north, to colder and dryer terrain. It takes 360 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef.

These days, travellers heading north through California's Central Valley can gaze at mile upon mile of environmental wreckage: arid land except where irrigated by water brought in from the north, absurdly dedicated to producing cotton.

Some 200 miles north of Los Angeles, a fierce stench and clouds of dust herald the Harris Beef feedlot. On the east side of the Interstate several thousand steers are penned, occasionally doused by water sprays. After a few minutes of this Dantesque spectacle the barren landscape resumes, with one of California's state prisons at Coalinga - unlike the beef feedlot, secluded from view - lying just over the horizon to the west. Two gulags under the same pitiless sun: penned creatures, furnishing 'security' from hunger and from fear.