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INTRODUCTION
This is a study of animals, ecologies, and the human communities that affect and are affected by them. It considers the grasslands of interior British Columbia (see Figure i) and revolves around two closely related "wars" waged by ranchers and grazing officials against creatures whom they considered to be pests. Although both aimed to accommodate cattle in increasingly degraded grasslands, neither campaign was simple or entirely successful. Both disclose a great deal about the intersections of economy, ecology, science, and law in a colonized and rapidly modernizing British Columbia.2
I begin with a discussion of grasshopper "plagues" and the ways in which a campaign organized to eradicate them worked to expose and exacerbate economic inequities among immigrant cattle ranchers. This *done, I recount a "war" with "wild horses" that also served to dispossess Native people and discredit their competing claims to land. And, finally, I connect the campaigns against grasshoppers and horses with a general argument about the inseparability of environmental problems from their intertwined social and ecological contexts.
GRASSHOPPERS
Grasshopper irruptions are part of grassland ecology, but in the nineteenth century they rarely posed a problem to settlers. After 1890, however, settlers held that the scale and frequency of irruptions had increased significantly; in the 1920s, scarcely a summer went by without a "locust plague" (or the spectre of a locust plague) somewhere in the semi-arid interior of British Columbia. The first of them occurred in ¿$90, when large numbersof "hoppers" in the Nicola Valley began "doing considerable injury to pasture."3 In the summer of 1898, grasshoppers again appeared in large numbers, principally in the Nicola VaUey but also near LiUooet, where, according one resident, ranchers had "to feed out a lot of hay on account of the grasshoppers leaving pasture short."· They returned again in 1907, and in 1914, according to Dominion Inspector of Indian Orchards Tom Wilson, "were so numerous that their flight resembled a snow-storm." Their impact appeared to Wilson to have been considerable: "We found that crops of clover, alfalfa, and ordinary hay crops had been much injured, so much so as to bring about an appreciable shortage in weight per acre, while the cattle grazing-grounds had been rendered bare."5
Late nineteenth-century entomologists advocated a number of relatively natural...