Frontier Goias, 1822-1889

Frontier Goiás, 1822–1889

David McCreery

Stanford University Press

frontier goiás, 1822–1889

Frontier Goiás, 1822–1889 David McCreery

stanford university press stanford, california 2006

©2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. This book has been published with the assistance of Georgia State University. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCreery, David. Frontier Goiás, 1822-1889 / David McCreery. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-5179-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8047-5179-X (alk. paper) 1. Goiás (Brazil: State)—Economic conditions—19th century. 2. Agriculture— Brazil—Goiás (State)—History—19th century. 3. Goiás (Brazil: State)—Politics and government—19th century. 4. Goiás (Brazil: State)—History—19th century. I. Title. HC188.G6M36 2006 330.981’73—dc22 2006005165 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/12 Sabon

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: A Province on the Edge of the Modern World 1.

State Structure

vii

1 24

2. State Power

50

3.

Industry, Commerce, and Communications

79

4.

Agriculture and Food Supply

105

5.

Stock Raising

130

6. Land

155

7.

180

Work

Conclusions

206

Glossary

217

Notes

221

Bibliography

277

Index

293

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank my family, my wife Angela and our children, Anthony (“Shimby”) and Elizabeth Carmen for their continued love and support. Professor Mary Karasch, of Oakland University, the undisputed doyenne of Goiás studies in the United States and a historian of Brazil of international reputation, has aided this study literally from beginning to end, introducing me to Goiás’s state archives in my first days in Goiânia and then reading and making extensive comments on the completed manuscript. Thanks, Mary. In Goiâna Professor José Antônio C. R. de Souza hired me as a visiting professor in the graduate history program at the Federal University of Goiás, arranged a CNPq Fellowship to fund the position, and aided us in every way. His wife Professor Waldinice M. Nascimento welcomed us into their home, explained to me the complexities of her native Goiás, and on occasion even drove me to my research. Professors Dalísia Elisabeth Martins Doles (deceased), Gilka Vasconcelos de Salles, Maria Amélia de Alencar, and Leandro Mendes Rocha at the Federal University helped me with my research and teaching, and Dona Gilka read and commented on the manuscript. Professor Maria do Espírito Santa Rosa Rosa, of the Catholic University of Goiás, was kind enough to invite me into her group working in the history of the sertão. Professor Odair Giraldin introduced me to Porto Nacional and helped me gain access to the notary records there. The Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (CNPq) of Brazil funded eighteen months teaching and researching in Goiânia. Georgia State University paid for return visits to Goiás to finish the research, and the interlibrary staff at GSU has always come through with the books I need. Successive chairs of Georgia State’s History Department, Drs. Tim Crimmins, Diane Willen, and Hugh Hudson, have generously supported my work. Professor Marshall Eakin read and commented on the manuscript when it was being considered for publication. Again, my sincere thanks to all.

frontier goiás, 1822–1889

Introduction a province on the edge of the modern world

Gold mines discovered by a few audacious and enterprising men, a horde of adventurers throwing themselves upon imagined riches, a society formed in the midst of all manner of crimes, that acquired its habits of government under the rigors of military despotism, whose customs were weakened by the influence of the climate and spineless laziness, a few instances of splendor and lavishness, ruins and a sad decadence. This, in a few words, is the history of the province of Goiás. —José Martins Pereira de Alencastre, Anais da Província de Goiás, 1986.

Confected initially by the French traveler Auguste de Saint-Hilaire early in the nineteenth century and repeated a generation later by a provincial administrator sent from Rio de Janeiro, here is a succinct description of birth in original sin. It may surprise those familiar with the prosperous and relatively peaceful twentieth-first-century state, but from the late colonial period through the nineteenth century Goiás’s residents struggled with the heritage of poverty, isolation, and violence which history had set them. Marooned by changing circumstances on the edge of the state and the national economy, local leaders at once lamented the effects of the province’s fall from grace while at the same time hoping that a vanished prosperity might yet be resurrected. Complicating these tasks, they felt, was the lethargy of the local population and the neglect of the rest of the country: “From the position Goiás occupies, it seems that all the other provinces turn their back on her.”1 Few had illusions about short-term possibilities, but they remembered, or supposed they remembered, a better time, when Goiás had enjoyed an importance it now manifestly lacked and when at least some among them had become rich. Sodden with sin this imagined past may have been, but it nevertheless exerted a hold on provincial consciousness not easily loosened or supplanted.

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State and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Brazil Most of those who write about the construction of state and nation in nineteenth-century Brazil agree that these processes proceeded more or less simultaneously and from the top and the bottom at the same time.2 This was not, of course, the way the new nation’s leaders understood events. For them, state building was a conscious, top-down, “Junker” project undertaken in the face of the opposition, or at least the apathy, of the majority of the population. In their understanding these elites were the nation. They first began to come together around the idea of a Brazilian nation-state during the Cortes’s debates on colonial autonomy and subsequently had rallied to independence and a constitutional monarchy, both to maintain their power and to keep a republic at bay. In order to make this new state work, however, politicians at the national level found it necessary to court the regional and local power brokers who controlled Brazil’s vast interior, entering into power-sharing alliances with these.3 Not surprisingly, political struggles during the next century were primarily over the distribution of power among these interested parties. Where such alliances or pacts broke down, or threatened to break down, the central regime might resort to force, but particularly in the first years its repressive capacity remained limited and, as a result, its hold on distant provinces precarious. By the 1840s, however, a more powerful, centralized state, if only by comparison to the past and to its Latin American neighbors, had begun to emerge, under the direction a conservative reaction labeled by national history “O Regresso.” In the words of Professor José Murillo de Carvalho, the new state now had “taken root” but remained still “a macrocefálica, with a huge head and short limbs, that did not impinge on the municipalities and hardly touched the provinces.”4 Even as its hegemonic reach increased, the Empire found it impossible to free the state from continued dependence on the “lords of the sertão (interior).” Few among Brazil’s nineteenth-century elites would have accepted that the “nation” included the majority of even the country’s free population, characterized, they felt, by ignorance and, worse, lack of property. Yet the continued health of a constitutional monarchy demanded periodic legitimation through effective popular involvement in the political process. An important part of the process was performance: citizens become accustomed to sharing in activities of and for the state. It was precisely the absence of such involvement that doomed to civil war the infant republics of Spanish America. As well, many of the Empire’s independence leaders espoused a late eighteenth-century liberal ideology that anticipated at least the selective participation of the people in politics.5 Elections, for example, ritualized and reinforced the people’s role in the state process. Although

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Pedro I dismissed the original Constitutional Assembly when it seemed poised to deliver too radical a document, the 1824 Constitution that he did approve instituted a voting system as democratic as any in the Atlantic world at the time, with modest property and no literacy requirements. But how, then, were elites to guarantee their continued power and, they imagined, national survival? The answer was a voting system that combined indirect election to the more important offices with public balloting, opening the process to fraud and intimidation. The emergence of political parties in the late 1830s, however, tested elite cohesion and led to competition for votes and voters, with the twin effects of increasing electoral violence and raising the danger that a breach might open in the political system, allowing the masses to grasp for real power. The eventual solution, in Brazil as in the southern United States, was the imposition and manipulation of literacy requirements. Under such circumstances, how did the mass of the population, marginalized by geography and power, experience the state? Acceptance of, or at least acquiescence to, the national government seems to have been remarkably widespread: after the disturbances of the 1830s and 1840s, for example, violent challenges to the Empire plagued only the border province of Rio Grande do Sul. Of course, low-level popular resistance to specific government policies such as taxes and military recruitment was endemic, as it was in most preindustrial societies. Over all, however, and certainly compared to the numerous conflicts in Spanish America in these years or the United States’ bloody civil war, popular opposition to the central authority in Brazil remained diffuse and muted under the Empire. In large part this was because the state made few effective demands on the general population, but also, and more importantly, because it made these demands through customary social and political hierarchies. On a day-to-day basis, the state was the local elite, to whom the population had always given obedience: “The prince reigns with the help of the lords of the land, who govern.”6 As it operated under the Empire, politics converted traditional, personalist ties of dependence into political loyalties, to the locally powerful, to the state, and, eventually, to parties. But even as the coronel (regional or local political boss) remained the key institution linking the center to the sertão, the basis of his power was shifting, from socio-economic and political resources under his direct control to a negotiated ability to mobilize support from the provincial, or state, and national governments. Identification with the state was a low-cost proposition for most of the population most of the time, it took an accustomed form, and the benefits of such identification were increasingly evident. For all the undeniable growth of the power and penetration of the Brazilian state under the Empire, it nevertheless remained in many areas of the

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interior “a dim shadow, more of a future project than an actual reality.”7 A key problem was the chronic poverty of both the central government and provincial regimes. Professor Steve Topik has argued that the availability of revenues from export taxes gave the Brazilian state an autonomy unusual for the time and place,8 but it also allowed the state to put off the hard task of domestic fiscal reform and, thus, continued its reliance on existing political and economic structures. Specifically, the Empire could not break free of its dependence on local elites not only for political control but also for the collection of internal taxes. These elites, in turn, often defrauded the state to their own advantage, at the same time that they squeezed those below them where they could. The victims blamed the state for their illtreatment. Provinces depended heavily on vaguely illegal, interprovincial “export” taxes which met with widespread smuggling, evasion, and fraud. State poverty led to ineffectiveness which further impoverished the state. and it also complicated efforts to improve transport and communications, a further cause of the isolation of the interior. Yet Brazil did not come apart as happened to so much of Latin America in these years, and instead the central regime achieved a steady, if uneven, growth in hegemony over the national territory, even as this territory expanded. Hegemony in this context includes both political and ideological components: political hegemony rests directly on the threat or use of force or physical coercion, while ideological hegemony implies the achievement of policy ends based on willing, or apparently willing, compliance, on shared ideas and values. State institutions such as schools and popular societies taught national geography and history and mythology, and periodically these enacted patriotic rituals, in order that the people would learn “the duties and privileges that the title of citizen confers.” Each year the state church recognized at least fourteen official festivals celebrating the Empire and the royal family.9 Yet, and despite the best efforts of the state, its agents, and supporting elites, the construction of hegemony here as in most societies remained a partial or incomplete process and continued to encounter, indeed to generate, resistance, whether opened or disguised. One point, for example, on which the Empire’s nation building did encounter sustained opposition among the nonslave poor was in connection with forced wage labor. The reluctance of the “lazy” ex-slave or lower-class mulatto or caboclo (Indian-white mixture) to work for wages was a staple of elite discourse and despair throughout the century, both nationally and in Goiás: “The people of Goiás are little industrious,” a traveler imagined, “not because they lack natural resources but because they let themselves be dominated by indolence and give themselves without restraint to the pleasures of the senses.”10 Still, the Brazilian state under the

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Empire made no serious effort to forcibly incorporate the mass of the population into wage work. Contract laws and regulations against “vagrancy” existed, but these were little enforced in rural areas, and the Empire undertook nothing comparable to, for example, the coercive work schemes of neighboring Argentina or the peonage systems of Peru or Mesoamerica. Brazil’s government and economic elites could allow such slippage because they were able to obtain sufficient labor power from other sources: at first Indian and then relatively cheap African slaves and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, European immigrants met the worker requirements of the more dynamic sectors of the economy. Freedom from forced labor, paid or not, was a significant part of what Brazil’s free poor gained from the pact that legitimized the state. Another effect was that outside of the cities bureaucratic state agents had little direct or day-to-day contact with most of the population, whether slave or free. As many observers have pointed out, an important element facilitating the expansion of state hegemony and the acceptance of that state power as legitimate in nineteen-century Brazil, and one that set this government apart from its Spanish American neighbors, was the rule of a legitimate monarch: “Brazilians recognize that Our Majesty is the most certain architect of the stability of our institutions.”11 Typically, the annual reports required of each provincial president began with reference to the well-being of the royal family, and authorities structured public and patriotic ceremonies to reinforce popular loyalty to the Crown. One such evening in 1830s Meiaponte, Goiás, for example, ended with “the presentation of the portraits of Her Majesty and the Emperor to which the assembled group gave vivas for religion, the Constitutional Emperor, perpetual defender of Brazil, the Empress, his Highness the Royal Prince and the Imperial Family, and the Constitution.”12 It is not necessary to suppose that the mass of the population always accepted such state-sponsored rhetoric at face value to understand that participation in patriotic rituals or festivals worked to promote a sense of inclusion in the body politic, at the same time that it reinforced key status hierarchies.13 Important, too, in the construction of the civic religion of nationalism was the conscious differentiation of Brazil from an inferior Spanish America: “Brazil, more prudent than the other peoples of America, love our institutions and, thanks to God, understand that it is in the domain of peace that riches grow.”14 It is also worth remembering, and allowing for local affections, that after the 1840s in most of Brazil loyalty to state and Emperor had few serious competitors, apart from the occasional and self-destructive outburst of messianic religion. With the defeat of the 1840s revolts, politically troublesome regionalism largely subsided, and Brazil lacked the settled but unassimilated indigenous majorities that plagued nation-building schemes in the Indian Republics.

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What should this state do or be able to do? Marx famously defined the capitalist state as a managing committee for the bourgeoisie, and classical economics essentially agrees, assigning the state the role of guarantor of private property. Recently, by contrast, analysts have given more attention to the “relative autonomy” of the state, to its institutionalization and its ability to function as an economic and political actor more or less independent of particular class or factional demands. If the Empire enjoyed growing fiscal autonomy, politically the state’s continued dependence on transactional pacts with local and regional power brokers robbed it of much of its political autonomy. This manifested itself in rural areas in the failure of the state to monopolize legitimate violence and, as a result, its inability to guarantee popular security and rights independent of the power of these elites. The decision, or more properly the need, to farm out to private individuals the right to the legitimate use of violence opened the way for challenges to state power. In fact, however, by the 1850s most local and regional elites had made the decision to seek their advantage within the state rather than to oppose it; the social content of the 1830s and 1840s uprisings had thoroughly frightened them. And legal assurances of property rights mattered little in the interior, where the economy was not capitalist and where other factors determined such rights. The state’s inability in the sertão to exert autonomy from local interests or to monopolize legitimate violence necessarily raised transaction costs, but this served the interests of the locally powerful who had no use or need for the guarantees of bourgeois law.

The Weight of Memory The “decadence” of the present and the reasons for it were a constant thread woven through early nineteenth-century elite discourse. Of Goiás, for example, travelers reported desolation at every turn: roads so little used that “grass hides every trace of them” and towns “in a state of decadence that surpasses any other”; fazendas (large estates), houses, and stores “that look as though they had been abandoned a century ago.”15 “Decadence,” of course, implies a situation once better that has since declined.16 Whether this accurately described Goiás under the Empire, or, indeed, much of Brazil’s interior during these years, was open to doubt. First, it defined “development” or “prosperity” chiefly in terms of successful gold mining, which at best brought wealth to only a handful of the province’s inhabitants, together with misery and early death to the slaves imported to mine it and the Indians displaced or killed in the process.17 More broadly, Goiás’s gold boom rose and collapsed so quickly and con-

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centrated itself in so few areas that it left little of the economic or cultural residue characteristic, for example, of neighboring Minas Gerais. Against such a background, one historian has labeled Goiás’s years under the Empire “a century without history,” while another instead wonders how the province’s inhabitants must have felt, swept up in a storm of constant change.18 The first perspective seems intuitively the more logical, given the limited shifts that Goiás’s economic and sociopolitical life appears to have experienced over the course of the century, and these slowly. In 1820, for example, most of the province’s residents lived in the countryside and depended for survival on subsistence agriculture and the sale of cattle; by the 1890s the state still remained overwhelmingly rural and cattle were its chief item of interprovincial trade. From the point of view of the historical actors themselves, however, and particularly those in the provincial capital, change may at times have seemed about to overwhelm them: from a monarchy to an empire to a federal republic, the arrival of the printing press and newspapers, party politics, escalating Indian attacks, exciting new consumer goods, and a flux of immigrant and transient populations, including mineiro (from Minas Gerais) and paulista (from São Paulo) cattle ranchers looking for land; gypsies; refugees from northeastern droughts; cattle buyers and traveling merchants; and desperate lepers struggling toward the newly opened hot springs at Caldas Novas. By the 1890s the telegraph was in operation and railroads approached across neighboring provinces. As this suggests, how you experienced the century depended in large part where you were and what you did. The geography of imperial Goiás embraced several environmental zones, and these, in turn, heavily influenced Luzo-Brazilian settlement and possible economic activities.19 Much of the province was cerrado,20 grasslands punctuated by clumps of trees and low bush that grew chiefly along rivers or small, often seasonal, watercourses. The soil of the cerrado was predominantly sandy and infertile but in many areas supported coarse grasses suitable for extensive cattle grazing. Over time, however, the effects of fires set to clear pastures, deforestation to open land for agriculture, and overgrazing destroyed many native plant species, allowing invading, sometimes less nutritious grasses to take over and possibly altering patterns of rainfall.21 Generally the soil in the north of Goiás was thought to be of poorer quality than that of the center and south, and the economy there remained less developed during the nineteenth century. Running down the middle of the province from Descoberto in the north to Bonfim (Silvânia) and Campinas in the south was the Mato Grosso, a twenty-to-thirty-kilometer-wide band of dense forest that initially impeded settlement and in the nineteenth century still sheltered indigenous enemies. Travelers found it difficult to make a passage through the Mato Grosso, particularly during the rainy season

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that lasted in Goiás from October through March.22 Already by the first years of the Empire, however, slash-and-burn agriculturists had invaded the area, cutting and firing trees and brush to open areas for plantings and leaving abandoned patches gone over to brush and wild grasses. Cutting across the countryside were numerous rivers and creeks, many of which ran dry in July and August but came back as roaring torrents during the rains. Commonly they overflowed their banks, creating travel barriers and health-threatening swamps and bogs. Crossing rivers with life and goods intact was a constant challenge for nineteenth-century merchants and travelers, some of whom found themselves held up for days at a time or even trapped between rivers, unable to go forward or retreat: residents of the town of Rio Bonito, for example, reported that during the rains their town became an “island,” cut off from road contact with the rest of the district.23 Good agricultural land lay along some of the rivers and creeks but inhabitants shunned it, because of problems with floods and fevers bred in stagnant pools, and also for fear of water-borne Indian attacks. An exception was the Vão (valley) of the Rio Paranã, northeast of the town of Formosa and noted early in the century for its cattle, horses, and disease.24 Further to the north the Rios Araguaia and Tocantins marked much of the province’s northern and western boundaries, though this did not preclude territorial disputes with neighboring provinces. In the east along the division between Goiás and the provinces of Piauí, Bahia, and Minas Gerais ran a range of low mountains labeled variously the Serra Geral or the Serra Mestre. Guarding the approaches to these mountains were the “Gerais,” areas of sparse vegetation inhabited by a “savage” population feared by itinerant merchants, cattle drovers, and travelers.25 With the decline of mining in the late eighteenth century and the gradual shift to cattle and small-scale agriculture, two regional patterns emerged within the province. The north pioneered the commercial production and sale of cattle, sending animals overland to coastal buyers, chiefly in Bahia. Effectively a cattle-hunting rather than cattle-raising activity, ranching here was extensive and the animals received little or no attention between roundups. Poor soils, limited market access, and the dominance of the cattle culture militated against the development of agriculture in the region. As a result, the north suffered chronic food shortages and high prices. By comparison, and because the early emphasis on mining had fixed attention on the center and north of the province, only in the early nineteenth centuries did the south begin to fill up with settlers and properties. In the southeast immigrants from Minas Gerais developed mixed holdings that produced tobacco and cotton, hogs and cattle, and they sold these to nearby settlements or across the Rio Paranaíba to Paracatú and the towns along the Rio São Francisco. To the southwest the province’s economy

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focused more on cattle. Still, many of the supposed differences between the north and the south were as much imagined as real and were exaggerated for effect by interested parties. When the military officer Raymundo José da Cunha Mattos set out early in the 1820s to inspect Goiás’s provincial militia, residents of the capital warned him of the “barbarity” of the north. But he found, he said, little to differentiate the two regions and ridiculed the ignorance and pretensions of the inhabitants of both.26 Still, a perception of divergence had taken root in popular imagination and with time estrangement grew. Several factors fed this. Because the north’s origins lay more in mining, the decline of gold hit the region harder than the south, and it was here that colonial towns withered.27 Indian attacks before mid-century were especially fierce in the north, forcing the abandonment of farms, fazendas, and settlements and prompting a general resentment that provincial authorities could not or would not do more to help the population: in February 1848, for example, the câmara (town council) of Porto Imperial (Porto Nacional) protested that were it not for poor roads and Indian attacks theirs would be one of the richest freguesias (parishes) in the province, but the state gave them little assistance with either.28 The north’s interprovincial trade continued to go chiefly overland to the coastal northeast and by river to Pará and Maranhão, whereas in the south commerce flowed between the province and Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. The vast distances that separated the provincial capital from the settlements in the north, together with bad roads and slow and irregular mails, meant that official correspondence, letters, and newspapers commonly arrived there late, if at all, and any response required came long after it was needed. While many in the north agreed that the region was “backward” even as compared to the south of Goiás, others tired of stereotypes that painted them as ignorant and uncouth, and nourished separatist ambitions.29 For a predominantly rural economy with a modest population, nineteenth-century Goiás exhibited a surprising number of towns, a legacy of both the province’s origins in mining and the subsequent decline of that industry. As a provincial president explained: “Once the surface mining ended, the population found itself held captive by many local bonds, far from the coast and without the comforts of civilization, and they were forced to take up agriculture, manufacturing, and stock raising. The towns that gold had formed persisted, inhabited by families now rooted in the soil.”30 Of course, “town” was a relative term. Not only were most of nineteenth century Goiás’s settlements small, more properly hamlets (arraiais) than towns, they remained largely empty for much of the year, filling up only when the rural people visited for festivals, elections, or jury trials. Because gold, and the water needed to work it, determined where

R i o To ca

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Boavista

The Province of Goiás Circa 1822 50

Carolina

100 km

Ri

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Ar

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Porto Imperial Goi·s Province

Natividade Duro Peixe Palma

Santa Maria Taguatinga Arraias

Cavalcante Posse São José do Tocantins Flores

Ri o

Ve r

me

lho

Jaraguá

Formosa Meiaponte Corumbá

Bomfim

a

Santa Luzia

Rio A ra

gu

ai

Goiás

Santa Cruz

Rio Bonito Rio Verde Jataí

Santa Rita do Paranaiba Rio

Catalão Paranaíba

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the miners settled, towns typically crowded themselves into narrow river valleys, hot and airless in the dry season and prone to floods and disease when the rains came. While most grew gradually in population over the course of the century, they did not change greatly in organization or physical aspect and inspired little admiration among travelers or Crown officials sent from the coast. At the end of the colonial period the French traveler Saint-Hilaire offered a bleak portrait of the provincial capital of Vila Boa, officially Cidade de Goiás since 1818: located in a “sterile” valley far from navigable rivers and surrounded by low hills covered with brush and burned-over forest, the town was unhealthy and stiflingly hot for much of the year. Its churches were small and of no particular interest and its streets were wide but poorly paved, and although some neighborhoods boasted a few twostory buildings most had no glass windows, replacing these with sheets of locally mined mica. The stock of the few stores (lojas) was poorly organized and overpriced, and the population suffered from a lack of doctors or competent artisans. “Everything is small,” he summed up, “everything is shabby, without beauty or even substance.” A few years later, by contrast, Cunha Mattos found the public buildings “very good for an interior province” and the streets well laid out, but agreed that the town’s location was insalubrious. And while the German scientist Johann Emanuel Pohl opined that after weeks traveling in the countryside even the least hamlet looked good, he added that apart from this the capital had little to recommend it. Some of this certainly reflected the biases of foreigners and of Luzo-Brazilians from the coast, and passing through in the 1870s the judge Virgílio de Mello Franco paid the capital a backhanded complement: “for a city so buried in the interior . . . it was not without beauty.” A half century later, however, Julio Paternostro confirmed that Saint-Hilaire’s description still fit the town “almost perfectly.”31 Meiaponte (Pirenópolis) competed with Goiás during the colonial period and the first years of independence for commercial and cultural leadership of the province, but its economy faded when trade routes shifted and left the town to survive on agriculture and a limited commerce with the north.32 Most of the other settlements in the province had little to distinguish them one from another. Typically they embraced a small knot of houses, many in disrepair, perhaps a dry goods store that kept irregular hours, several taverns selling alcohol, food, and cheap consumer items such as matches and tobacco, a run-down church or two, and a jail incapable of holding any but the most cooperative prisoner.33 The more prosperous had a town hall and a school. Travelers slept in abandoned buildings or in the open sheds (pousos) used by mule and ox cart drivers and considered themselves lucky when they could buy food for dinner.34 In a largely rural

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and self-sufficient economy, towns served little function apart from that of centers for an occasional and modest commerce and as settings for the staging of state and church rituals. Still, for many a sertanejo (resident of the sertão) these modest centers must have been impressive and laden with temptations.35 Goiás’s population overall grew slowly during the nineteenth century and remained widely dispersed, amounting by mid-century to perhaps 150,000–160,000 and rising to some 250,000 by 1900, spread over more than 600,000 square kilometers.36 Of the free population most were pardo (dark-skinned), a result of the mixing of European and African, and sometimes Indian, genes, and travelers in the countryside routinely commented on such race mixture. By 1825 pardos made up perhaps 60 percent of the province’s population, and a rough count a decade later found them predominant in most of the individual parishes.37 At the same time, though, the percentage of those officially labeled “white” was growing: an 1825 count, for example, listed 17 percent of the population as white; by 1832 this had risen to 18 percent; and by 1872 to 26 percent. No survey, however, made clear the bases for classification.38 While such an increase in the percentage of whites may have resulted in part from a decline in the importation of African slaves, as well as an increase in nonslave immigration from neighboring provinces, it may too have been as much a product of redefinition and “passing,” social processes little studied for Brazil’s nineteenth-century interior. With the exception of the 1872 census, population counts during the century tended in any event to be grossly incomplete and sometimes based on nothing but an estimate of “households.” None included the province’s “undomesticated” Indians. To be fair, the size and whereabouts of Goiás’s unsettled indigenous populations was hard to know. Most lived in small family or clan groups and moved frequently, to hunt and fish or to attack or evade enemies. Almost certainly, though, the indigenous population declined overall during the century and surviving groups became more fragmented and disorganized. But while annual presidential relatórios (reports) typically covered in great detail the activities of “semidomesticated” Indians living in governmentsponsored aldeias (villages), settlers and Crown agents knew, or at least reported, little about the lives or habits of the “barbarous tribes” beyond their control. In 1862, however, President José Martins de Alencastre made an unusual effort to compile information on Goiás’s “forest dwellers.”39 Among the “uncivilized” he included “Apinayés,” “Guajajáras, “Caracatys,” Carajás (Karajás), Carahós (Krahós), “Tapirapés,” Javahus and Javaés, Caiapós (Kayapós), Canoeiros (Avá-Canoeiro), Cherentes (Xerente) and Chavantes (Xavante), and Gradaús, although members of several of these groups had

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in the past resided in the government aldeias.40 Some of the Kayapó, for example, had lived in the government settlement of São José de Mossâmedes near the capital and learned there to read and write and to use firearms. With the destruction of that settlement in the early 1830s the Kayapó took to raiding the southwest of the province, taunting their opponents in Portuguese and leaving graffiti where they passed. The Canoeiros “infested” the north and central parts of the province, but Luzo-Brazilians had little success locating their settlements or learning their customs, except that they were said to be cruel and known to be ferocious fighters. On the upper Rio Araguaia and the Ilha do Bananal, groups of Karajá, together with “Tapirapés” and Javaés, lived by hunting, fishing, and rudimentary agriculture, as well as by selling handicraft items such as hammocks and cotton cloth to the military colonies in the area and to passing boats. At other times they attacked the Luzo-Brazilians. Although President Alencastre generally exhibited more cultural tolerance than did most of the province’s settlers, he accurately reflected local opinion when he remarked that the Indians “eat too much and multiply exuberantly; besides, they do not like to work and have a pronounced instinct for evil.” At the same time, however, he admitted that they had good reason to be “jealous of their liberty and independence and to be distrustful.” Too often settlers and Crown agents had acted as if violence were the only possible manner in which to approach the bugres (“brutes,” that is, Indians). By mid-century, however, Crown policy had shifted to insist on catequese (missionary work) instead of war to tame the “forest hordes.” But Goiás’s secular clergy was hopeless for this: “Propagation of the faith demands a special education, severity of personal habits, much religious fervor and self sacrifice, virtues not encountered in the clergy of Goiás.” And Alencastre had only a few missionaries from the regular orders available. He argued instead that the best way to free the province’s indigenous groups from lives “given over to pure animal instincts” was to settle “civilized” peoples among them and to cultivate in the Indians needs that only wage work could satisfy.

The Frontier Conflict characterized relations between Goiás’s indigenous populations and arriving Luzo-Brazilians from their first contacts and continued in many areas of the province through the end of the Empire. 41 Indeed, there were few better demonstrations than Goiás that “civilization creates barbarism.” To understand the historical trajectory of Goiás in the nineteenth century it is necessary first to understand its position as a frontier, remembering, of course, that all frontiers are ideological constructs, and

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all frontiers necessarily are experienced differently depending on who you are and where you stand. A substantial literature on the idea and history of the “frontier” in Latin America, including Brazil, exists.42 Most of these writers reject the optimism and democratic tendencies traditionally associated with the frontier in the North American-Frederick Jackson Turner tradition for a darker and more ambivalent read.43 But commonly, too, these are essays based on a limited range of secondary sources that treat broad sweeps of space and time in a short compass. While such an approach may be helpful in generating ideas, the conclusions tend to suffer from a paucity of evidence. For Brazil, however, studies that look at specific frontiers in more depth are becoming available, including, for example, Harold Langfur’s forthcoming book on eighteenth-century Minas Gerais, Robert Wilcox’s and Zepher Frank’s dissertations on Mato Grosso, and Steven Bell’s historical geography of the nineteenth-century cattle industry in Rio Grande do Sul.44 On Goiás Professor Mary Karasch has published a number of papers and is preparing a book focusing on the late colonial and early national periods. Publications based on dissertations and theses in Portuguese are also appearing, including Maria Nonnenmacher’s book on Rio Grande do Sul and Nelson Tomazi’s on northern Paraná.45 The area that would become the province of Goiás was a frontier well before Europeans and their African slaves appeared. The arrival of the first ships on the coast of Brazil touched off waves of indigenous migration into and about the interior. This provoked, or at least aggravated, wars between indigenous groups, as these inadvertently bumped up against one other or carried out raids for the capture of slaves to sell to the new coastal sugar economy. Exactly what happened in Goiás as a result and when is largely lost to history, but the area evidently experienced repeated invasions and population adjustments well before the first European bandeiras (exploring/slaving expeditions) penetrated the region. And the physical environment of the center-west already had undergone extensive ecological modification as a result of fires set by the indigenous inhabitants to clear land for agriculture, a technique Europeans adopted and perpetuated. Bandeiras first reached the area of present-day Goiás in the mid- to late sixteenth century, seeking religious converts, and Indian slaves, gold, and precious stones. Modest finds of gold and diamonds touched off a rush to the area in the 1720s and 1730s, and by 1750 the settler population, free and slave, totaled some 50,000–55,000.46 The invaders’ brutalities and the diseases they brought quickly devastated several indigenous groups, including the Goiáses from whom the province was named, and prompted others to retreat from contact. But some of the Indians fought back, beginning raids and attacks on the settlers that would continue into the twentieth century. Goiás, then, was a classic example of a frontier formed as result

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of the demands, or possibilities, of the larger world economy, in this case merchant capitalism and the value it placed on gold.47 Because of the focus on mining, a settlement pattern of small, tightly populated hamlets developed around the strikes, with little “in-fill” between them. For tax purposes and to keep the miners focused on gold, the Crown initially did not allow farms and ranches to expand much beyond to the immediate environs of the towns and the road running south to São Paulo.48 The pattern of constricted settlement that developed in Goiás, then, was the product of legal controls on gold mining and on settlement, limited demand for food products, and slow and costly communications, but it also reflected the continued presence of groups of hostile and aggressive Indians throughout the captaincy. As a result, from the beginning Goiás presented the “archipelago” form which writers have discovered for other areas of Latin America:49 a scattering of small settlements isolated from the outside and from one another by a hostile environment. If it was gold that drew settlers into the area, held the archipelago together, and linked it to the world economy, when mining began to decline in the 1760s, Goiás necessarily convulsed.50 Because of the boom’s short duration and limited output,51 as well as state restrictions, the captaincy’s mining industry generated relatively little secondary development, so that the fall-off in gold left the ex-miners few alternatives for survival. Some fled the area, taking with them their slaves, if they did not lose these to creditors, while others retreated to the countryside for at least part of the year, to subsistence agriculture and ranching. Overall, the demographic history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Goiás remains obscure, but most of the existing towns survived mining’s decline, unlike the many famous “ghost towns” of the North American mining west. This highlights two of the principal characteristics of Goiás as a frontier: by the early nineteenth century it was already an old frontier, in contrast, for example, to the rapid opening and closing of the North American far west, and it was an urban-based frontier. Towns preceded large-scale ranching or agriculture and continued to function as centers of civilization, commerce, and administration, even as the economy and society “ruralized.” To be correct, Latin Americans and Brazilians generally do not speak of “frontiers,” except as these identify boundaries between neighboring countries. Rather, in Brazil the interior is the sertão: “a category of history situated between fiction and reality.”52 Whereas in the North American tradition the frontier had connotations of opportunity, of a place to start over, for Brazilians the sertão was a dark, unknown, and dangerous space, without God, society, or the state: “In the interior the inhabitants lives separated one from another and beyond the reach of government action or the authorities, [forming] a part of our society distinct from that of the littoral

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and . . . characterized principally by barbarous customs, acts of ferocity, and horrible crimes.”53 Of course, for some this was precisely its appeal: a not very repentant slaver admitted that “he often did not wish to return from the sertão, because in there he had many wives and ate meat on forbidden days and did everything else he wished without anyone paying attention.”54 For such men, the attraction of the sertão was precisely the ineffectiveness of the state’s surveillance and the weakness of its coercive capabilities. A few Brazilian writers have attempted to find in the bandeirantes and the sertão’s miscegenated population traces of a democratic tradition parallel to that argued for the frontier of the western United States.55 However, the shortening of social distance typical of marginal situations such as frontiers is not the same thing as democracy, and miscegenation may be as much the result of violence and force as equality. Frontiers tend to reflect and to reproduce, if sometimes in peculiar and archaic ways, characteristics of the society from which the dominant group derives. In the case of cattle frontiers, these include “outworn forms of social and economic organization whose typical political expression is pastoral despotism.” 56 Eighteenth-century Brazil was profoundly hierarchical and shot through with social and economic inequalities, and life on the frontier reflected these characteristics. By the 1830s and 1840s coffee production in the center-south of Brazil had begun to attract substantial amounts of domestic and foreign capital, capital that built up plantations, improved transport and communications, and funded the migration of large numbers of workers. As the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo coffee frontiers moved west and south, they “closed” in the sense that the new crop dominated the economy, and an immigrant population, slave and free, filled the landscape, largely displacing other export agricultures and other populations. Writers, however, have stigmatized this as a “hollow” frontier,57 emphasizing the extent to which coffee pillaged the soil and then moved on to new profits in virgin forest, leaving behind a devastated landscape. Compared to a pattern of more or less permanent small farmer settlement this may have been true, but apart from sporadic efforts to promote European immigrant colonies, Brazil’s dominant groups did not contemplate yeoman farmer development for the country or imagine a future based on such an economy.58 Plantation production of export staples had been and would remain the basis of national wealth. If the aftermath of coffee evident in the eroded hillsides of the Paraíba Valley shocked foreign visitors, its railroads and its towns filled with businesses, artisans, and consumer goods declared the region a hub of progress and civilization when compared to the sertão. Nineteenth-century Goiás was, by contrast, and in the language of 1970s dependency theorists, the “periphery of the periphery.”59 That is, while the

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worldwide juggernaut of economic colonialism fueled by the demands of industrial capitalism cut a path squarely through Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, it struck Goiás but a glancing blow. This was not for want of effort by Goiás’s elites, but try as they would provincial leaders never discovered a product of sufficient demand and value during the nineteenth century to attract the capital necessary to build the roads or railroads that would have more tightly integrated Goiás into the national and world economies. By the 1860s and 1870s, when travelers from Rio de Janeiro could reach Cuiabá in Mato Grosso or ascend to the heart of the Amazon in two or three weeks by ship, it still took as many months of hard overland travel to reach Goiás: in an admittedly extreme case, the chief judge of the province’s newly created appeals court in the mid-1870s complained of “a long and painful” five months to get to the capital.60 Goiás was not, as administrators repeatedly complained, poor because of inadequate communications. Rather, the province suffered from primitive communications because it was poor, because there were no reason and no resources available to invest to improve these. At the risk of reification, capitalism had scant need of Goiás: there was little there, whether labor, raw materials, or markets, that could not be obtained on equal or better terms elsewhere. If the literature about frontiers seems often to suggest that the “ideal” frontier is a clearly moving line behind which there is orderly settlement and an institutionalization of state power, and São Paulo’s coffee frontier was, by contrast, “hollow,” nineteenth-century Goiás might best be thought of as a “Swiss cheese” frontier, or perhaps as a congeries of frontiers. Frontiers surrounded and separated each settlement and supported only tenuous and sporadic contact among these. The inhabitants of each village, fazenda, and farm were on their own in the sertão, a “desert,” real or imagined, of thirst and hunger, violent storms and swollen rivers, savage animals, and bugres. The geology of gold scattered the original population, with no regard for agriculture or transportation possibilities. Low population densities, the variable quality of land, and the vast claims of fazenda owners ensured that neighbors remained out of sight.61 For Luzo-Brazilian settlers and their African and creole slaves, the “other” of the sertão lay not beyond some distant line but rather it surrounded and confronted them daily, reminding them of their uncomfortable and precarious situation. Because Goiás did not attract sufficient capital or population to close the frontier during the nineteenth century, the sertão remained, to borrow a characterization of Colombia’s llanos (grassy plains), a “static [and] permanent” frontier.62 This is a reminder that frontiers not only advance but may remain in place for extended periods, or even retreat, depending on both exogenous and endogenous circumstances.63 A teleological bent in frontier history tends to see indigenous populations as invariably doomed,

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but there is no reason to suppose that those involved in the conflicts at the time understood or experienced the situation this way. Indeed, some of the Indian groups in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Goiás might be forgiven for perhaps believing that they were winning the struggle against the intruders. Their counterattacks cleared large parts of the province’s north and center of settlers; ranches and towns were abandoned; and the Luzo-Brazilian and slave populations stagnated or declined. A provincial president confessed as much when he explained that “intimidated by this scourge, the people have abandoned excellent and rich cultivations and mines and pastures full of fat cattle.”64 While the continuing hostilities characteristic of nineteenth-century Goiás may suggest a frontier of “exclusion”65 not unlike the North American west, a closer look offers a different picture. Almost always, and this was common to most frontiers where the indigenous inhabitants were mobile hunter-gatherers and where racism did not demand complete extermination, hostile encounters typically involved killing or driving off the men and capturing the women and children. Occasionally, the Crown or families were able to ransom or rescue kidnapped “Christians”66 from the Indians, but for indigenous captives, and despite laws to the contrary, their fate usually was slavery.67 Others entered a more ambiguous position, being distributed as “servants” among the “better families,” to be “civilized.” Some of these assimilated but others resisted, escaping at the first opportunity. To judge by the number of caboclos that there were in the population, at least some of the captured Indian women must have been used sexually. Over all, though, nineteenth-century demand for Indian women among the Goiás’s settlers for purposes other than cheap labor seems to have been limited. As an old frontier and one that grew largely as a result of local reproduction and the immigration of families from neighboring provinces, already by the 1820s Goiás enjoyed a gender balance among free persons and was approaching one in the increasingly creole black slave population.68 Heir to a largely expired gold boom, Goiás entered the nineteenth century exhibiting low levels of material and intellectual culture, and these advanced but gradually under the Empire. Repeatedly, for example, both the destructiveness of local agriculture practices and the poor quality of Goiás’s cattle came under fire from critics. In fact, however, the techniques adopted by the settlers maximized the resources that the province had in abundance, for example, land, and minimized those that it did not, including labor and capital, or those it could not afford, such as better tools and new technologies. Local creole cattle, if not handsome, survived the hard conditions and diseases of the countryside and the rough handling of the cowboys better than might blooded stock. Goiás’s inhabitants were

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conservative but not stupid, and in the sertão they knew that the line separating survival from catastrophe was thin and the latitude for experiment small. The province’s ranchers understood their marginal position and in response developed a low-cost, if low-profit, stock-raising industry suited to prevailing circumstances. Extensive cattle production required few workers but it demanded more or less unimpeded access to wide expanses of land. This raises the question of the relationship between farming and stock raising in the sertão. For the late nineteenth-century United States and in some areas of Latin America today, observers have suggested that frontiers may serve as socio-economic “safety valves.”69 Farmers and agricultural laborers in more settled areas and workers in the cities unhappy with their lot could opt to migrate to the frontier, undercutting the appeal of revolutionary parties or industrial labor organizations. Even if they never moved, imagining that they some day might could have much the same pacifying effect. In twentieth-century Brazil impoverished farmers and rural workers from the south and the northeast migrated to Mato Grosso and the Amazon basin. There many cleared and occupied what they imagined was government land (devoluta), only to find themselves later displaced by large ranchers with legal, or pseudolegal, title.70 In some cases the new owners have encouraged squatters to stay on, inhabiting the fringes of their properties, to form a “picket” or “buffer zone” between themselves and actually or potentially hostile neighbors. Neither of these patterns characterized nineteenth-century Goiás. While, on the one hand, there was migration, it was not chiefly of the small farmer variety. Certainly the province hosted many subsistence and petty commodity agriculturalists, especially near the settlements, but most among the recent arrivals either brought capital and opened new areas to cattle ranching on a comparatively large scale or came fleeing poverty and drought in Bahia or Piauí and initially found work on the lowest rungs of society, as ranch hands or agricultural day labor. Many of these did eventually become agregados, landless subsistence farmers allowed to make use of small parcels on properties controlled by large holders. But the very permeability of Goiás’s frontier undercut their protective utility. Well into the 1880s the Kayapó were raiding not only Rio Verde and Jataí in the southwest but the municipality of Santa Luzia (Luziânia), near the Minas Gerais border, and killing mail carriers within a few kilometers of the capital.71 Bandits attacked towns, fazendas, and isolated rural dwellings. No one and nowhere were safe. Comparatively high rates of interpersonal violence have characterized most frontiers, whether in Brazil, the Argentine Pampas, or antebellum Mississippi, so it should be no surprise that in Goiás under the Empire by far the most commonly reported crimes were murder, attempted murder,

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and woundings. One reason for this was the weakness and perceived lack of fairness or reliability of the ill-named justice system. The police and courts functioned poorly or not at all, giving those who had suffered violence at best uncertain recourse within the law. For their part, the perpetrators of violence rarely had to fear this law, particularly if they enjoyed the patronage of the powerful. Such much-regretted “impunity” was widespread. But not all interpersonal conflict is the same. There was, for example, little ritualization of violence in the sertão of Goiás, and nothing comparable to the Argentine tavern knife fight or the showdowns of the (mythical?) North American west. Male competition did occur, most commonly in the context of the cattle roundups, but the results normally were nonsanguinary; fazendeiros did not wish to see ranch work disrupted. Rather than seeking ritual encounters, the aggrieved pursued their ends with any and all instruments available and were more likely to strike from ambush or to hire professional killers than to seek a face-to-face confrontation. The goal was to destroy your enemy not demonstrate manly qualities,72 an approach that closely resembled, for example, murder in the nineteenth-century southern United States. A common source of violence on Latin American frontiers has been efforts by the state or private employers to mobilize and control labor. In Goiás, however, and except for the few mission Indians, the state had almost no part in organizing work, and broadly speaking, and apart from slavery, extra economic coercion played little role in the province’s labor relations. Why? Part of the answer is that cattle required relatively few workers, and although Goiás’s population remained small and dispersed, it was a settled population with local roots. The situation of Goiás’s rural poor may not have been good but it was better than the opportunities they understood to be available elsewhere. They did not suffer the extreme poverty and periodic crises that drove thousands out of the northeast, and to move beyond the limits of established society in the province offered them little but the likelihood of death at the hands of bandits or hostile Indians. Existing conditions allowed them a reasonable place in the world, so long as they did not openly challenge established hierarchies. In other parts of Imperial Brazil partisan politics and land disputes were important causes of violence. Political conflict generally limited itself to local struggles for control of the ballot box, but in some cases this led to provincewide or even regional conflicts, if never on the scale, for example, of Mexico’s or Colombia’s nineteenth-century civil wars. Until almost the end of the Empire, however, electoral violence was of little importance in Goiás, chiefly because political parties developed there only in the late 1870s. Similarly, serious land disputes were rare, and those that broke out did not normally lead to violence, or if they did this was locally contained.

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Wealth was in animals and slaves not land.73 Fazendeiros typically made vast and overlapping land claims, but so long as everyone had room to run their cattle the actual ownership of land mattered little. Agricultural properties had greater value, and here conflicts did on occasion erupt, but overall, farming was of limited concern in the provincial political economy. In some areas of Latin America increased integration into world capitalism during the late nineteenth century caused the value and price of land to increase dramatically, and owners responded by squeezing workers and tenants, forcing them out to make way for largescale production or demanding more labor or higher rents.74 This did not happen in Goiás at this time precisely because the province’s links with the outside economy remained attenuated and second hand. Finally, there remains the question of how those who inhabited the sertão experienced their situation. As with most frontier inhabitants, those of nineteenth-century Goiás were not particularly self-reflective, at least not in print, but several elements of how they saw their condition stand out. For most among the elites, apart from occasional comments on the physical beauty of their surroundings, there was little that was positive about the sertão. It was, to repeat, not a space in which to rediscover democracy or to search for personal freedom, but a forbidding and dangerous realm characterized by the absence of civilization. Those who could afford it sought to compensate for this by consuming markers of the modern world imported from Rio de Janeiro and overseas, and they closely followed, and imitated, changes in social and material culture emanating from these centers. Generally, “civilization” required the destruction of the indigenous populations or their incorporation into the labor force, the construction of roads and railroads that would link the province to the center, and the importation of foreign immigrants to displace the local lower orders, or at least teach these better habits. Interestingly, while most elites supported such changes, some were frankly ambivalent about the possible results, fearing that modernization might undercut their power and position: “The worse things are the better they are,” they remarked.75 But for others the injuries of life on the margin were immediate and personal: young women of the capital were said at one point to have protested to the provincial president about the lack of local higher education facilities, not for themselves but because the best among the young men now went to São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro to study and came back married. Nineteenth-century Goiás does not easily fit standard frontier patterns. Its economy suggests a “cattle frontier,” but because of competition and distance to markets the region never developed a level of specialization comparable to, for example, the Pampas or even Rio Grande do Sul.76 Agriculture, mining, and the raising and sale of animals other than cattle

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continued to play important roles in the provincial economy throughout the century. What tends to obscure this is the dependence of provincial administrations on the tax revenues received from interprovincial cattle sales. Goiás did not qualify either as a “moving line” or a “hollow” frontier, and throughout the century the province retained its “Swiss cheese” structure. The evident exterminationist aims of many bandeiras and the settlers’ attitudes toward Indians points to a frontier of “exclusion,” at least until we note the incorporation of captured Indians into families and attempts to draw the indigenous population into the labor force. The work of Capuchin missionaries suggests perhaps a “mission frontier,”77 but the government aldeias intended to control Indians were of little, and declining, importance in the nineteenth century. Certainly the closest comparison for the province would be with the llanos of Colombia and Venezuela, but the distances were greater, and Goiás never played the role in national politics that the llanos did. Overall, perhaps what is most interesting is precisely the fluctuating incorporation of Goiás into the national political economy. The province evidently was more isolated for much of the nineteenth century than it had been in the eighteenth, and in regional terms, the north became more isolated over the course of the Empire, as the economies of the coastal northeast faded. For the national elites and local settlers hoping to civilize the sertão, Goiás remained an “unsuccessful” frontier: it failed to close and did not provide security of person or property. Rather, and until almost the end of the century, the opposing forces of intruders and indigenes remained locked in a bloody balance of weakness. In the text that follows, Chapter 1 discusses manifestations of central government power in the province, such as the provincial president, various judges and law enforcement officers, and the National Guard and the Church, and examines how and why these operated in ways unanticipated in Rio de Janeiro; Chapter 2 looks at several real or potential threats to state power, including the black slave population, Indians, and criminals; Chapter 3 examines the failure of basic industries such as textiles and iron production to develop, as well as the structures and operation of commerce and transportation and the obstacles these encountered; Chapter 4 discusses agriculture in the province and Chapter 5, stock raising; Chapter 6 looks at land and especially at the effects in Goiás of the 1850/54 land law; and Chapter 7 details types of work, as well as efforts at labor mobilization and control. Two points need to be made. Much of what the reader will find in these chapters is frankly descriptive. This is necessary and important because so little is known about the history of Brazil’s sertão during the nineteenth century. Foreign and national historians, with most Brazilians, have been

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“crabs on the beach,” neglecting aspects of national history not linked directly to the export sectors. But if we are to understand how Brazil developed under the Empire we need to know more about how the state and the economy functioned in such distant places as Goiás. Also, readers will find many numbers, all of which they should greet with considerable skepticism. Quantitative material for nineteenth-century Goiás is almost always incomplete and often represents little more than informed estimates. The numbers offered here are the best available but they cannot and will not be made to bear the weight of sophisticated statistical analysis.

1

State Structure This province, so remote from the lights of civilization —President of Goiás, 1833

From the arrival of the first Portuguese ships in 1500 to the transfer of João and his court in 1808 and independence in 1822, the colonial state had notoriously poor purchase on Brazil’s vast interior. Not surprisingly, then, a priority for the new Empire was state building away from the coast. Even before the economic changes brought about in Europe by the Industrial Revolution, the rising nation-states there had sought politicaladministrative standardization in a set of laws and policies meant to be uniform across the national territory and to be administered by a bureaucracy loyal to the central regime, the members of which, if transferred from one part of the country to another, could expect to find the same regulations and procedures in effect there. Brazil’s Conservative and Liberal political elites commonly differed on specific policies, for example, the manner and degree of central state control, but they broadly agreed on the need to augment and routinize state presence in the sertão. Any such effort, however, quickly ran up against long-standing traditions of localism, personal rule, and resistance to outside intervention. What was the result? What political-legal institutions did the central state seek to implement in the sertão, how did these function far from Rio de Janeiro, and how successful were they and by what definition? How did the specific conditions of the frontier modify, enhance, or invalidate policies and institutions imagined in the center? What did state building look like from the perspective of the sertão?

Servants of the State The Empire’s chief representative in Goiás was the provincial president, appointed from Rio de Janeiro and changed depending on the needs and politics of the central government. Most of these men were law school

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graduates, and after the mid-1840s none of those who served in Goiás was locally born. The post suffered a high rate of turnover: in Goiás, for example, presidents averaged only slightly more than thirteen months in office, and the rate of circulation increased after mid-century as communications improved.1 This was the result both of shifting political patronage as parties in the center exchanged power and of a conscious effort to keep presidents from remaining in one place long enough to form local allegiances or to enter into economic or political alliances that might subvert imperial policies or authority. But a rapid turnover also left little time for these men to come to understand local problems or to formulate suitable policies and made it almost impossible to carry major projects through to completion. The Empire generally found presidencies in the interior difficult to fill. Appointments to a post nearer the coast or even to a theoretically inferior position as a district judge but in a more accessible area were normally preferred to a presidency in the sertão, and at least until mid-century a shortage of trained personnel gave applicants some leverage in negotiations.2 Goiás’s poverty and isolation made it particularly unattractive: for example, only bachelors could be assigned to the province because the overland trek was thought to be too arduous for women. Anyone with reasonably good connections could hope for something better, and those named to a post in Goiás routinely stalled while they maneuvered for a more attractive appointment. As a result, presidents in the province who had received reassignment orders sometimes spent extended periods as “lame ducks” awaiting their replacements; others left regardless, turning over power to an interim substitute. Thus, much of the time the state’s chief executive position in the province was vacant and waiting to be filled, in the process of becoming vacated, or in the hands of a substitute, hardly the stuff of strong leadership or continuity of policy. Much of the president’s day-to-day work required mediating between the bureaucratic demands of the imperial state and the interests and concerns of local and regional elites. This could be a frustrating and thankless task for the young men sent from the coast, and at least one, previously a successful judge in the province, simply quit, admitting that he was not up to the task!3 The executive’s first responsibility was to assure peace and stability, and each of his annual reports on events of the year past featured a survey of public and private security. Only in the first two decades of the Empire was the former a problem for Goiás and even then local conditions compared very favorably with the turmoil in many other parts of Brazil. For example, independence produced a brief secessionist movement in the north, but dissension broke out among the leaders and a small armed expedition from the capital quickly restored order.4 Goiás participated too in the anti-Portuguese violence that followed the resignation of Pedro I:

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in May of 1831, for example, a mob at Flores murdered the Portugueseborn judge Jeronimo José da Silva e Castro and threatened others among the town’s residents thought to be favorable to Europeans. Three months later disturbances in the capital forced President Miguel Lino de Moraes and various other “adoptive Brazilians” holding public office to temporarily step down. But these outbreaks were brief, and the population of the countryside and of most towns apart from the capital seemed not to have openly subscribed to the anti-Portuguese sentiments.5 Although the historian Luíz Palacín argues that the “events of August” left Goiás a legacy of “instability and insubordination,”6 it would have been difficult to have found a province of the Empire during the 1830s and 1840s more loyal and less torn by sociopolitical conflicts than Goiás. Provincial administrators, together with many among the local population, nevertheless worried that this sort of violence might spill over into Goiás from neighboring districts. In 1839 and 1840, for example, “fright and terror possessed the people of the north with the [rumored] march of Maranhão rebels on Porto Imperial.” Similarly, upon hearing of the 1842 Liberal uprisings in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, Goiás’s town councils rushed to assure the Empire of their loyalty. When reports reached the president that Chimangos (the 1842 rebels) were entering the province, he took troops to inspect the situation along the eastern boundary but found that the mineiros there had come only to do business at the Moquém fair, not to engage in political agitation. Summing up the local political environment a president wrote that “in no part of the Empire does one find easier and more complete execution of the political program of the central government than in Goiás, where, happily, there never has existed the deplorable spirit of exclusion and political intolerance, even in the most excited times.”7

Political Parties National politics and parties arrived in the western municipalities of Minas Gerais during the 1830s and 1840s8 but did not penetrate Goiás until a generation later. In Minas even the back country participated in a provincial politics crucial to national power, and elections were hotly contested and closely watched. Goiás’s situation was quite different. As late as 1878 a president could report: “Innocent still of party struggles, the province of Goiás remains essentially pro-government,” and a resident of Catalão remembered that in those days politics “had no ideology. The dispute was simply for power, to be able to say, ‘I’m the boss here.’“9 Local elites, far from opposing the central regime, fought to be on the side of the winning party and the government: “They give themselves to any president,” a newspaper explained, and Goiás, another complained, was a “simply a fac-

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tory for pro-government deputies.” A judge described it as a “rotten borough.”10 Parties only took hold in the late 1870s and were understood then to be imports from Minas Gerais. For the same reasons, Goiás had little role in selecting those who represented it at the national level, and typically the province’s deputies or senators came not from Goiás or, if they did, rarely returned to the province. Elections would be made to run smoothly, and to be seen to run smoothly, so as to legitimate the desired results. This was not difficult in Goiás. In 1854, for example, the president explained that “[t]hanks to the pro-government spirit of the province, and the absence of political parties, elections here take place in complete peace.” He added that he had not had to send the military to any town nor had he had to dismiss or appoint any public officials or police to assure the proper outcome. A decade later another reported that elections had passed “with no public disorder.” Where “irregularities” did occur these remained minor and were attended by limited violence, though it was certainly an exaggeration to suggest that “political rivalries are unknown” or for a governor to claim in 1898 that the recent murder of Colonel Antônio de Silva Paranhos was the province’s first political assassination. For example, a half-century earlier a president had reported on a struggle for control of Formosa’s town council that pitted the whites against “people of color” and the locally born against recent immigrants from Minas Gerais, and that involved several murders. But the conflict remained local and did not spread.11 In the absence of party competition, such municipal contests focused instead on who “could best be of the most service to the president, whatever his politics.” Another president summed up the situation when he wrote: “Perhaps among all the provinces of the Empire not one could be named where elections run so smoothly and placidly.”12 Conditions began to change only in the late 1870s when the Bulhões faction of the local elites created a branch of the Liberal party. Though linked in Goiás to abolitionism, the party more importantly represented an effort by some among Goiás’s leaders to gain provincial autonomy and shed imposed representation.13 Political parties were the first institution in the province, apart from the church, to have both national connections and an articulated ideology shared across provincial boundaries. As such, parties could be of great service to Goiás, the Liberal paper A Tribuna Livre explained, helping to define and sharpen political ideas and putting an end to the simple “officialism” so long characteristic of the province.14 Soon the Liberals split into two competing camps, a modest Conservative party arose, and even a small group of Republicans made an appearance, so that finally in the last decade of the Empire Goiás’s local politics began to approximate the model historians have derived from the coastal provinces.

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With parties came more aggressive political competition and escalating violence, evidenced most notoriously in a mid-1880s armed encounter at São José do Tocantins (Niquelândia). Tensions there had been rising for some time, ostensibly over control of the position of treasurer of a religious brotherhood but, in fact, because a town faction was challenging the rule of long-time local boss Colonel José Joaquim Francisco da Silva, “The Terror of the North.” With Conservatives in ascendance at the national level and a Conservative provincial president, the opposition in São José organized a branch of the Conservative party and disputed local elections, backed by troops sent from the capital to “keep order.” On election day fighting broke out in front of the polling place between the colonel’s supporters and the soldiers, resulting in one dead on each side and several wounded. A preliminary police report suggested that the government’s troops had accidentally killed their own officer, but the subsequent official version laid the blame for the deaths at the door of Colonel José Joaquim and his gunmen.15 Party politics and party violence had arrived in Goiás a generation after it had begun to agitate the western parts of neighboring Minas Gerais, and it would continue and gain strength under the Old Republic.16 Before the mid-century reforms that banned multiple office holding, Goiás’s president sometimes abandoned the province for months at a time to serve as a deputy in the National Assembly or took a leave to “recover [his] health” or to attend to private concerns. With the president absent, the vice president, always a Goiás native, replaced him. João Bonifácio Gomes de Siqueira, for example, served as acting president five times, for a total of forty-four months, between 1862 and 1871.17 Although Gomes de Siqueira was a trained lawyer and later served as an appeals court judge, typically such substitutes lacked formal legal training, and few could boast upper-level administrative experience. All were deeply enmeshed in local affairs. And everyone was awaiting the return of the president or the arrival of his replacement, further undermining the vice president’s effectiveness. Dubious instruments for the imposition of central authority, at least where this might conflict with the interests of provincial elites, such substitutes held power for extended periods in the province. Working with the president were the Provincial Assembly and the chief of police. The Assembly met briefly once a year and did little. Although presidents technically could not initiate legislation, in Goiás there seems to have been limited resistance from the Assembly to most of their schemes; one congratulated the members for “not having wasted your time in fruitless struggles.”18 Apart from overseeing the spending of the municipalities and passing the occasional law, the Assembly’s chief task was to write the annual provincial budget. But chaos dominated revenue collection and

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state spending, budgets commonly ran deficits, and the Assembly remained unwilling or unable to resolve these problems. Effectively councils of local notables, provincial assemblies did not have the power to directly contravene imperial directives, but they could and did work to shield their fellow elites from the more egregiously intrusive designs of the central regime. For example, pressed by the national government in 1870 to implement a cattle production tax, and subsequently a land tax, Goiás’s Assembly acquiesced but also quickly allowed both to wither for lack of enforcement. Similarly, efforts by the imperial government to obtain information on the province’s economy, with suspected fiscal motives, or to force registration of land titles and the recovery of usurped public land, met with the same sort of resistance.

Policing the Sertão The provincial chief of police was himself a law graduate, where one was available, and often did double duty as a judge. The chief oversaw a network of delegados (marshals) and subdelegados (deputies), the principal agents of law enforcement in the countryside.19 Typically these men were members of the local elite or acted for it and all served only part-time as law enforcement officers. More than any other of the state’s agents, it was the delegado-subdelegado who linked central authority to local concerns, law to custom. The position was unpaid but in compensation offered extensive powers to persecute enemies and protect friends and promised the office holder wide legal impunity. At the same time, of course, efforts to enforce the law were almost certain to entangle these men in local political and family conflicts and to expose them to the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of retribution or revenge. Delegados could expect support from provincial police or regular soldiers only exceptionally, and then with considerable delay, forcing them to rely instead on militia troops or, more broadly, on the powers that accrued to them by virtue of their local status or connections. The activities of the delegados and subdelegados were classic instances of reliance on “private” power to enforce “public” law, and as a result the individual and the position necessarily became caught up in all of the contradictions this implied. The office required courage, literacy, and, ideally, a certain independence, and because of this it often proved difficult to fill. Presidents complained constantly of shortages of suitable candidates and admitted to leaving in place agents known to be incompetent or partial, for want of a better replacement.20 Because local conflicts commonly enmeshed in violence clans, families, and factions, each of which was likely to control one or more municipal or provincial political or judicial posts, delegados often found themselves

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at odds with other officials. In February of 1869, for example, the provincial president learned that the delegado at Boavista (Tocantinopolis) had recently attempted to kill the district judge. Responding to this judge’s plea for help, President Pereira could only regret that at the moment he had no troops or police to send and instead counseled the interested parties to try to get along. In another instance, a traveling Italian doctor found himself caught at Palma in a rift that pitted the delegado against a subdelegado and divided the town’s other officials into competing factions.21 Such struggles were at once facilitated and complicated by the system of suplentes (substitutes). Because of poor communications and illness, posts such as municipal judge or delegado had not only a designated office holder but a series of replacements or substitutes, much as did the provincial president. Because, however, most districts could muster only a few even modestly qualified men for office, the same individuals commonly held multiple appointments: for example, schoolteacher, second suplente municipal judge, first suplente subdelegado, etc. As a result, participants in local disputes typically could each muster the authority of one or sometimes several official posts to bolster their positions. Following a particularly gruesome murder in Natividade, for example, the delegado was unavailable, and a local judge warned the president that the first suplente was himself involved in the killing and should not be allowed to take over the investigation. At Boavista in the north, a president explained, “there are two law judges, two municipal judges, and two town councils, with the result that the only way to tell who is [the proper] judge is by noting the larger number of absurdities.”22 Bureaucratic rationality found itself here thoroughly enmeshed in family, faction, and custom. The delegado’s main duties were to investigate possible crimes, gather evidence, and present this to the appropriate judge to determine if a prosecutable offense had occurred. Where this proved to be the case, he was to capture the culprits, find witnesses and additional evidence, and aid the public prosecutor in preparing for trial. Delegados and subdelegados also were expected to act preemptively where possible to avoid crime and other disruptive behavior. Assisting them were so-called “block inspectors,” but these seem to have functioned only intermittently in the capital, and rarely at all outside of it. Complaints were common that delegados used the power of their office to intimidate or abuse personal or business enemies or those of their sponsors, or to protect criminals and hide their own illegal activities. Genuine neutrality in local affairs was hard to achieve or maintain and, in truth, was not expected, with the result that almost whatever they did delegados or subdelegados found themselves accused of abuse and favoritism. Of course, often they were guilty. To most residents of nineteenth-century Goiás the idea of impartial law and blind justice was

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foreign, especially when it ran against their interests or came at the hands of a member of an opposing faction: “The assertion of an impersonal code transcending the particularism of the vendetta, made no sense in the privatized universe of the backlands.”23 “Justice” often seemed, and indeed was, but vengeance or a vehicle for personal gain: “When they want to persecute someone they find an excuse in the law; when they want to help they always find a way (jeitinho).”24 Not all delegados or subdelegados were competent or assiduous in the performance of their duties. One, for example, ruled a death accidental when simply rolling the corpse over showed that the unfortunate victim had been “strangled with the cover of his own shotgun, castrated while still alive, and then had rocks piled on his stomach until he expired”!25 But just as these representatives of the state balanced public and private, law and custom, they found themselves too poised between advantage and peril. If holding the position might augment an individual’s or group’s power and status, it just as easily could prove burdensome and dangerous, and each year dozens petitioned to be relieved of their appointments.26 There was the simple danger of having to deal with armed and potentially lethal miscreants: in one case, a subdelegado reported that a thug appeared for a scheduled deposition armed with a double-barreled shotgun and a long knife, and then waited threateningly by the side of the road, weapons in hand, as the official rode home. In another instance, an agent at Santa Rita do Paranaíba (Itumbiara), faced with popular demands that he arrest a notorious criminal, instead sought refuge in his own house, only to be joined there shortly by the presumed criminal, now pursued by an angry lynch mob.27 Often, too, those accused of crimes were among the locally powerful or enjoyed their protection. In November of 1878, for example, a subdelegado at Rio Verde explained that he could not investigate a recent murder because everyone was afraid of Colonel Joaquim Bernardo de Oliveira, thought to have ordered the killing.28 And before the development of political parties and serious electoral competition in Goiás, the posts of delegado or subdelegado “that are everywhere ardently sought and often involved in local or provincial political conflict, here are refused.”29 Delegados and subdelegados reported to various judges, including justices of the peace, municipal judges, and, most importantly, the juiz de direito (law judge), with jurisdiction over the entire comarca (judicial district). As originally imagined, justices of the peace were to be popularly elected and had responsibility for policing neighborhoods and small communities, as well as handling lower-level civil and criminal disputes. The justices, however, quickly earned a reputation for incompetence and abuse and lost most of their power to the delegados in 1840s judicial reforms.30

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Municipal judges also dealt with minor crimes and civil matters such as wills and inheritances and small-scale land conflicts. Again, a problem was the shortage of properly prepared candidates. In 1848 Goiás’s president reported that there was not a single law school graduate serving as a municipal judge anywhere in the province.31 When Bernardo de Guimarães first became a municipal judge of Catalão in the mid-1850s he was certainly among the first such bachareis (law school graduates) to hold the post in Goiás outside the capital; as late as 1870 only a small number of municipal judgeships were in the hands of trained lawyers. The problem, as various presidents acknowledged, was the difficulty in luring educated men to poorly paid municipal posts, especially in the more remote parts of the province.32 Not until the 1890s did Goiás set up its own law faculty, to train men presumably more willing to work in the province. Reliance on locally rooted, lay judges multiplied the opportunities for mischief or simple mistakes: occupants of the posts freed prisoners who should have been jailed, condemned others regardless of the evidence, victimized widows and orphans, and cheated the state. Because most could not or would not live on what they earned as judges, they frequently absented themselves from town, to look after their ranches or to travel on business, impeding the resolution of legal cases. Some held multiple offices.33 If ignorance brought procedural errors, in other cases lay judges hesitated to act at all precisely because they feared to make mistakes. Criminals, the locally powerful, and popular sentiment pressured judges, and blood and kin relations cut across class and factional political or power alliances, further confusing the possibilities for justice. Without adequate checks on their authority, lay judges could become, a president remarked, “monstrous enemies of humanity”; others were ready to acquit everyone.34 Nevertheless, and after reviewing a number of local cases, it is impressive how thorough and even-handed many of the lay judges were, and how ready they were to hand down decisions that must have aggravated important, and possibly dangerous, members of these small communities. The juiz de direito was supposed to bridle the worst instincts of inferior judges and counterbalance their incompetence, as well as supervise the juries that decided major cases. All such judges were law school graduates and most hoped for upwardly mobile careers in the imperial bureaucracy or in party politics. Through schooling that restricted training to two faculties and service in a centralized bureaucracy, the state attempted to socialize these judges to a set of national values and to a view of law and public administration that served first the interests of the Empire.35 Rarely, for example, were they allowed to sit in their communities of origin. Hopes for the implementation of bureaucratic rationality notwithstanding, however, patronage and political connections at least as much as training and

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competence, determined a judge’s professional fate,36 placing him too at the intersection of public and private authority. Goiás was no more sought after by ambitious young judges that it was by prospective presidents. Costs of living were high, and the isolation of the far sertão made it difficult for the new appointees to develop professional contacts. It also left them vulnerable to local enticements or pressures: more than one Goiás law judge received notice from the local boss to leave town or die, and several in the province were assassinated. Others chose a more profitable route, making business arrangements with local elites or marrying into their families.37 And as was the case with other judicial posts, at least until the last decade of the Empire, Goiás rarely had trained law judges sitting in all of its comarcas. The imperial system of frequently shifting law judges between posts and into other government positions undercut continuity and consistency in the application of justice. As did presidents, a newly appointed judge might delay taking up a post, in hopes of a better position. Noting, for example, the recent removal of a judge from Cavalcante to the province of Rio Grande do Norte, Goiás’s president remarked acidly that he was unable to comment on the man’s performance as the judge had never taken up his office in the province.38 Once in place, judges as often as not sought to escape at the first opportunity, to a more agreeable location, or at least on a temporary leave.39 In 1873 Goiás gained an appeals court (Relação), and district judges sometimes had to leave their comarcas to fill in for absent appeals court judges.40 As a result, complaints were constant from prisoners held for months without trial in filthy jails, because a judge failed or refused to appear. The judges countered that their circuits were too large, poor roads made travel impossible, and health problems commonly immobilized them.41 When the law judge was absent or could not serve, the familiar suplente, appointed by the provincial president from among the prominent local men, replaced him: “The law judges seldom remain in the comarcas,” a president explained, “but instead turn their post over to lay persons while they look for a better position.”42 Although most such substitutes had had experience as municipal judges, few had benefited from any formal legal training, and they were not provided books or other materials to orient them in deciding cases.43 Some were grossly ignorant and others only semiliterate: the substitute judge of the Rio Maranhão comarca, for example, was described as “little cultured and even less studious” and nothing but a servant to the powerful of Corumbá.44 Perhaps the prevalence of substitutes gave some semblance of home rule for the towns and comarcas, but many of these judges “mixed in politics, indifferent to the evils this caused and became involved with the persons to whom they are supposed to dispense

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justice.”45 Others used the opportunity to settle old scores. Because of such problems, many among the population preferred the hopefully neutral outsider to the “irrational particularism, the frequency of ad hoc decisions, the terse pragmatism, and the typical lack of distinction between the household and office”46 of the suplente. No wonder, a provincial president admonished one substitute, people are calling it a “jubilee,” when you chose only jurors that would give you the decision you desired, required all of the accused to employ your brother-in-law as their defense attorney, and freed the obviously guilty.47 In jury trials the judge’s role was to supervise the proceedings, interpret the law for the jury, and sentence the criminal if a conviction resulted, or appeal the verdict if he felt the jury had erred. But the shortage of trained judges, Goiás’s president complained, meant that criminals were being absolved by juries that could barely read, let alone understand, the law.48 Justice miscarried, or so it was claimed, in the hands of juries not simply because of ignorance but because of sympathy for the accused or, alternatively, because of fear and intimidation. Much of the juries’ work involved crimes of violence, and for many in the countryside, and regardless of the law, murder or physical assault was the proper response to affronts to personal or a family honor. Defendants played upon these values. Where law opposed custom, the latter commonly prevailed.49 In other instances, jury members feared possible retribution for a guilty verdict. Jails were weak and criminals easily escaped, or they had friends or family to act for them.50 Many of those accused of violence enjoyed powerful protection; fazendeiros, for example, sometimes built up private armies of capangas (thugs) precisely by shielding criminals. These were not men the average juror would care to offend. The jury system worked at all only when an competent judge kept the proceedings moving forward efficiently and in line with the law. In the hands of an incompetent or biased local substitute the legal process could too easily collapse into a sham: “The jury in this province has served less often the cause of law and justice than that of acquiescence, patronage, and impunity,” a president lamented.51

The Army and the National Guard During the colonial period and the first decade after independence the only coercive forces regularly available to the state for policing the interior were the ordenanças or segunda linha (the militia). These units had a generally well-deserved reputation for lack of discipline and ineffectiveness, whether this involved protecting the population from Indian attacks and criminals, searching out and destroying quilombos (runaway slave settlements), or catching smugglers. In 1810, for example, Governor

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Fernando Delgado described Goiás’s militia as sunk in “total confusion and disorder”: of the two cavalry regiments, only one had even a sketchy organization, but the officers had no records of enlistments and the colonel was dead; the commander of the other was ninety years old and “halfdead.” There existed also a pardo infantry regiment, however the officer in command was said to be a drunk.52 A decade later when Raymundo José da Cunha Mattos toured the province to check on military preparedness he found the militia little improved: the soldiers at Jaraguá, for example, he described as “without the slightest notion of military duties” and the officers of Meiaponte were “terrible in all senses of the word. As they never hold drills, it is not surprising that the troops have no understanding of military service.”53 Similar problems crippled the National Guard, created by the Empire in 1831 as a replacement for the colonial militias.54 Modeled in a burst of democratic fervor on the French republican example, the Guard was open to all free male Brazilians aged eighteen to fifty with a minimum income (for those in the interior) of at least 100$000 réis.55 Initially the rank and file elected their officers, typically from among the locally important, or at least those who could afford uniforms. Intended as both a reserve for the regular army and an instrument for internal control, the National Guard might be called up by the state to search for and arrest criminals, to repress slave uprisings and catch runaways, to protect towns and garrison forts against Indian or bandit attacks, and to guarantee the peace on court days and during voting. The chief inducement for enlisted men to join was exemption from forced recruitment into the regular army, while for the officers the Guard offered titles and the chance to wear gaudy uniforms.56 Over time, however, the organization lost both its relatively democratic character and much of its power: during the 1840s the state abandoned elections and began appointing the officers, and the income requirement for the soldiers went up to 200$000. Subsequent changes in the 1870s cost the Guard its policing powers, though this reform seems to have been widely ignored in the sertão where substitute forces generally were not available.57 The National Guard got off to a slow start in Goiás and problems continued to plague it throughout the century. In 1837, for example, the president noted that he still had no information on the readiness of the Guard anywhere in the province, and most presidential reports over the next decade repeated complaints of undermanning, organizational chaos, and lack of equipment: in 1842 the president had to borrow muskets from local merchants to arm the National Guard soldiers detailed to protect government offices.58 Not until 1846 did a more or less complete, if still imaginative, table of organization become available, detailing 13,337 men and 2,253 officers in seventeen municipalities.59 Most of these, however,

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remained “without uniforms, arms, or discipline.” Observing National Guard troops called to duty at Natividade in 1840 to repel a possible invasion of Balaiada guerrillas, a traveler found “a hundred and forty men, most armed with only their hunting shotguns, and without muskets, powder or shot. Those who did not have guns came armed with knives tied to sticks.”60 By the end of the 1850s the Guard claimed, at least on paper, one company of artillery, several of cavalry, thirteen infantry battalions, and various unorganized reserves, totaling in all some eighteen thousand men.61 Their preparedness, however, continued to inspire little confidence. Reflecting on the long-term failure to raise the effectiveness of the Guard, it is hard not to imagine that provincial and Crown elites had reservations about placing arms in the hands of the lower orders outside the framework of a more disciplined institution such as the regular army. In fact, National Guard units commonly served not so much as instruments of central state control as institutional shells appropriated to legitimize the activities of the armed retainers of local elites. Goiás’s National Guard proved particularly ineffective in its policing function. A president explained in 1848 that “Guard detachments get themselves together slowly because the members are reluctant to leave their affairs, they do not have proper arms, and since there is no secrecy, it is useless to attempt to catch anyone.”62 A subdelegado at Santa Cruz wrote to the provincial chief of police two decades later to say that recently he had sent two military deserters and an army recruit to the capital in the custody of four National Guard soldiers, but these had let the deserters escape; he then jailed the errant guardsmen and sent the recruit off again with a new set of Guard soldiers, who promptly lost him!63 Neither were these troops very useful when sent to keep an eye on tax collection points: “They are locals and relatives of the smugglers,” a frustrated tax collector explained.64 A tragic example of the problems created by the Guard’s poor discipline and its links with the community involved a lynching in the town of Bonfim. Late in 1851 reports arrived in the capital that a group of unknown men had broken into the Bonfim jail and murdered two prisoners. Attacks of this nature were very unusual for the province, and the chief of police sent a detachment of troops to discover what had happened. The investigation soon implicated a number of men from the town, including the delegado, in the crime. The two murdered men originally had been remanded as prisoners to the capital,65 accompanied by a squad of National Guard soldiers. On the road the prisoners somehow freed themselves, killed their Guard escort, and escaped. Townspeople quickly recaptured them, however, and that evening a mob bent on revenge broke into the jail and murdered the imprisoned men. The troops from the capi-

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tal arrested many among the local population suspected of participating in the crime, but Bonfim juries exonerated most of these, and those they convicted quickly escaped jail, evidently with the assistance of local people.66 Another duty sometimes pressed upon reluctant Guard troops was manning garrisons, whether in the capital, in the northern forts (presídios) intended to protect against Indian and bandit attacks, or, as noted above, at river crossings and other fiscal checkpoints. In theory the army or the police should have handled such duties, but Goiás was always short of regular troops, and on several occasions the central government removed even the few stationed in the province for service elsewhere. Although Goiás’s town council sometimes employed a small number of unarmed “municipal guards” to patrol the capital,67 much of the policing and the security of key government installations even here fell to the National Guard. In 1847, for example, the president reported that in order to replace regular troops sent to Mato Grosso he had had to call up 100, later 130, National Guard soldiers for duty in the capital.68 The imperial government resisted such use of guardsmen because by law after three days service they had to be paid. Guard soldiers, for their part, protested that the patrols took time from their work and sleep, but the practice continued intermittently into at least the 1870s. In February of 1873, for example, the president explained that National Guard troops protected the Palace, the Treasury and other government buildings, and in most towns they watched the jails; the few regular army troops available in the province were stationed in distant northern forts.69 The alternative of returning these to the capital and replacing them with Guard soldiers was even less attractive than service in the capital both to the guardsmen, who had no desire to venture into the wilderness, and to the citizens the forts were intended to protect, who had little confidence in their citizen militia. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Guard’s notorious inefficiencies, the citizens of Goiás did not question its legitimacy or the state’s right to call them up. But as individuals they were not eager to respond to muster: “[Local men] lack the necessary . . . zeal for service, which they give almost always reluctantly.”70 More fundamentally, by relying on a self-financing repressive apparatus officered by local notables, that is, by privatizing its key coercive instrument in the interior, the state forfeited any ability to discipline those upon whom it depended to control the rest of the population. The Empire delivered coercive power into the hands of a group likely to misuse it, but at least in Goiás to misuse it within the framework of the state and not against it. This was the best trade-off available. An 1858 law that created a provincial police force should at least in part have alleviated the problem of social control. It provided for nine officers and forty-one men, with the troopers to receive a wage of six hundred

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réis a day. When no one volunteered, the province raised the wage to eight hundred réis, considerably better than that paid agricultural workers but still less than regular soldiers received. Even had this force functioned as proposed, however, the fifty men provided for in the original law could hardly have adequately policed a population of 150,000–160,000 spread over some 600,000 square kilometers. In the event, the poor wages offered, together with the outbreak of the Paraguayan War, kept the force a paper entity until the 1870s.71 In the wake of 1870s reforms meant to remove the National Guard from policing, a new law authorized a provincial police force of one hundred men and eighteen officers, with the enlisted men now to receive one thousand réis a day.72 By 1879 eighty men were serving, but wages remained unattractive and the quality of the recruits low. They received only limited training and equipment: for example, although their French-made carbines gave them firepower unmatched by the muskets and shotguns of the rural folk, they carried only ten cartridges each.73 In the next decade the chief of police reported that he still had only eighty troopers available, forty-three stationed in small detachments around the province and the rest occupied in transporting prisoners and gathering revenues from the various fiscal agencies.74 Rarely were men available to pursue lawbreakers or to patrol to prevent crimes. Only after a disturbance erupted was the chief of police likely to scrape together a detachment to send to the trouble spot. As often as not, though, these men simply further inflamed the situation, by drinking and troublemaking or by siding with one faction or another.75 But the provincial budget could not support even this limited number of police, and the survival of the force depended on subsidies from the Ministry of Justice. When in 1887 the imperial government cut its grant, the province reduced the police force to twenty men and officers and then for a time eliminated it altogether.76 Until the end of the Empire, then, Goiás’s government lacked an independent or centralized police force competent to assert state control in the rural or urban areas and continued instead to rely largely on the state-licensed but privately controlled violence of the National Guards. Except for when it temporarily deployed them elsewhere, the imperial government did keep a detachment of the regular army troops stationed in Goiás. The numbers and composition of this force varied over time. In the 1840s, for example, it consisted of two companies of infantry, one of cavalry, and one of pedestres (lightly armed garrison troops), with a budgeted total of some 350 men; by the 1850s the infantry component alone had risen to 600, but rarely was the unit up to strength, both because of recruiting and desertion problems and because the minister of war repeatedly transferred soldiers for service in Mato Grosso. In 1877, for example, of an authorized strength of 683, the battalion could muster 233 sol-

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diers and 34 officers.77 Volunteers were welcome, but poor conditions for enlisted men, harsh discipline, and the dangers of Indian fighting seem to have limited provincial enthusiasm for military service, causing the units to rely instead chiefly on forced recruitment. Conscription was not popular in Goiás.78 Some have suggested that resistance to forced recruitment grew out of the experiences of the Paraguayan War,79 but in Goiás aversion to military service long predated this conflict. Because membership in the National Guard exempted a man from service in the regular army, the weight of military service fell chiefly on the poorest and least protected; in the Vão de Paranã, for example, judge Mello Franco happened upon a poor widow who complained of a subdelegado who had impressed her son to punish him for some small disagreement. How common this was is hard to know, but state policy was to draft those described as “vagrants,” a suitably flexible term with ample room for abuse. In other cases, the regime forcibly inducted criminals, which did nothing to raise the image or morale of the military.80 As early as 1851 Goiás’s president was reporting a general “horror” of military service, and he noted the recent murder of a recruiting agent, evidently at the hands of one of the men he had tried to capture.81 In fact, evasion and escape were common themes in police correspondence, frustrating efforts to find recruits and to deliver these to the army. Routinely recruiters held pressed men in local jails, and often in chains, until they could transfer them to the capital, and as routinely the men broke jail, on their own or with help from others. Usually the only escorts available to transport pressed men were National Guard troops, many of whom sympathized with the impressed men or might even be related to them. Not surprisingly, they often reported that “unknown men” had overpowered them on the road and freed the recruits. More seriously, the chief of police reported two instances in just one month in 1870 in which groups bent on freeing forced recruits had wounded or killed the men guarding them.82 When the Empire shifted from impressment to recruitment by lottery in the mid-1870s, the target for draft resisters shifted to the registers of eligible young men drawn up by local governments. On several occasions groups of “unknown men” invaded town halls and confiscated and burned these registries, sometimes piling them up first in the central plaza to drive home the point.83 That the men involved, even if masked, actually were not known seems highly unlikely given the very small scale of these communities; where they rode horses almost anyone could have identified these. But injuries were rare, largely because official resistance to this sort of popular action was little more than symbolic. Nor was anyone caught for the crimes. Provincial governments called on the army for help with tasks that should normally have fallen to the police, including “the maintenance of

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public order and individual security and aiding with the requirements of justice, with recruitment, [and] the collection of taxes.”84 Typically presidents kept about half of the available troops in the capital, as a strategic reserve, to serve in the presidential guard, and to patrol the city in conjunction with municipal police or National Guardsmen. The rest he dispersed about the province in small garrisons and at the forts in the north. For example, in July of 1864 the president provided the following disposition of troops outside the capital: two companies of pedestres manned garrisons and patrolled against Indian attacks at Porto Imperial, Natividade, Pedro Afonso, Boavista, and Carolina, and along the Rio Araguaia; the infantry and cavalry units were split into small groups stationed in various towns, including São Joaquim de Jamimbú, 16; Porto do Tocantins, 6; Rio Claro, 7; Pilar, 10; Bonfim, 11; Formosa, 12; and Catalão, 11, “as well as not a few undertaking various tasks for the government.”85 If placement of these detachments in the towns helped quell popular fears, they in fact did little to combat the bandit attacks or Indian raids that threatened the population or to repress the smuggling that worried provincial officials. For its part, the army complained that scattering the troops about in small units sapped their soldierly qualities: “Far from the supervision of their superiors, they lose the habits of their military training and become demoralized.”86 In some garrisons the officers sold food and other supplies to the men, further eroding military discipline.87 To the extent that the troops fell under the sway of local elites, they “involved themselves with local intrigues and factions.”88 For example, late in 1855 soldiers from Burity, Minas Gerais, joined up with others from the Formosa, Goiás, garrison to rob and murder Captain Vicente Xavier da Silva in his home at Flores, cutting off his ears for proof. Apparently the attack was part of a struggle over control of border smuggling. Soldiers, better-armed than the general population, sometimes engaged in more or less freelance murder and mayhem, or they might be merely drunk and annoying: “Often they are as much a cause of disorders,” a president complained, “as a help to public authorities.” In January of 1887, for example, the newspaper O Publicador Goyano reported that troops sent to Rio Verde to help ward off Kayapó attacks were instead involving themselves in alcohol-aggravated disputes with members of the local population.89

Church and State From the colonial period and into the nineteenth century the church in Brazil served as the ideological arm of the state: “Religion and morals are the two anchors that hold the ship of state.” 90 The Empire’s consti-

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tution guaranteed the preeminence of Roman Catholicism and the funding of the church, and the government subsidized seminaries and training institutions, imported missionaries, and supported Indian aldeias; through provincial public works budgets it funded the construction and repair of churches. This is not to say that there were not church-state conflicts under the Empire, the most famous being the “religious question” of the early 1870s, but these had little effect in the sertão of Goiás. Indeed, the church as an institution was largely absent from the countryside. Goiás’s inhabitants instead were strongly faithful to such local manifestations of Catholicism as the saints of the parish and given more to the symbols and rituals of religion than to any deep ruminations on its content.91 From the state’s perspective, adherence to the doctrines of the church and obedience to its agents were key to maintaining the social order in the interior: “Without the church the sertão would be overtaken by chaos.”92 Whereas messianic and chiliastic movements erupted repeatedly in the interior of the northeast during the nineteenth century, these found scant echo among Goiás’s population. When, for example, a young man with dark skin and a beard turned up at Cavalcante in 1842 calling himself a “missionary apostle” and preaching the end of the world, local authorities promptly jailed him, with no evident popular reaction. A few years later a Franciscan who mixed liberal politics and religion in his preaching caused a brief stir in the capital, but here again there was no serious reaction among the population when the police ran him out of town, and in the mid-1880s the jail at Jurupensen held an individual who claimed to be a saint and able to work miracles but who nevertheless seems to have drawn no local following.93 Disputes over politics and property that were common in other areas of nineteenth-century Latin America had little role in the province’s church-state relations. Goiás’s inhabitants were as loyal to their church as they were to their emperor, and to traditional Catholicism as they understood it. More seriously, and this was hardly unique to Goiás, the church suffered the effects of a poorly trained and sometimes poor-quality clergy, and too few of these. This was not a new phenomenon. One commentator described Goiás’s eighteenth-century clergy as “the most depraved, licentious and debauched ever,”94 and few suggested that the situation had improved since independence. Worse, there was a constant shortage of priests of any sort, and the Provincial Assembly complicated this by adding new parishes, to satisfy local ambitions. Goiás’s population largely avoided joining the clergy, not so much out of a question of vocation but because of low salaries and the isolated conditions of many of the parishes. The priesthood was the least prestigious of the liberal professions. Priests earned less than primary school teachers or competent artisans, and sala-

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ries commonly ran months or years in arrears.95 A few had other sources of income and sought the position for local status or even as the result of a genuine calling, but whatever the motivation, for those who found it necessary to live off their salaries this must have been a struggle. Goiás’s clergy were on average not well prepared for their duties: “Our priests receive Holy Orders almost entirely without instruction, and, worse, they have no way to acquire this.”96 Before mid-century applicants commonly had only rudimentary schooling in Latin and some ideas about dogma, learned from the bishop or a parish priest. A few gained their post by fraud, by having someone else take the required examinations for them. Goiás did not attract seminary graduates from other provinces, and only in 1860 did the local Assembly pass a law creating a provincial institution for religious training. Still, it took more than a decade to bring the school into operation, and the facility suffered repeated closures, for want of funds or faculty. Students not uncommonly left the program before completing the course of study, to take up more promising and better-paying careers in the military or the provincial bureaucracy.97 The result, a president complained, was “a clergy totally lacking in training that cannot be expected to fulfill properly their elevated ministry.”98 Poorly paid, poorly educated, isolated, and largely unsupervised, but enjoying considerable local standing and, if they sought this, power, it is small wonder that some of Goiás’s priests went astray. Not uncommonly they supplemented their income with outside economic activities such as cattle raising or running small stores, activities that threatened to bring them into conflict with their parishioners.99 Others sought to collect excessive fees for their services or extorted bribes to, for example, perform dubious marriages. The bishop put the situation succinctly in 1880 when he informed the president that there were no priests in Goiás suitable for elevation to bishoprics in other provinces.100 Ambitious priests sometimes sought to convert spiritual authority into secular power, becoming local political bosses and involving themselves in violent confrontations with competitors or other state officials. Early in 1872, for example, José Maria Vieira reported an encounter with Padre Tristão Carneiro de Mendouça, who, heavily armed and backed by hired gunmen, threatened him and other town council members because of the arrest of one of the priest’s employees. In another incident, a subdelegado wrote that the local priest clashed often with town officials and had thwarted his efforts to rein in the disorderly conduct of a prostitute.101 Challenges such as these were doubly difficult to deal with because of the limited authority that state agents had over priests. In November of 1875, for example, Goiás’s bishop refused to provide information about the reported “scandalous behavior” of a priest, claiming that the man was not

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simply a “government employee” but remained always under the jurisdiction and protection of the church.102 What might seem the most “scandalous behavior” of all by a priest, living more or less openly in concubinage and fathering children, actually provoked little concern among Goiás’s population.103 Clearly this was widespread and to a certain degree expected of a powerful and important man, but it did violate church canons and certainly made it difficult for the priests “by their good examples to instill in the souls of people the true spirit of our Holy Religion.”104 How much of a problem such relations provoked depended in large part on how they appeared. Monogamy cloaked in a bit of subterfuge was likely to pass with little comment, both because the people saw it as customary and because the shortage of priests made it unlikely that one sacked would or could be soon replaced.105 Openly scandalous or violent actions were more likely to draw attention and condemnation. The English traveler George Gardner encountered priests at Natividade, for example, whom he described as almost “incredibly immoral,” living openly with slave women and having children by them who were sold to pay the priests’ debts when they died. Another priest came to the notice of the provincial president when he involved himself in a gunfight over a woman.106 By contrast, the general acceptance of monogamous heterosexual unions involving priests seems to have been so ingrained in the popular imagination, and even among the church hierarchy, that when the bishop provided his clergy a detailed list of prohibited activities, including such relatively harmless pastimes as hunting and fishing, he addressed concubinage not at all.107 For the majority of the population that lived in the rural areas engagement with the institutional church remained limited to participation in an annual festival or two which brought them to town and the occasional pilgrimage to make or fulfill a vow. Normally religious brotherhoods affiliated with local churches organized the festivals, in which the priest played only a small role, saying mass and perhaps hearing confessions. Travelers sometimes described these events, commonly dwelling on the “ignorance” and “superstition” of the population and finding the rites reminiscent of the Inquisition.108 While race and cultural prejudices in part drove this criticism, secular ceremonies, including cavalhadas (ritual performances on horseback), drinking and gaming, and, above all, commerce do seem to have occupied at least as much of most participants’ attention as did strictly religious activities. Of course, medieval and early modern European church celebrations were no different. Most important among Goiás’s festivals, and one that drew people from across the province, as well as from the surrounding areas, was the romaría109 (pilgrimage) to Moquém. For two weeks in August thousands

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camped in tents and shacks around the chapel of Moquém, near São José do Tocantins. Some came to ask the assistance of Nossa Senhora D’Abadia or to thank her for help given, others did a brisk business buying and selling animals and imported goods, and “troublemakers,” it was reported, engaged in “orgies, licentiousness, games, and other abuses offensive to morals.”110 The encounter not only gave vent to popular religiosity and brought in a modest income for the chapel, but it served too as a center for the wholesale distribution of goods to the province’s north and helped sustain the economies of towns such as Meiaponte that changing trade patterns in the south had largely abandoned.

Education Along with national defense, the maintenance of internal law and order, and guarantees of property, one of the obligations of the nationstate as it developed in the nineteenth century was the provision of public education to a growing segment of the population. Schools, in turn, served among the most important vehicles for the ideological construction and elaboration of that state. Education was consistently one of the largest items in Goiás’s annual budgets, but the results of such spending remained far from satisfactory, as a succession of presidents noted. The first provincial report in 1835 identified the problems that would plague Goiás’s schools through the end of the century: distances between settlements and a scattered and sparse population, the poverty of families and lack of interest of many of these in educating their children, and the province’s scarce resources.111 A generation later another rehearsed most of these difficulties and added to the list a shortage of capable and conscientious teachers, as well as the high cost of books and paper, laboriously transported to the province on muleback.112 The problems of education divided themselves in two. At the primary level perhaps the greatest difficulty was finding and keeping competent instructors: “I am not aware that even one of the present teachers [in the province] has the least notion of the better methods of primary education,” regretted a president.113 But the wages paid teachers did not allow them to support a family. As a result, they tended to accumulate other government posts and employments and to give less than full attention to the students, sometimes shutting the school and absenting themselves from the community for days or weeks at a time, to attend to more lucrative concerns.114 Cultural values in nineteenth-century Goiás did not allow the North American solution of employing cheap female labor as teachers, except in the few girls’ schools: in 1872, for example, the province had 47 schools for boys, with 1,604 students, and 23 for girls, with 478 enrolled.115

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Certainly some parents gave little importance to education, but more serious problems for most were poverty and distance. Unless the student lived in town he or she had to stay with relatives or board, a cost many families could not afford. There was a serious question too of what the student actually learned, in return for the sacrifices the families made. At best the primary schools taught reading, the four basic operations of mathematics, a bit of history and geography, and Christian doctrine. However, with few supplies, untrained or unmotivated teachers, and frequent closures, it must have been hard for the students to make progress. After leaving school learning requires constant reinforcement so that the skills are not lost, but books were impossibly expensive for most in the province and newspapers had but a few hundred subscribers. Only in the capital was there a lending library, the Gabinete Literário, and this limited access to paying members.116 Still, difficult as the situation was, Goiás compared favorably in questions of education with other provinces more fortunately situated: in 1879, for example, Goiás ranked above Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul in its per capita number of schools, and in terms of male students per hundred inhabitants it led Amazonas, Pará, Alagoas, Bahia, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, and Mato Grosso.117 For those who completed the primary cycle and wished to continue their education, the province offered only a few possibilities. Goiás enacted, and periodically shifted, isolated “chairs” of Latin in various towns, chiefly to help prepare men for the priesthood.118 A provincial law in the 1840s provided a Liceu, or secondary school, for the capital, and for most of the century this was the main, and sometimes the only, comprehensive institution of secondary education available in Goiás. As it developed, the Liceu served two purposes. Those students with the capacity and resources to do so studied there until they were ready to go to the coast to cram for entrance examinations at one of the national faculdades (faculties of higher education); others trained for local employment, chiefly in the provincial bureaucracy.119 In theory, the Liceu offered instruction in Latin, French and English, history and geography, arithmetic and geometry, and design, but, as with the primary schools, it suffered a chronic shortage of adequately prepared instructors; the rumor was that professors discouraged students from acquiring books for fear that they would know more than their teachers. Other problems were a lack of supplies and equipment, absent instructors, indifferent students, and harsh discipline. Nevertheless, when in 1871 the provincial president moved to shut down the school as an economy measure, students and parents rioted, fearing that this would close off the possibility of secondary education to any but the wealthy, who could afford private instruction. Beginning in the 1870s the seminary

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also trained a few students, some of whom opted for careers outside the church, but it too suffered intermittent financial crises and closures, as did a normal school that functioned sporadically in the same building during the 1880s.120

Public Health If not, perhaps, the “great hospital” many on the coast imagined, the interior of nineteenth-century Brazil did harbor a host of diseases and environmental threats to the population’s health and safety.121 Some of these were susceptible to cure or amelioration with available tools and understanding, but most were not, and given the time and place remained effectively acts of God. Common infectious diseases included dysentery, tuberculosis, pneumonia, whooping cough, measles, meningitis, tetanus, leprosy and other skin diseases, typhoid, venereal diseases, colds and influenza, and a variety of “fevers,” chiefly malaria, with the resulting liver damage. Parasites could become so bad that patients died from suffocation when these clogged their air ways. Also afflicting the population were deficiency ailments. Travelers remarked on dirt eating, typically a sign of the lack of certain vitamins, possibly compounded by worms, and everyone noted the prevalence of goiters, some said to be bigger than the person’s head!122 Health problems related to teeth afflicted many but received little attention, and the traveling dentist Oscar Leal encountered gruesome examples of decayed teeth and secondary infections.123 Striking by their absence were yellow fever, cholera, and smallpox. Except occasionally in the far north, travel distances and times meant that victims of such fatal diseases generally either expired or recovered before they reached the province’s population centers. By the 1820s smallpox epidemics had largely disappeared from the south of Goiás, perhaps a testament to worsening communications in the wake of the decline of gold mining.124 Smallpox, though, was actually one of the public health areas where the provincial government made sustained efforts to intervene, if with discouraging results. By the late eighteenth century Europeans understood the value of inoculation against the disease, and both Spain and Portugal sought to disseminate the practice in their empires. But almost immediately the problems that Goiás would face appeared. Because of the distances involved it was difficult to get the fluid from the coast to the province in good condition. In December of 1811, for example, the governor of Minas Gerais warned Captain General Fernando Delgado of Goiás that it would be impossible to immunize the threatened population of Santa Luzia because by the time the fluid had reached Paracatú it was useless. Complicating this was the problem that few in Goiás, at least in the early

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years, knew how to correctly administer the inoculation. As a result, the general population distrusted and resisted the practice, not out of simple ignorance but for the very practical reason that it often did no good or, worse, if improperly administered it could actually cause the disease.125 By late in the century more reliable materials had become available but popular reluctance persisted, and with the approach of railroads Goiás was losing its defensive isolation. Malaria probably appeared in Goiás early in the eighteenth century with the gold miners and their slaves, and a century later it was endemic to large parts of the province. Empirically, local people understood the relationship between standing water and “putrid fevers,” though, of course, not the role of mosquitoes; fear of fevers was one of the reasons that people refused to settle along riverbanks, with their bogs and swamps. The abandoned excavations filled with water that surrounded many of the old mining towns also bred the disease, and this seems to have been particularly a problem for the capital.126 The population knew of the ameliorative properties of quinine, but the drug was expensive and not widely available. For the majority the only resort was “emetics and purges or bitter bark torn from trees,” sometimes called “country quinine.”127 In what would become a familiar refrain, President Lino de Moraes in 1830 complained of the lack of trained doctors, surgeons, or druggists in the province. Of the three men in the capital who claimed to be “curers,” he said, one had some experience as a hospital nurse, another had been a butcher in Bahia, and the third, contracted to set up the textile mill, “suddenly announced he was a surgeon and doctor” when work on that project slowed. The government attempted to lure doctors to Goiás and, failing that, encouraged students from the province to train in medicine and to return there to practice.128 For a schooled physician, though, life in the interior could be stultifying, with little opportunity to keep up with new discoveries and a tendency to lose interest or to fall into a dangerous routine: a traveler visiting Porto Nacional early in the next century encountered a doctor who treated every ailment with the now more widely available quinine.129 There were never more than three or four doctors practicing at one time in nineteenth-century Goiás, and these concentrated themselves in the capital. From the 1830s on the provincial administration supported a charity hospital also in the capital, but the institution remained short of funds and trained staff and effectively was little more than a place for the poor to cure themselves or die. Absent qualified medical personnel, and sometimes in preference to these, even the well-to-do of the province commonly turned to popular remedies compounded by their families or sought the services of local curandeiros (curers). Uncharitable observers labeled these “quacks” and

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“charlatans”130 and certainly some were, but others had a knowledge of practical medicine and of herbal remedies that were at least as likely to be helpful as those prescribed by the formal medicine of the time. Competing with such amateur doctors were rezadores (prayer makers) or benzadores (givers of blessings) who promised to cure people not with herbs but with prayers and spells. While traveling between Conceição and Palma, for example, Judge Mello Franco encountered one João Francisco who displayed “an old manuscript which contained prayers and exorcisms that, according to him, were infallible cures for fevers and malaria.”131 Perhaps suffering a bit the taste of sour grapes, the dentist Oscar Leal complained that in small towns people could not tell qualified medical practitioners from homegrown fakers, and tended to disparage the skills even of locals who returned with professional diplomas.132 Another popular alternative was to self-medicate with patent medicines, most of which contained primarily opium and alcohol or, worse, “strychnine [and] bichloride of mercury,” as well as morphine.133 Provincial authorities understood the dangers to public health posed by the unsanitary conditions in the towns, and struggled with limited success to improve these. If, for example, a president in 1835 identified the capital’s principal public health hazards as “bogs, quagmires, and trash dumps,” a governor’s characterization of the city some fifty years later as a “vast dunghill” suggests small progress. By the early years of the Republic the government was gloomily warning that conditions in the provincial capital were actually worsening, with a death rate higher than that of Rio de Janeiro.134 Residents in Goiás’s capital too often sunk their wells and privies in their backyards, in close proximity to their houses. Others threw trash and feces in the Rio Vermelho, butchers and tanners dumped their wastes there, and it was there too that many among the population bathed and drew drinking water. Contributing to the filth were domestic animals that roamed the streets more or less freely, but efforts to curb these met with strong resistance from the urban poor, for whom pigs, chickens, and goats were their only savings and which they had no place to pasture save in public spaces.135 Among the favorite spots for pigs, goats, and dogs to forage was the Campo da Forca, where they rooted up and ate the bodies of the poor buried there.136 Interment under the floors of the churches spared the elites such indignities, but this, it was increasingly complained, turned sacred places into “receptacles of corpses and vermin.”137 In warm weather the smell was overpowering, raising suspicions that the custom also contributed to the spread of disease. In an effort to show that Goiás was not, in fact, as backward as some on the coast imagined, and to combat disease, the provincial government, the city council, and the hospital began at

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mid-century to campaign for the construction of an adequate burial area distant from the city center: “a monument to civilization and a source of revenue for the hospital.” The proposed cemetery was to have a chapel, a building to temporarily store bodies, a house for the administrator, and space for twenty-four hundred graves, with sections marked off by wealth and social standing, and all surrounded by a stone wall to keep out scavengers. Despite complaints that these still occasionally found their way in, the cemetery became operational in 1859, and shortly thereafter the government forbade burials in churches.138 Progress was slower in the smaller towns, where at least as late as the middle of the next decade the president was complaining of “a lack of cemeteries in almost all the parishes of the province.”139

2

State Power Not so much the ferocity of the Indians but the methods used to try to domesticate them . . . have made them irreconcilable enemies of the civilized class. —President of Goiás, 1846

How effective was this frontier state and why? How successful were state institutions at protecting Goiás’s settler population from the threats posed by real or imagined enemies, particularly black and Indian slaves, criminals, and hostile Indians? Looking back it may seem that none of these groups seriously challenged state construction or state power in nineteenth-century Goiás, but at the time this was not so obvious to those in the province: surveying mounting Indian attacks in the north, a president in 1839 feared “that the circle of civilization narrows every day.”1 From the other side, and even if only for a brief moment, it must have appeared the same to the indigenous populations, as their assaults forced the evacuation of towns, forts, and ranches. In fact, state presence and state power in the countryside advanced and ebbed over the course of the century, manifesting itself in different ways in different regions at different times.

Revenue Revenue capture and patterns of expenditure are generally good indicators of preindustrial state effectiveness. By this yardstick Imperial Brazil in general and nineteenth-century Goiás in particular performed poorly. Both regularly failed to collect and expend revenue sufficient to adequately fund bureaucratic or coercive structures or to develop and pay for needed state projects. In 1879–80, for example, only Piauí lagged behind Goiás in per capita provincial income, and in the following decade, whereas the average tax return for Brazil was 6$590 réis per person, Goiás managed only 1$320 réis, the lowest of any province.2 Imperial and provincial governments commonly ran deficits (Table 2.1) and suffered the effects of unstable incomes, and the provincial regimes had less flexibility and less borrowing power than did Rio de Janeiro. As the Empire neared

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its end, Goiás’s financial crises persisted: “Income has fallen drastically”; a president explained, “not only do the geographic conditions of the province make it difficult to collect taxes on exports, but its industry, agriculture and commerce are ruined by high freight rates, contributing to the revenue shortages.”3 Other factors included the incompetence and corruption that plagued the provincial fiscal system, local resistance to paying taxes, and smuggling. Goiás had the same trouble finding and keeping honest and effective revenue agents that it encountered with judges and teachers. While applicants table 2.1 Goiás Provincial Budgets, 1836/7–1888/9 (in milréis)

1836–37 1837–38 1838–39 1839–40 1840–41 1841–42 1842–43 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862

Budgeted Income

Budgeted Expenses

32:100 37:300 32:280 40:534 35:113 — 57:677 — — 63:340 60:740 48:750 66:475 68:800 — 66:769 67:313 — 40:640 48:637 72:216 97:161 123:105 156:125 152:011 142:946 93:855

36:100 49$200 44:978 57:850 53:119 — 45:104 — — 50:262 61:313 55:961 65:865 68:586 — 59:499 59:241 — 48:577 45:522 57:196 87:416 109:859 106:653 112:870 110:976 113:817

sources: AHEG, provincial budgets.

1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1870–71 1871–72 1872–73 1873–74 1874–75 1875–76 1876–77 1877–78 1878–79 1879–80 1880–81 1881–82 1882–83 1883–84 1884–85 1885–86 1886–87 1887–88 1888–89

Budgeted Income

Budgeted Expenses

105:000 105:380 107:150 99:535 105:824 179:447 108:488 125:125 108:488 166:768 168:867 176:168 184:164 236:100 189:609 248:548 228:873 207:013 259:077 264:574 306:144 — 275:193 272:096 371:585 254:199 229:689

124:531 117:140 120:115 155:719 151:531 202:533 182:882 170:734 182:882 170:734 163:864 168:030 180:203 203:259 266:161 280:904 281:383 212:713 205:903 258:584 263:387 — 244:865 255:065 346:847 263:548 213:350

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eagerly sought appointment to fiscal posts along the border with Minas Gerais “because of the opportunity to steal,” many of the agencies in other parts of the province returned so little income or involved such hardships and dangers that the government found it difficult to fill them.4 Tax collectors rightly were concerned for their safety should they attempt to enforce unpopular levies: one at Arraias, for example, explained in 1844 that past agents had collected few taxes “because they feared fatal results,” and a halfcentury later at Piracanjuba, another collector, having just had a drunken town official ride a horse through his agency door and threaten to shoot him, not surprisingly felt “coerced and demoralized by these troublesome and incorrigible people.”5 Others blamed marauding Indians or bandits for keeping them from their rounds. Of those initially incautious enough to take on the task of revenue collection, a number soon repented and begged to be relieved, refused to perform the necessary activities, or simply abandoned their posts.6 At least as damaging was the incompetence and corruption of the tax officials who remained in office. Most of those employed at the Provincial Treasury in the capital had at best only a few years of secondary education at the Liceu or the seminary and likely could claim a better knowledge of Latin than mathematics: “With one or two exceptions, they do not have adequate training for their duties or the aptitude to acquire it.”7 Those who manned tax posts in the countryside commonly could not make simple calculations, and whether by accident or intent their accounts frequently arrived in the capital jumbled and incomplete. Without independent information against which to verify such records, the work of Treasury officials in the capital often amounted to little more than an “arithmetic exercise.” Even this sometimes ran months and years behind.8 Hobbled by administrative chaos, the state could not know what funds were available for which purpose or who owed what to whom.9 As another result of such confusions, corruption could easily go undetected for long periods and be revealed not at all or only months or years later, when the responsible official had left office or died, making it difficult to recoup the losses or to punish those involved. Agents commonly made alliances with the powerful, to facilitate theft and to protect themselves in the unlikely event of exposure: a treasury official rejoiced, for example, when he could finally remove a corrupt agent, because the appointee’s halfbrother was no longer a state deputy.10 Local pressures and local sympathies might keep cases of fraud or theft from coming to light or to trial, and juries could decide not to convict. In the early 1860s, for example, Manoel Rodriguez da Silva Brasileiro, the agent at Pedro Afonso, complained that powerful landholders with farms and cattle in his district, but who lived in Boavista or in Carolina (Maranhão), were refusing to pay taxes and

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counseling small farmers and ranchers in the area to do the same, claiming that his appointment was not valid and that “the Treasury and its agent only wanted to steal to fill their belly”. For his efforts in the interests of the state, he said, he earned only “injuries, affronts, and disrepute.”11 Apart from continuing to seek competent and effective officials, the provincial government experimented with several schemes to increase tax yields. The Treasury sometimes put agencies up for auction, returning essentially to the colonial system of tax farming. Except for choice locations, though, bids commonly were few or impossibly low.12 An alternative was to appoint circuit-riding inspectors to check up on the tax collectors in the interior, though this assumed, of course, that the state could find reliable inspectors. As early as 1849 the province named three such “exactors.” Particularly those assigned to the north undertook heroic journeys: in November of 1863, for example, one of these reported back in to the capital after almost two years on the road, having traveled 545 leagues and collected some forty-one contos.13 But ultimately this simply added another layer of expense to the fiscal system and was no substitute for competent agents, and the Treasury subsequently abandoned the scheme. Undermining the morale and effectiveness of all provincial employees was the chronic failure of the state to pay them in full and on time. On the face of it this should not have been a problem for fiscal agents in the interior because they worked for a percentage of collections. But when business was slack they had no income, and the soldiers assigned to some of these posts to combat smuggling did not receive their wages.14 This encouraged corruption and bribe-taking and undercut efforts to enforce the laws. By contrast, bureaucratic work in the capital was salaried and highly prized because of this. During much of the century, however, the state’s payrolls ran months and even years behind. Those hired commonly waited up to two years or more to begin to receive their pay and even then this might take the form of promissory notes or scrip. With no other recourse, they traded or sold these at discounts of as much as 50 percent to capital city merchants and speculators, who then could use the notes at face value to pay taxes.15 In order to combat these sorts of injustices presidents sometimes took out loans from private sources to catch up on back salaries, and in the mid-1850s one turned the situation on its head, choosing to use such a loan to pay current accounts and only gradually make up the backlog. The province soon fell behind again, however.16 Poorly trained and poorly paid bureaucrats were a certain recipe for fiscal disorder, the normal condition of Goiás for much of the century. Although Goiás collected, or attempted to collect, taxes from a wide range of sources, up to mid-century provincial income depended heavily on the dízimo (tithe or one-tenth) tax on cattle and food (miunças) produc-

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chapter 2 table 2.2 Provincial Income by Tax, 1871–1887: Selected Taxes (in milréis)

1871–72 1874–75 1877–78 1880–81 1883–84 1886–87

Cattle exports

5% food

Transit taxes

Slave sales

16:801 21:046 41:163 65:109 52:437 90:534

14:143 17:219 16:148 14:982 15:410 25:652

12:700 12:169 9:014 12:252 14:739 25:016

3:651 8:241 6:703 4:609 4:892 3:238

Alcohol

Hides

3:126 2:940 2:827 2:046 2:795 2:070

1:844 2:185 8:337 6:329 6:982 5:469

source: AHEG, provincial budgets.

tion. Projected revenues for 1842 included, for example, 3:593$588 réis from the cattle dízimo and 8:080$152 réis from the dízimo on agriculture compared to only 1:712$800 réis from levies on meat consumption and 996$000 réis from alcohol taxes.17 Despite the name, a dízimo was not necessarily calculated at one-tenth, but instead the rate varied over time and with a particular item. There were separate dízimos for coffee and tobacco and taxes on the sale or “export” of cattle and horses out of the province, although at first these latter levies had more to do with trying to keep animals in Goiás to build up provincial herds than with revenue as such. Similarly taxed were sales of slaves, as well as their transfer out of the province: “It seems necessary to me,” a president argued, “to raise this tax as high possible, to make it repressive, in order to stop the drain of workers from our agriculture.”18 However, the government was slow to revive the necessary registros (checkpoints) on the province’s borders and actually collected few of the export taxes before mid-century. Urban, but not rural, property paid an annual tax based on its rental value, and fees were due for the use of the main river crossings, for the exercise of certain liberal professions, and to operate stores and taverns. Minor imposts such as that on inheritances occasionally netted a windfall. But parched for revenue as the province might be, even state officials remained conflicted about how aggressively they should attempt to collect taxes and feared the effects such efforts might have: “Our principal taxes, if pursued with a minimum of care, would be too heavy and could not help but affect or even destroy the revenue sources upon which they fall.”19 In the mid-1850s the province abandoned the dízimos on cattle and agriculture and substituted for these a 5 percent tax on the public sale of food products and a revised cattle export duty.20 These quickly became the mainstays of provincial revenues (Table 2.2). Goiás’s legislature each session drew up a budget of anticipated revenues and expenditures for the coming year (Table 2.1). Unfortunately for

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table 2.3 Selected Provincial Expenses, 1835–1885 (in milréis) Category

1835

%

Total 53:135 — Assembly 4:982 9 President 4:550 9 Education 6:300 12 Hospital 1:600 3 Public Works 8:000 15 Missions 5:000 9

1845

%

58:562 — 5:224 9 3:300 6 11:652 20 2:900 5 7:000 12 4:600 8

1854

%

47:442 — 2:337 5 4:150 9 11:760 25 1:800 4 4:000 8 1:000 2

1865 %

149:100 9:053 9:800 30:600 6:800 23:750 1:000

1875

%

1885

%

— 203:259 — 233:365 — 6 8:547 4 9:218 4 7 11:080 6 12:208 5 21 53:650 25 64:660 28 5 8:700 4 10:000 4 16 15:000 7 14:000 6 .6 500 .2 — —

note: % = of total budget. source: AHEG, provincial budgets.

the historian, and, one imagines, for provincial officials, many years saw several versions of the budget circulated, typically giving widely different revenue and spending projections. In any case, and as events repeatedly demonstrated, such projections often bore little relationship to what the state actually took in or spent in a given year. Too, collections ran years and even decades in arrears and debts mounted. Lacking the imperial government’s ability to literally “paper over” shortfalls by printing money and enjoying limited ability to borrow, Goiás went through repeated and wrenching bouts of belt tightening, including closing schools, deferring maintenance and capital projects, and leaving the police and other provincial employees unpaid. If Goiás’s budgets were not always reliable indicators of actual income or expenses, they do suggest intent. Patterns of anticipated spending, for example, remained fairly consistent over the course of the century, with, however, a few interesting shifts (Table 2.3). Most impressive is the provincial commitment to education, which as a percentage of the budget more than doubled over fifty years, even if the results remained less than satisfactory. At the same time, expenses involved in missionary and nonmilitary efforts to subdue the province’s indigenous population fell from 10 percent of the budget to nothing as that population dwindled and the danger of attacks faded in most areas. Expenditures for public works may seem low for a province whose inhabitants constantly bemoaned a lack of adequate roads and bridges. In part this is because support for many infrastructural projects came as special grants or subsidies from the central government, funds not normally included in the provincial budget. When money was thought to be available, the imperial government “opened credits” for the poorer provinces, either in the form of general budget assistance or, increasingly, through specific ministries and for particular projects.21 In Goiás’s case, this subsidy amounted during the 1820s to a conto a month and arrived in the form of

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chapter 2 table 2.4 Imperial Transfers to Goiás, 1860s versus 1870s (in milréis) Ministry

Empire Justice War Treasury Agriculture Total

1860–70

1870–80

92:049 80:589 3.659:069 104:044 325:652 4.262:316

148:219 342:510 2.680:120 74:504 844:801 4.091:156

source: Relatório-1881-2, 111–12.

copper sheets. Using a locally constructed machine the provincial administration cut and pressed the metal into coins. Goiás lost this help early in the 1830s as the state shifted to paper money, and provincial public works suffered as a result.22 But by the next decade the central government was again providing help, now as items in the budgets of individual ministries: for example, the Ministry of Justice paid Goiás’s judges, the police, and the National Guard; the Ministry of the Empire helped with the mail, missionary work, the bishop and clergy, and the costs of the Presidency; War funded the local army garrison; road building and similar infrastructural improvements received assistance from the Ministry of the Empire, and, later, the Ministry of Agriculture.23 Because plans and projects varied from year to year, because the president’s reports and the budget did not always differentiate such assistance, and because what was promised did not necessarily materialize, it is difficult to estimate the impact of imperial subsidies on the province’s finances. But it was substantial. For example, in 1881 Vice President Rodrigues de Moraes reported that during the past two decades the province had received assistance from the central state as shown in Table 2.4. By comparison, in 1860 Goiás anticipated a total provincial income of only 152:011$361 réis and in 1870 but 125:125$723 réis. Remembering, too, that local authorities rarely managed to collect more than part of budgeted revenues, the importance of imperial credits seems clear. Precisely because they could not be guaranteed year-to-year, however, subsidies remained a constant source of anxiety for provincial administrators. When, for example, in the mid-1870s the Empire failed to allocate Goiás assistance for road construction, work on such projects in the province came to a sudden and almost complete halt.24 Together with writing the provincial budget, Goiás’s legislature supervised the revenues and spending of the towns. The municipal law of 1828 greatly reduced the power and responsibilities of local câmaras (town councils) and cut too their sources of revenue, leaving them only a few

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small levies on weights and measures, on cattle killed for sale and consumption, and on tobacco and alcohol, as well as licensing fees for local and visiting merchants, artisans, and professionals. Sometimes individual towns were permitted special taxes: for example, on placer mining in local rivers.25 Although in theory municipal budgets each year had to balance, many towns, like the province, instead suffered repeated deficits and labored under substantial debts.26 And just as the government of Goiás depended on the imperial government for help with capital projects, the towns looked to the provincial regime to assist them with local improvements, or even to pay for repairs on existing equipment or facilities. Jails were by far the most common project for which municipalities sought assistance from the province, and year after year they pestered the public authorities for money. In response, for example, the Provincial Assembly in 1839 appropriated money to repair the jail in Santa Cruz, and the following year Palma received 250$000 réis for the same purpose; a half century later Porto Imperial was asking the Assembly for funds for their lockup. Towns also wanted help with building and fixing schools and cemeteries, municipal offices, and bridges and roads. More than one president, though, responded to the constant importuning of the municipalities by observing that too often when these received funding assistance, they misused it, because of corruption or a shortage of materials or a lack of competent artisans to carry out the work. Over all, because municipal government in Goiás was weak, “without vitality or capacity to act,” the provincial government “de facto absorbed municipal administration and exercised its functions, because [the towns] had no income, no regulations, no authority or effect.”27

Threats to the State: Slaves, Criminals, and Indians One of the most obvious consequences of the state’s perennial financial straits was that it was poorly equipped to protect the population against such “evildoers” as rebellious or escaped slaves, criminals, and the “hordes” of ferocious Indians thought to “infest” the countryside. Nevertheless, what is actually most striking about these threats to public safety is the unwillingness or inability of the citizens to defend themselves. Whereas, mocked an 1850s president, a century before settlers regularly battled large indigenous groups, “today word of a half dozen bows of a small tribe spreads terror through any of our settlements, which expect to be rescued by the provincial administration.”28 Rumors of the approach of bandits or even a group of gypsies could equally panic small communities, prompting frantic appeals to the president for help. Part of the problem was simply the poverty of the rural population, and especially of the small farmers and agregados, which made it difficult for them to acquire and

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maintain firearms; at best they might have an old musket or a muzzle-loading shotgun charged with homemade powder and ball, and sometimes not enough for a second shot.29 Too, whereas the early bandeirantes and mining prospectors necessarily understood how to survive in the wilderness, nineteenth-century townspeople, and even many farmers, did not. Few could track escaped slaves or had the skills to find Indian raiding parties or spoke indigenous languages. As a result, Indians and criminals, and the occasional runaway slave, moved freely about the countryside with little fear of capture.30 Few groups seemed more threatening to Brazil’s free population or to the fledgling state than the country’s black slaves, a population replenished regularly from Africa up to mid-century. In the years after independence several of Goiás’s neighbors suffered large-scale slave revolts, as well as popular uprisings that drew in slaves and the free poor alike. Debates about the possible “Haitianization” of Brazil occupied the press. The 1860s Paraguayan War disrupted the entire center-west and loosed upon it runaway slaves and army deserters: in 1867 Goiás’s president reported that since the outbreak of war he had been hearing rumors of a possible slave revolt, though he thought it unlikely.31 And by the mid-1880s many areas of Brazil were experiencing massive slave resistance and flight. Unrest of this sort encountered little resonance in Goiás. Such had not always been the case. During the eighteenth century there were many reports of slave escapes and quilombos (escaped slave communities) together with repeated militia and popular expeditions to repress these. For example, in 1760 the governor of the Captaincy described the recent discovery and destruction of a settlement of more than two hundred escaped slaves and their children. Indeed, historians of the colonial period have argued that hardly any colonial town was free of “the shadow of its quilombo.”32 Rumors of such communities continued to circulate into the last days of the colony and through independence, though actual encounters or engagements with escaped slaves became increasingly rare. Expeditions sent north in the 1830s to attack the Canoeiro and Xavante, for example, received instructions to look also for quilombos but had no more luck finding these than they did the Indians. Generally, references to escaped slave communities or evident fear that these existed or might threaten the settled populations are almost entirely absent in surviving nineteenth-century provincial records.33 This contrasts dramatically with the experience of neighboring Mato Grosso, where violent encounters with fugitive slaves and reports of quilombos figured prominently in presidential reports up to the end of slavery and even beyond.34 Court and jail records in Goiás only occasionally referred to escaped or recaptured slaves, and the correspondence of the delegados and subdel-

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table 2.5 Slave Population of Goiás, 1804–1885

1804 1808 1824 1832 1856 1861 1872 1885

Slaves

% of population

21,176 19,185 13,375 13,261 12,334 11,448 10,548 5,194

42 35 21 19 10 9 7 3.5

sources: Relatório-1858-2, anexo; França, “Povoamento,” 116; Moraes, Bulhões, 64; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 347, 9 Dec. 1885; AN Cod. 808, vol. 1, fl. 96; Brazil. Directoria Geral, Recenseamento . . . 1872; Karasch, “Slave Women,” 81.

egados, as well as that of the municipalities, rarely touched on the subject. Notices did appear in newspapers, but the capture of escaped slaves seems to have been more a private than a public enterprise: owners, for example, sent employees in pursuit of fugitives or hired private slave catchers.35 National Guard troops and local police only reluctantly involved themselves in hunting for runaways, both because these sometimes put up fierce resistance and because anyone attempting to capture a slave might be prosecuted for property damage if they hurt or killed the fugitive. In January, 1859, for example, the subdelegado at Rio Claro arrested and sent to the capital for trial three National Guard soldiers who had killed an escaped slave when they tried to take him prisoner.36 Why were owners not more worried about slave escapes or quilombos or, put the other way, why did slaves not flee more often or form resistance communities? Part of the answer was demographics. Unlike areas of Brazil with more dynamic export economies, in Goiás by mid-century there were not many slaves, either in absolute numbers or as a proportion of the population, and their numbers were declining (Table 2.5). But it was more than simply numbers. Once mining collapsed the importation of slaves into Goiás became prohibitively expensive, and suggestions that the central government subsidize the trade met with an unfavorable response.37 Not only were new levies not arriving, but there was a small but steady traffic in captives from Goiás to provinces where they brought higher prices, chiefly to Mato Grosso before 1850 and then to the coffee frontier.38 Slave traders easily evaded the export tax.39 With the fall in imports the black slave population “creolized,” resulting in an increasingly balanced sex ratio, while sales and thefts tended to drain the more valuable, and potentially more violent, young men from the province. Matrículas (slave registries) in 1872 and 1885 showed a predominance of older men and women

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and children among Goiás’s slaves, not a population likely to revolt or to escape to form foci of resistance.40 Other factors militating against slave uprisings included the nature of the local economy, patterns of labor relations, the hostility of the indigenous population, and the relative ease with which slaves could legally free themselves. It might be argued that the very size of Goiás and its small population should have made escape easy and the discovery of quilombos difficult. In fact, however, far from isolating themselves, escaped slave communities in Brazil had a history of peaceful or violent interaction with nearby free settlements. The relative absence of such contacts in nineteenth century Goiás suggests that any quilombos that may have existed remained small and of little economic or security concern.41 Labor conditions, too, in nineteenth-century Goiás were such that the slaves seem to have been relatively well treated and to have worked along side other types of labor at similar tasks. Mid-century censuses, for example, showed wage workers, renters, agregados, and slaves laboring together on small and medium-sized agricultural properties and on cattle fazendas, and these made clear too the absence of large, slave-based commercial plantations comparable to those on the coast. Pardos and mixed bloods predominated among the rural free population, so that slaves, free workers, and masters looked and lived very much alike.42 In fact, free labor in the capitalist sense hardly existed in the countryside, with most of the poor seeking instead stable patron-client relationships with their more powerful neighbors. On the ranches and in alluvial mining slaves sometimes worked on their own and apart from direct supervision, yet few tried to escape, perhaps because the nature of these activities gave them considerable personal freedom, as well as a good chance to accumulate capital with which to buy their manumission. Thus, especially after the Free Birth Law in 1871, the day-to-day situation of slaves may not have been all that different from other workers nor have been experienced by them as such. In contrast, to escape into unsettled areas not only involved entering an environment with which imported or creole slaves had little experience, but also risked death at the hands of an indigenous population that generally showed little sense of community of oppression with black slaves but instead commonly killed them as agents and allies of the whites.43 This did not mean that captives accepted their situation or remained passive. Most forms of resistance familiar to those who have studied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New World slave societies manifested themselves in Goiás. The exception was large-scale revolts or uprisings, apparently entirely absent from the province under the Empire. Quite likely the small numbers of slaves and their wide dispersion made organization or conspiracy, or even communications, difficult. Instead, resistance

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was individual. Disgruntled slaves, for example, physically attacked their masters. Typical were events noted in the 1 April 1838 number of the Correio Official: a slave mother and her son confessed to killing their owner and received death sentences, though whether the executions actually took place is unclear.44 Justice certainly was arrayed against the slave, but juries did not always condemn them out of hand: in 1856, for example, a jury cleared several slaves accused of murdering their master, for lack of evidence, and in 1881 a Catalão jury absolved the slave Maria of the crime of poisoning her mistress Maria Propícia. The mistress herself had been under suspicion at the time of having arranged the murder of her husband, and the popular sentiment seems to have been that she had it coming to her!45 Slaves injured free persons and each other in efforts to be sent to jail or to remain there rather than to be returned to a cruel master, and for the same reasons others committed suicide.46 With the exception of violent uprisings and quilombos, then, slaves in nineteenth-century Goiás acted much the way studies have shown that African and African-American slaves resisted, and accommodated, in other parts of the Americas. Goiás’s elites lived a contradiction common in many New World slave societies: they feared the real or potential violence of their slaves but sought at the same time to obtain more captives, complaining of shortages and blaming these for the province’s “backwardness.”47 What comes across dramatically in provincial newspapers and government correspondence is the extent to which, even on this far frontier where slavery played such a small role in the local economy, much of the free population stuck unswervingly to an assumption of the need for bound labor. It was a quite astonishing triumph of ideology over reason and aggravated the province’s problems by distracting attention from more creative ways of addressing local economic, and specifically labor, difficulties. Ironically, the attitude could persist precisely because the extensive cattle raising that developed in the province, together with an absence of markets for large-scale commercial agriculture, limited labor demand. Employers may not have found nonslave workers as cheap or docile or as readily available as they might have liked, but serious labor shortages were not a problem for the nineteenth-century provincial economy. Slavery persisted, in part, because it was unnecessary.

Crimes and Criminals More threatening in real terms than slaves were criminals and the province’s undomesticated Indians. Goiás, the chief of police explained, was awash in crime because “of ignorance, lack of public force, protection of criminals by the locally powerful or the wealthy, the negligence

17 -6 23 11 30 53 -19 -24 25 29 23 14 13

-1 -7 8 12 4 12 5

1 2

5 --

Attempted Murder

4 -6 10 15 6 18 -4 -23 37 34 24 35 27

Wounds

-6 8 11 10 6 9

1 -8 9 3 2 5 --

“Robbery”*

1861 --** 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876

* Includes robbery and theft. ** No data for 1839–46, 1852, 1854, and 1862. sources: Relatórios. For summaries, see Relatório-1863, 164, 1869, 260, and 1871, 87.

1838 --** 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 --** 1853 --** 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860

Murder

22 -14 23 13 10 17 18 23 22 12 14 16 11 15 9

Murder

table 2.6 Selected Criminal Statistics, 1838–1860

4 5 6 3

13 -9 6 2 6 7 10 9 6 5

Attempted Murder

34 -10 12 15 9 14 16 31 30 18 8 9 7 7 6

Wounds

6 -4 2 2 3 7 13 5 9 9 6 1 2 7 2

“Robbery”*

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and fear of those in charge of enforcing the law, and the lack of jails. From this is born impunity, a cancer that eats away the fibers of our society.”48 Admitting that “crime” is defined and, more importantly, that definition is enforced by those with the power to do so, it is nevertheless useful here to distinguish among several categories of criminal activities, roughly in terms of threats that these might pose to the state. Most evident in all of the surviving records are of crimes of violence: murder, woundings, and assaults. Statistics are incomplete but the parameters of crime in nineteenth-century Goiás are unmistakable (Table 2.6). To the extent that it is possible to do a regional breakdown of the statistics, and despite the north’s reputation for turbulence, the occurrence of violent crime largely paralleled population density, with slightly higher rates in the southeast, and especially in some of the border districts. Another way to understand Goiás’s crime is simply to follow the events of a typical year, in this case 1880–81. Selected Crimes, Goiás, 1880–188149 November 1880 Lecadio José de Souza escaped from the Boavista jail, aided by the jailer and a soldier. 9 December 1880 Cassiana Nogueira da Costa, Laurindo Nogueira da Costa, and Salvador do Nascimento beat Rufina de tal (no location given). 29–30 December 1880 In Curralinho Antonio Lemos dos Santos was wounded by a shot and Joaquim Luiz da Fonseca hurt by a blow when the subdelegado broke up an illegal meeting. December 1880 Euzebia Antonia Maria da Conceição escaped from the Boavista jail, as did Felicio de Souza Sinhá. 13 January 1881 Two leagues from Rio Verde, Francisco Justino de Oliveira shot João Gonçalves Teixeira. 15 January 1881 On the Fazenda Burity, Calças district, Honorio Moreira do Valle, Antonio da Silva Junior, aka “Borboleta,” and Maria José, wife of the victim, shot and wounded Joaquim Gonçalves Riberio. 15 February 1881 The criminal Faustino Ferreira dos Anjos was captured at Formosa. 20 February 1881 In the municipality of Rio Verde Ancleto Ramos, already charged with the murder of João Alberto, shot José Pedro da Silva to death. 2 March 1881 At nine in the evening in the town of Bonfim, Antonio Lopes da Trindade fired a shot from a blunderbuss at Cherubina Laurinda Dias, wounding her right hand.

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12 March 1881 “Justice official” Tiburício Rodrigues Chaves while patrolling the streets of the town of Arraias encountered the criminal José Narcizo de Moraes, armed with a blunderbuss and a dagger. Ordering the criminal’s arrest, Rodrigues received the full blast of Moraes’ blunderbuss in his chest but managed a return shot, with the result that both died. 16 March 1881 At Barreiras, a district of Boavista, Bento Jeronymo da Silva was assassinated by unknowns. 27 March 1881 Gabriel Pereira Braga knifed to death Manoel Onofre da Silva and the minor Benedicta, daughter of Damasia de Cunha Souto, at Vargem, a district of São Luiz. 14 April 1881 Six leagues from the crossing of the Rio Grande on the road to Mato Grosso, at a place called Caiapó, Indians attacked the pack train of José Avelino do Carmo, killing his camarada (employee), and taking clothing and a gun. 23 April 1881 Seventeen accused criminals presented themselves voluntarily to the law judge of Boavista to be tried. 25 April 1881 The president learned unofficially of various criminal assaults in the district of Jataí: e.g., Lino Netto, a merchant, and Ernesto Alves Gondim, a criminal, were both wounded by shots fired from outside the house in which they resided. But he has not received any official clarification of this incident. 20–21 May 1881 Manoel Domingos, grandson of a famous parricide, and camarada of Francisco Ferreira, killed Cyrillo, the son of his employer, with a knife, because the boy had abused a dog. When the father heard the boy’s cry and ran to help him, Manoel Domingos killed him too. Caught near the border with Mato Grosso, returned for trial, and condemned to death, Domingos regretted only, he said, that the sentence could not be carried out immediately. June 1881 Since October 1880 there had been three murders at Trindade about which the local authorities had done nothing. 18 July 1881 The jury at Boavista absolved thirty-seven men accused of sedition, murder, woundings, attempted robbery of the mail, and falsification of electoral results. 14 August 1881 Second lieutenant João Nepomuceno Dantas at Formosa captured Manoel Antonio de Assis, a deserter from the police force, and José Joaquim da Silva, a murderer, both from Minas Gerais. He also caught three deserters from the Goiás military. Various crimes of unknown date The sacristan of the main church at Porto Imperial stole gold jewelry from the images and escaped; Antonio

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Alves Bandeira reduced a free woman to slavery and sold her at Moquém; José Pedro da Silva Rios, condemned for murder in 1879 but who nevertheless worked for the government in Pedro Afonso and used his position to issue false documents, has disappeared; and the criminal Jacob Dias, condemned at Boavista, walks freely about that city. Most years the president or police chief did not provide information this detailed on crimes, but nevertheless in many instances enough is known to imagine what was happening. The flash point for interpersonal violence in this society, as in many others, often was conflictual relations between men and women or between men over women, commonly exacerbated by alcohol. Such violence could be between wives and husbands but might involve children as well: in April 1876, near Arraias, João Birges de Macedo shot and killed his daughter Maria Epiphania and a young man visiting her, apparently because he disapproved of their relationship.50 Other events involved politics. For example, the surrender of the “criminals” at Boavista, together with their subsequent trial and exoneration, involved a decades-old local struggle for control of the municipality. With their faction temporarily in power, partisans took the opportunity to rid themselves of the threat of criminal prosecution. Lecádio José de Souza’s and Euzebia Antonia Maria da Conceição’s escapes from jail, on the other hand, were only two of many such incidents reported throughout the year; those who fled the jails penetrated weakened walls, bribed jailers, or had help from the outside. As for the “illegal meeting” broken up at Curralinho, in the absence of more information one can only guess whether this was a part of recently invigorated party politics or, more likely, a dance that got out of hand. Goiás’s rich and poor alike resorted to violence, in part because the existing moral code demanded a direct response to affronts to one’s honor. This did not have to be personal and might involve hired professionals: Manoel Irenio Alves Pereira, for example, died at the hands of killers employed by the husband of a woman he was protecting from the man’s abuse.51 In 1857 several of the residents of Santa Cruz took it upon themselves to kill Colonel Manoel Lobo de Souza, notorious for “oppression and violence” and wanted for murder in Minas Gerais; it was the only way, the delegado admitted, in the absence of adequate policing, that they could imagine to defend themselves.52 Most of the province’s residents shared this wellfounded skepticism about the willingness or ability of the state to intervene to protect them or to render effective or impartial justice.53 But interpersonal violence as such did not obviously or even necessarily threaten the state as an institution or the elites as a class, though it commonly endangered individual members of that group. Crime in nineteenth-century Goiás fitted a pattern still common for much of rural Brazil: individual and apparently spontaneous acts of violence, though underlying the specific

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event might be years of personal or family tensions, tensions the historian is unlikely to be able to excavate from available sources; mixed in with these were more premeditated attacks, whether for economic gain, linked to local power struggles, or promoted by personal or ideological differences. The patronage of the powerful or the right family connections could guarantee “impunity,” to the frustration of police and judicial officials, as well as of those aggrieved by a crime.54 The Correio Official, for example, in February of 1838 carried an unusually long piece on the recent fruitless efforts to capture the criminal Domingos Teixeira: Colonel Honorio Amancio de Araujo, himself indicted for murder, had gathered around him on his fazenda near Santa Cruz a band of thugs including Teixeira that intimidated the local National Guard and made it impossible to arrest any of them. Commonly these were career criminals, for example, Sebastião José de Lacerda, aka “Dedão,” described as a “scourge of humanity,” or Claudio Paranayba, “the terror of the neighborhood,” with a twenty-year criminal record along the Minas Gerais–Goiás border.55 Harboring of this sort was a common pattern in the countryside. Should someone who enjoyed protection be arrested, an “important man” could delay criminal proceedings, arrange to have the legal papers lost, intimidate a jury, or have him broken out of jail.56 Intervention by one of the “lords of the sertão” kept many, rich and poor, guilty and innocent, from the mercies of an admittedly not always reliable justice system. But protection was not absolute: in another case the “lost” legal papers of an accused criminal suddenly reappeared when he involved his daughter in an incestuous relationship that clearly violated community norms.57 Of course, these same family or patronage links could draw individuals into confrontations and violence in which they had no immediate or obvious stake. For example, the recently arrested José de Paula Cordeiro explained to the provincial chief of police in mid-1861 how he had come to be involved in the notorious Bonfim lynching a decade earlier. Cordeiro, a small farmer on a visit to town, had stopped to pray the rosary in front of the church. A slave belonging to Major Antônio Umbelino de Sousa ran into him there and, reminding Cordeiro of the many favors the Major had done for him, he urged him to come to de Sousa’s house that evening. Once there, Cordeiro became involved with the mob that had gathered and that went on to murder the men in the jail. Subsequently convicted of the crime, he soon escaped jail but remained in the area. Although Cordeiro complained bitterly that de Souza’s protection had failed him, he admitted that for the past decade everyone had known where he lived and that his arrest had actually been an accident.58 If drink, sex, and honor drove violence among the lower orders, and often among their betters was well, in the case of the elites it was some-

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times difficult to disentangle causes or motives behind a particular set of events. Local notables, and their family members and retainers, acted in so many different and overlapping political, economic, and social roles in small communities that it was typically impossible to know in what capacity they were acting, or were thought to be acting, when violence overtook them. It is doubtful that they always knew. From the perspective of state control, it did not matter. Unless local conflicts got out of hand or involved too many people or too much killing these did not endanger the regime. When it appeared that a dispute might be headed in a direction that threatened to compromise the state, provincial authorities would send a detachment of police or military to separate the parties and pacify the situation. The more distant the conflict from the capital the weaker and more delayed the state’s response. At Posse, “726 kilometers from this capital,” the president reported, “attempted murders and assassinations in the streets are common and groups of hired thugs walk the streets and frequent the houses of the public authorities. A conflict between the law judge and a municipal judge paralyzes court cases, and the police are without the force to intervene.”59 Further north in Natividade a conflict set the delegado against the local boss of nearby Almas, resulting in the murder of both, and by the end of the year the municipal judges were attempting to resign, much of the population of the town had fled to the bush, and gunmen controlled the streets of the town.60 But most notorious of all was the far northern municipality of Boavista. Already by the 1860s the president was writing of “long-standing and completely personal . . . struggles between the two factions in that distant district, where the provincial government cannot act in time to correct abuses.” And the situation had deteriorated by the 1880s: “Local authorities, the câmara, and individuals describe a state of horrible anarchy without guarantee of life, liberty, or property for the citizens.”61 However, none of this immediately threatened the state. While available crime statistics report a substantial number of murders each year, and these almost certainly understate the actual number of such incidents, the same figures record few property offenses. Cattle rustling and horse theft are common to most cattle frontiers, and visitors and ranchers claimed that such activities were rampant in rural Goiás. The traveler Francis Castelnau, for example, spent a harrowing night at a rest stop with a group of horse thieves and murderers who, believing that he did not understand Portuguese, passed the time boasting of their feats. But custom had it that the right to punish rustling belonged to the offended owner; unless the authorities received complaints “they had to leave [the thieves] in peace.”62 With extensive ranching owners did not always notice small losses or might do so only long after the event and might, in any event, attribute these to natural causes.

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Petty thefts, burglary, and armed robbery seem to have been rare in the sertão or at least seldom reported to public authorities. In part this was because whereas murder was a legitimate defense of honor, stealing debased the thief.63 Too, given the poverty of material culture in most areas, stolen items of any value could easily be identified and traced: in Bernardo Elis’s story “A Enxada,”(“The Hoe”) for example, the central character Piano desperately needs this tool to cultivate rice but knows that if he steals a hoe his deed will soon be discovered.64 After mid-century, however, there were occasional indications that modernization was bringing more professional thievery. Several times, for example, there were unsuccessful attempts to break into the provincial Treasury, and in September, 1883 someone did penetrate the wall of the new Caixa Econômica and made off with 157$500 réis, a rare exception, the president remarked, to the usual round of knifings and murders.65 Crime was particularly a problem in municipalities along the province’s borders, including not just Boavista, but also Duro (Dianópolis), Catalão, and Rio Verde/Jataí. Much of this was the work of bandit gangs and criminals that entered the province from Bahia, Piauí, and Minas Gerais.66 The district judge of Catalão, for example, as early as 1839 complained that “the town [is] not far from anarchy,” and the municipality experienced a turbulent history well into the 1890s.67 Crime in the border districts typically grew out of struggles for control of illegal activities such as smuggling, rustling, and tax fraud: in 1859, for example, Colonel Roque Alves de Azevedo, leader of the dominant faction in Catalão and revenue agent for the district, was said to owe the province almost four contos for taxes that he had collected but never remitted to the capital.68 Aggravating the problem was the ease with which ranchers, smugglers, and gunmen moved from one province to another, evading justice, if not always retribution. Demarcation differences between Goiás and its neighbors, and particularly with Minas Gerais, facilitated evasion and impunity: disputed areas, explained the câmara of Paracatú in that province, “are considered a sacred refuge.”69 It is important to repeat, though, that these border conflicts had no ideological content and specifically were not separatist movements.70 The causes and goals of local struggles remained emphatically local, and provincial presidents compared favorably the tranquil state of public security to the unsatisfactory rates of criminal violence. One group that did worry the state, and greatly agitated the general population, was gypsies (ciganos), accused of a variety of crimes and persecuted wherever they appeared. Although a few settled permanently, most moved about in family groups within the province and between Goiás and, especially, Minas Gerais, trading horses and cattle and telling fortunes. A traveler described encountering such a group of near Meiaponte: “They

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seemed to me a subrace, different than the mixed-blood descendants of Portuguese, traveling in bands through the interior of Brazil, stealing pigs and chickens where they pass. They seek to traffic in horses and burros, deceiving all those with whom they trade.”71 Country folk were deathly afraid of gypsies, who, it was said, went about heavily armed and in bands that could easily outnumber the population of an isolated ranch or a small hamlet. In the popular imagination they were much like the bandits from Bahia or Minas, a mysterious and sinister force invading the province from outside, or like wild Indians, and the newspapers applied to their travels the same word (correrias) used for Indian raids. Complaints of stolen horses and slaves fairly or unfairly dogged the gypsies’ travels, and Goiás’s authorities attempted to keep track of their movements, requiring, for example, passports for the people and for their animals.72 The most violent confrontation during this period took place at Formosa early in 1879. The provincial chief of police had for some time been hearing rumors of crimes committed by a band of gypsies traveling near that town, and in April the Correio Official reported that they had assaulted the settlement of Arraial Velho, fifteen leagues from Formosa, raping women, murdering some of the inhabitants, and stealing animals. Whether or not such an attack occurred, and no one ever put forward evidence to prove it, men from Formosa quickly formed a posse that overtook and attacked the band, killing seven men and five women and wounding two children. Provincial police arrested some of the participants and the public prosecutor had them indicted and tried for murder, but, not surprisingly, a Formosa jury absolved the men.73 However, a few years later when word began to circulate that some “two hundred families” of gypsies armed with Spencer repeating rifles were poised to enter the province from Minas Gerais, perhaps to revenge themselves on Formosa, tensions in the town ran high. Government troops sent hurriedly to investigate found only some thirty to forty gypsies engaged in peaceful trade, and these dispersed quickly when made aware of the sentiment against them.74 If the real or imagined violence of slaves and gypsies was the stuff of nightmares for Goiás’s population, subversion was much more worrisome to provincial authorities. Fortunately for these, challenges of this sort were remarkably rare in nineteenth-century Goiás, and none took serious root. In 1822 there was the short-lived attempt to separate the north of the province from the south, a sentiment that persisted but with no real force, and there was the anti-Portuguese violence of the early 1830s. A more worrisome problem for state authority arising from within Luzo-Brazilian society was counterfeiting. Falsification of money had a long history in Goiás, dating back to the mining period and the use of gold dust as an exchange medium. During these years the law required that all gold mined be sent to

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one of the government mints, to be melted into bars and taxes paid, but, in fact, gold dust circulated as an important money substitute well into the nineteenth century. Gold dust was extremely easy to adulterate: “You only had to scratch the wall to make money,” it was said, and as a result when merchants exchanged Goiás’s gold dust for coins or sent it to the coast it carried a 40–50 percent discount. By the 1820s such adulteration had reached “the most scandalous extremes.”75 In response, Goiás after independence adopted a new system of locally minted copper coinage, but this too quickly fell victim to counterfeiting. Contos of false money invaded the province, chiefly the north where buyers from other provinces came to purchase cattle: Cachoeira, in Bahia, for example, was a notorious center of counterfeiting during the 1820s and 1830s.76 Goiás’s government banned the use of coins with Bahia mint marks, but a shortage of circulating medium tended to keep even dubious items in use, supplemented with paper money beginning in the 1830s.77 For the rest of the century both paper notes and coins served the province. Following Gresham’s law, however, good money ended up in the hands of the province’s principal merchants, who dispatched it to Rio de Janeiro in exchange for wholesale goods, while poor-quality money remained in local circuits. The counterfeiting of both paper notes and coins continued too. A local newspaper, for example, accused the traveling dentist Oscar Leal of having introduced fake notes into Goiás.78 The falsification of money threatens the legitimacy of state power and can undermine trade and commerce, but while it remained a problem, counterfeiting never reached epidemic proportions in Goiás and never seriously embarrassed the state. Indeed, to the extent that false notes and coins met the exchange needs of constantly money-short rural and small-town commerce these probably had a net positive effect on the provincial economy. A more serious and violent type of criminality that did directly and openly confront state power was banditry. Not surprisingly, this activity was most common in the north of the province and along the border with Minas Gerais: the priest of Santa Rita do Paranaíba, for example, reported in 1868 that the town was a “nest” of criminals engaged in all manner of illegal activity and protected by “certain people” in the district. Banditry in nineteenth-century Goiás had few “social” overtones. Because the province’s population generally accepted the legitimacy of the state, they did not see bandits as protectors of popular rights or avengers of social injustices. Rather, they experienced them as vicious criminals, and often as agents of competing elite-dominated factions, who robbed, raped, and murdered the poor with little fear of arrest. While the guards who accompanied mule trains and cattle drives usually managed to ward off attacks, river traffic was easier prey.79 Bandits assaulted isolated fazendas and small settlements,

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taking animals and slaves, goods and money, and their violence ruined small ranchers and farmers.80 Larger groups occupied towns: early in 1880, for example, bandits from Bahia stormed the settlement of Duro, holding the town hostage for several days, sacking stores and the tax agency, and leaving victims dead in the street. A few years later the “celebrated Felix” tried unsuccessfully to extort money from Conceição, and in 1885 bandits assaulted Cavalcante, but in this case the population of the town fought back, driving the attackers off and killing the leader and his son.81 Best known of Goiás’s nineteenth-century bandits was “the Indian Affonso,” popularized in a Bernardo Guimarães story.82 Described as “fast as an tapir” and “flexible as a snake,” Affonso, with his family and hangerson, inhabited the forests along the Rio Paranaíba and engaged in freelance crime as well as working as a hired gun in local conflicts. In one instance, the loser in a legal case paid Affonso to take revenge for him. When Affonso’s son, João Affonso, and a nephew encountered the unfortunate winner in the middle of town, they shot and knifed him to death, and the nephew licked the victim’s blood from his knife before walking away. In response, public authorities arrested another of Affonso’s relatives, but the local people, despite the arrival of troops from the capital, remained terrified that the gang might attack the town. Clearly the outlaw enjoyed powerful protection, for he continued to live more or less openly in the Catalão-Ipameri area, and to be accused of various crimes, well into the 1890s. Twenty years later the police did arrest his grandson Antonio Candido, said to be himself guilty of forty-three murders, “but none for robbery.”83 Of course, who was a bandit, or more generally a criminal, depended on where or with whom you stood. Even in those cases where criminal gangs operated more or less independently, they did so only by leave of the elites and found themselves quickly eliminated if they became troublesome.

Indians The history of Indian relations . . . can be compared without exaggeration to that of Bahús in the recent war, a never interrupted succession of failures. —President of Goiás, 1869

Most frightening of all to Goiás’s Luzo-Brazilian and black slave populations were the groups of undomesticated Indians that roamed the province. An 1860s estimate put their numbers at twenty to thirty thousand, but no one in fact knew for certain how many the province held, as most avoided contact with settlers and frequently shifted their location or migrated to and from other provinces. Attacks, and the fear of such attacks, emptied areas of the north of settlers early in the century, and after

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mid-century conflict with indigenous populations slowed the development of mining and ranching in Goiás’s southwest. Lurid newspaper accounts whipped up fear: The body of one man was found blackened with whip marks, also a girl with an arrow through the back of her neck and sticking out her throat and another woman with an arrow entering the same place and coming out her mouth, and all of them naked. Another man was propped up by a spear through his shoulder that came out between his legs and was stuck in the ground; in his right hand they put another spear, on his head a crown of colored feathers, and hanging from his shoulder a bow and a quiver of arrows.84

The chief threat in the north came from the Canoeiros, who overran settlements, cut off boats on the Rio Araguaia, and generally terrorized the countryside, and who were notorious for kidnapping, as well as torturing and killing their unfortunate victims.85 Unlike some of the other indigenous groups, the Canoeiros showed little interest in peaceful contact or exchange but instead evidently hoped to clear the settlers and their cattle out of the area between the lower Tocantins and Araguaia. Of only slightly less fearsome reputation but also liable to assault northern ranches and towns were the Xavantes and the Xerentes,86 together with the Apinayé, and other, smaller groups. In the south and southwest the most active were the Kayapó, although bands of Bororo sometimes crossed into the province from Mato Grosso. Because their kinship structure did not allow the easy integration of outsiders, the Kayapó rarely kidnapped “Christians.” Neither were they generally thought to be as bloodthirsty as the Canoeiros, although Antônio de Castro, a mule driver killed with five arrows in April of 1881, and “his head torn off,” might not have agreed.87 Whereas reports of Canoeiro attacks generally declined after mid-century, Kayapó assaults increased in the 1860s and 1870s, especially in the Rio Bonito–Rio Claro area, and by the late 1880s they were said to be “approaching the capital.”88 This was a war of small-scale battles,89 though these were no less brutal for their limited scope. Typically, the Indians began their correrias at the end of the rainy season, and moving in small groups they almost always remained undetected, until the agregado’s dogs began to bark toward the edge of the clearing.90 Farmers in their fields and cowboys beating the bush for lost animals were ambushed: in January of 1859, for example, Canoeiros killed Eugenio de tal and his wife as they hunted runaway cattle along the right bank of the Rio Maranhão.91 Settlers took refuge in buildings, but their attackers used fire arrows to burn them out, prompting the practice of intercalating layers of mud with layers of thatch in roofs, as fire barriers.92 In other instances, the raiders simply made fun of the trapped settlers: “They had the idea to decorate the house with tree branches, and

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then left after this joke, with peals of laughter.”93 Although some of the Indians acquired firearms and the skills to use these, generally they preferred the bow and arrow and the spear or knife to the clumsy and obsolete muzzle-loading muskets available in the province.94 Indian raiding parties generally killed adult males, but might carry off women and children, and they destroyed livestock and burned buildings and equipment. Given the size of the province and the wide distances that separated much of the population, most of these battles were struggles known only to the participants, their shouts and screams absorbed by the sertão. The effects of such attacks by indigenous populations were substantial. Continued assaults forced the evacuation of towns and districts: in September of 1831, for example, Xavante killed six people at Thesouras and prompted the survivors to retreat to Santa Rita, leaving behind their plantings and animals; and at the end of the next decade the câmara of Porto Imperial reported that the inhabitants of Pontal and Carmo had abandoned their settlements and taken refuge with them.95 The fear of attacks caused farmers to shun areas potentially good for planting but difficult to defend, or those in distant or isolated parts of the district. Instead, they crowded into the towns and year after year cultivated the same accessible but increasingly exhausted land, aggravating food shortages.96 Or they had to employ guards to protect the workers in the fields, reducing available labor and raising costs. Assaults by the Kayapó also affected gold and diamond mining along the Rios Claro and Pilões. As late as 1881 the priest in the town of Rio Claro was threatening to leave because “the town was being abandoned” under the impact of such attacks.97 Assaults by indigenous groups interrupted river navigation, threatening to cut the province’s tenuous links with northern forts and Pará, and attacks on mule trains, ox carts, and mail carriers made communications and commerce more difficult and expensive. Late in 1874, for example, a group of Chamboiá wiped out the crew of a raft on the Rio Araguaia and then killed several soldiers and civilians left nearby to harvest plantings.98 The individuals manning the ferries at isolated river crossings were particularly vulnerable and fled whenever rumors of danger circulated, effectively interdicting road travel.99 Tax collectors refused to venture into the countryside, and Indian assaults, by destroying animals and crops and forcing the abandonment of outlying areas, undercut revenue collection.100 Had the various indigenous populations worked together they could have made the province virtually uninhabitable for the Luzo-Brazilians and their slaves at any time up to, perhaps, the last third of the century. They did not, however, and instead fought among themselves as often101 as against the invader. Only occasionally did someone suggest that the settlers themselves might have provoked the Indians’ attacks, that these were, as one president

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explained, “just reprisals for what had been done to them.”102 But presidents were outsiders. For most of the province’s inhabitants the first instinct and for many the only imaginable response to Indian resistance, or simply presence, was violence: “General opinion considers legitimate the use of violence to exterminate the savages.”103 Typically settler violence against the Indians took the form of armed intrusions into the interior called bandeiras. Named for the exploration expeditions launched from the coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Goiás’s bandeiras combined the purposes of revenge, slaving, and simple eradication of the Indians and continued long after the imperial government banned “just wars” in the early 1830s. Most were local ad hoc reactions, but occasionally the state mounted more elaborate efforts. For example, in the mid-1830s the province attempted a coordinated strike in the north using two separate forces, 270 men to clear the Canoeiro from around Amaro Leite-Traíras-Palma and 180 to flush the Xerente from the area between Porto Imperial and Cavalcante. The effort against the Canoeiro failed, a president subsequently explained, because of the “cowardice” and “ignorance” of its leaders, while “the lack of discipline of the troops made it impossible to find the Xerente.”104 The only fruits of these expeditions were the capture of a few children, together with, as the president feared, enraging the indigenous populations, who went on to ravage the north for another two decades. After mid-century provincial administrators generally resisted popular calls for armed attacks on the indigenous populations, though too often they only learned of these after the fact.105 Apart from bandeiras, the state employed two other strategies in efforts to subdue the province’s undomesticated Indians, aldeias and presídios. These were not notably more successful than were the bandeiras, if less bloody. During the 1840s the Empire undertook a major reassessment of state policy that resulted in new regulations governing relations with Brazil’s indigenous populations.106 Each province was to have a Director General of Indians and under him directors and missionary priests for the administered villages. These were to see to the “civilization” of the Indians through the inculcation of Christian values and the experience of manual labor. Where necessary, a military contingent would protect the government agents from the inhabitants of the aldeia and these from their still “barbarous” kin. The hope was that the villages would reduce conflict between settlers and Indians, break down indigenous cultural autonomy and speed integration, and make land and labor available for agriculture and stock raising: “a guarantee of public order and individual security for the civilized population and an immediate and positive advantage for the province as a source of labor.”107 The Empire inherited aldeias from the colonial regime. Jesuits had founded several in the Goiás region during the seventeenth and eighteenth

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centuries and then lost control of these as a result of the Pombaline reforms.108 The Indians residing in these villages generally resisted conversion, however, and proved inconstant in their settled condition, not least because the missionaries and government representatives who replaced the Jesuits made little effort to learn indigenous languages or cultures and routinely exploited and abused their charges, “forgetting what missionary work is, because making Christians out of the Indians seemed too difficult a task.”109 Those Indians that did not die of disease, mistreatment, or hunger fled back into the forests: “Driven away by abusive behavior and imprudent and bad administrators, they no longer have confidence in any white. Violent and vengeful, they have had burned into their memories the offenses and humiliations they suffered, transforming them from allies into the most dangerous and intense enemies.”110 As a result, by the end of the colonial period only a few aldeias, or the remains of these, survived, the most important of which were at São José de Mossâmedes, Pedro II– Carretão, and Duro-Formiga. The histories of Mossâmedes and Duro illustrate the trajectories of such colonial remnants during the nineteenth century. Erected in the 1780s as a “model” aldeia, Mossâmedes originally had extensive buildings, and the state provided not only a priest but a teacher and artisans to instruct the Kayapó concentrated there. By the 1820s, however, the settlement was plainly in decline, down to a population of just a few hundred, and held together only by the efforts of the remarkable Damiana da Cunha, a Kayapó Indian married to a mulatto militia sergeant.111 Repeatedly she had gone into the forests for months at a time, seeking Kayapó to settle at Mossâmedes. But by early 1831 she was sick and dying, exhausted from her efforts, and the last of the village’s inhabitants were abandoning it or being forced out by their nonindigenous neighbors and returning to the bush.112 Though technically Mossâmedes remained an aldeia for several more decades, by mid-century the population was overwhelmingly mixed-blood, and in the 1870s the province sold off the remaining land to private buyers. Similarly, the settlement of Duro-Formiga by independence had a mixed population of several Indian groups, together with mulattos and whites. As a result, there was considerable question as to whether Duro actually still qualified for the status of aldeia. The inhabitants were divided among themselves into bickering factions and suffered attacks from Indians outside the community. An 1855 survey found Mossâmedes and Duro to be effectively no longer aldeias, and Carretão was in ruins, with only some seventy inhabitants.113 During these same years Goiás’s provincial administrations also established, abandoned, and reestablished new settlements, chiefly in the north of the province.114 Because the local clergy lacked the numbers or vocation

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to preach to undomesticated Indians, Capuchins arrived in the 1840s to organize and run these aldeias. Unlike the Jesuits, however, they refused to contact “wild” Indians or to administer settlements without, fatally, military protection.115 Most, too, shared the local settler population’s assumptions of indigenous inferiority and untrustworthiness and treated their charges harshly and with contempt.116 There were exceptions: Frei Segismundo de Taggia, for example, devoted a quarter-century to missionary work and died revered by the Indians of Boavista.117 Not surprisingly, though, most of the missionaries met with only occasional successes, and at least one fled precipitously to Mato Grosso at even the possibility of being sent to a village. In organizing an aldeia, the government first selected a likely spot, and then a priest or lay administrator, typically accompanied by a detachment of troops, laid out the village and attempted to persuade Indians to settle there. To this end they offered them gifts of tools and cloth and protection from their enemies. Most such efforts quickly failed, for unsurprising reasons: the indigenous inhabitants, concentrated together, died of unaccustomed diseases or attacks from unsubdued Indians, and others fled the abuses of administrators and priests. One old man remembered how “they tormented us, with blows, stocks, chains, the whip, and collar.”118 At midcentury new settlements included Boavista, near the junction of the Rios Tocantins and Araguaia, with some four thousand Apinayé and Gradaú; Pedro Afonso, where the Rio Somno entered the Tocantins, with more than seven hundred inhabitants; Theresa Christina, eighteen leagues from Pedro Afonso, with two thousand Xerentes and Xavantes; and São Joaquim de Jamimbú on the Rio Araguaia with a population of five hundred, though many of these were not Indians.119 A generation later, however, and despite constant recruiting, the aldeias’ population had fallen to only some twenty-five hundred.120 Efforts, too, to train Indian youth at a special school, Colégio Isabel, located at the junction of the Rios Araguaia and Vermelho, likewise failed; most of those recruited died of disease or ran away.121 An unusually perceptive observer explained that “such is the unfortunate system of putting Indians in villages, without giving them what they need to sustain themselves, without establishing proper regulations, and without being able to promote in them an understanding of the advantages of social life, as opposed to a wandering existence. In this case it would be better to leave them in the forest.”122 Still, the attempts persisted, including discussion in the 1880s of expanding government settlements to the province’s southwest, in hopes of calming the Kayapó.123 Shortly after the fall of the Empire, however, a governor pronounced the epitaph to these efforts, labeling aldeias “one of the most brilliant proofs of the incapacity of the state for this sort of activity.”124

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To deal with indigenous groups that refused to settle the state constructed presídios,125 again, chiefly in the north of the province and placed to impede Indian raids, protect settlers, and support river traffic. The province lacked sufficient funds to carry out a regular “rationing,” or gift, system such as that used on some frontiers to buy off hostiles, but where possible the garrisons did attempt to enter into peaceful trade with local indigenous populations, offering cloth and tools in exchange for food.126 The actual number and situation of these forts varied over time. In 1861, for example, the province supported two lines of forts, one along the Rio Tocantins with posts at Santa Barbara, to protect the sertão of Amaro Leite; another nearby at Santo Antônio, where canoes come up the Rio Santo Antonio from the Tocantins; and a third at Santa Cruz, near the settlement of Descoberto. A second line followed the Araguaia, with forts at Santa Leopoldina, where the Rio Vermelho enters the Araguaia, and at MonteAlegre, near the Ilha do Bananal and linked by road with Santo Antônio on the Tocantins. Off and on there was a fort too at Santa Maria, also on the Araguaia, but groups of Kayapó, Karajás, and Chambioás repeatedly attacked and destroyed it. Twenty years later just Santo Antônio and Santa Barbara remained on the Tocantins, and on the Araguaia there were only a yet again resurrected Santa Maria and a new fort at Jurupensem.127 Manning these outposts were small detachments of pedestres (until the government abolished these in the 1860s), or regular troops, or, less often and reluctantly, National Guards.128 Garrisons survived by subsistence farming and on irregular shipments of supplies from the capital. Their situation could be difficult: “The condition of the men in these forts is sad, thrown into a remote and unhealthy wilderness and forced to suffer, along with illness, penury and hunger.” Pay was almost always in arrears, equipment lacking, and discipline slack: “Living as settlers not soldiers they lose their competence and become little different than civilians.”129 Conflicts among the members of the garrison could leave the forts vulnerable to attack. And the policy of sending criminals to serve out their sentences in presídios did nothing to raise morale and could not have been a good influence on the Indians or mixed-blood civilians who came to trade or to settle at the fort. Not infrequently these criminals escaped and banded together with military deserters to assault isolated farms and travelers in the north.130 Nevertheless, the forts offered settlers safer refuge that was available on other parts of the northern sertão, and over time small civilian communities grew up around some of them. At Santa Leopoldina on the Rio Araguaia, for example, the commander actively sought married colonists to bolster the population, even as he complained of the problems caused by “unruly women” whose husbands could not control them!131 It is hard to imagine what the indigenous population thought of the

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presídios. Garrison troops did not have a good reputation for competence or courage, and generally they lived up, or down, to this. The government considered creating special mobile squads to chase Indians and bandits but lacked the troops or arms for this. Instead, soldiers or National Guard troops typically responded to Indian depredations only after the fact, and with considerable delay; rarely did they essay preventive patrols. When they did these were easily ambushed: late in 1830, for example, the Canoeiro wiped out such a militia patrol on the Rio Maranhão, sparing only the female Indian interpreter.132 On more than one occasion troops cut a trail or saw smoke in the distance but dared not to seek out the source.133 From time to time groups of Indians directly assaulted the posts, and where the soldiers had failed to take precautions this could lead to disaster: an 1846 newspaper article related the fate of a garrison that, with the commander gone, ignored basic security and was surprised and destroyed. In another instance, Indians appeared across the river from the garrison at São José dos Martyrios and, feigning peaceable intent, attacked when the troops let their guard down, killing three men and two women.134 Apart from such lapses in discipline, however, the presídios generally were too strong for the Indians to take by direct assault but too weak to interfere with their raiding activities. Indigenous bands were as likely to trade with the soldiers and settlers as attack them, or to bypass the forts altogether, easily enough done. Nevertheless, the system persisted until the fall of the Empire, because the settlers demanded it and because it profited others. For most of Goiás’s Luzo-Brazilian population, the Indians’ flight from the aldeias and their attacks on settlers and forts proved their barbarism and gave adequate reason to destroy them. As well, the failure of the state to resolve the “Indian problem” was a clear indication of weakness and a constant challenge to its legitimacy. From the government’s perspective, the need to protect ranchers and farmers from indigenous attacks, attacks the settlers as often as not had brought upon themselves, was a drain on scarce resources. Almost from the outset Indian-white contact had involved violence, driven by European slaving and murderous wars of extermination intended to open the way for the mines and cattle ranches. The decline of mining aggravated the situation. A partial withdrawal of whites and slaves and the decay of towns, especially in the north, clearly animated the Canoeiro and other groups, and bloody bandeiras sharpened their anger, but at least until the 1890s neither side could muster enough strength to deliver a deciding blow or gain the upper hand.

3

Industry, Commerce, and Communications Only salt and iron draw the sertanejo to civilization. —A saying from the sertão

If by “industry” is meant the production of goods assisted by nonanimal power, Goiás began and ended the nineteenth century in almost complete innocence.1 Small water-driven lumber and grain mills dotted the countryside, as did sugar engenhos (mills) of various degrees of sophistication, and an occasional simple iron forge produced small quantities of metal for local use, but steam power arrived only in the 1870s, to drive boats on the Rio Araguaia, and as late as the early 1890s steam engines remained largely unknown on fazendas or in manufacturing.2 Apart from minor items such as the marmalade famously produced in the Santa Luzia region and tobacco curing, almost the only local processing of agricultural or animal products for sale outside the province was handicraft production of rough cotton cloth and the tanning and salting of hides for the Pará trade. By contrast, for example, Mato Grosso’s access to the Paraná river system allowed the development of a jerked beef and meat concentrate industry there decades before the approaching railroads promised this for Goiás.3 In many areas of Latin America high shipping costs initially protected artisan manufactures from the ruinous effects of nineteenth-century free trade, but, as Goiás’s case makes clear, these same costs also impeded the introduction of new capital equipment to modernize local production, raised the costs of raw materials, and restricted the development of internal, provincial markets.

Textiles Two items of everyday use in nineteenth-century Goiás that did attract efforts to mechanize and expand local production were textiles and iron. Of all common consumer goods, thread and cloth, chiefly cotton but secondarily wool, enjoyed the largest actual and potential markets

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in the province. Apart from luxury imports, most cloth used in Goiás was the product of female handicraft work: “far from meriting the name factories, poor women work [at home] in the weaving of coarse cloth for their own uses,” a president explained.4 Typically, this was but one among many activities that housewives and servants pursued, on a modest scale and when time allowed, but larger and wealthier households sometimes supported more sophisticated operations: a visitor to a fazenda near Jataí, for example, found a room behind the main house where women of the family worked together with slaves under the supervision of a master artisan, spinning, weaving, and dyeing fabric, and cutting and sewing clothing.5 Early in the 1860s President Alencastre put the yearly output of the province at some 120,000 varas (a vara = approximately a yard) from almost two thousand looms,6 but, uncharacteristically for him, this may well have been an underestimate. Annual production at this rate would have amounted to less than one vara a year per inhabitant, a modest figure given that only the elite could afford to buy imported fabrics. The mechanization of textile production seemed to promise several benefits, including lowering the cost of clothing, especially for the poor, and the diffusion of modern technology in the form of mill machinery and industrial organization. Brazilians and immigrants experimented with textile factories in several parts of the Empire during the early years of the nineteenth century, with varied results.7 In the case of Goiás, the Crown in July 1818 entered into an agreement providing that the state would furnish “various articles” to one João Duarte Coelho, to assist him in setting up a spinning mill and textile factory in the captaincy.8 He was also to receive one, later raised to two, contos from the local treasury, to pay his travel expenses and to help in acquiring and preparing a building in Vila Boa suitable for the project. With him traveled João Antônio de Souza, “Master Weaver,” to oversee the factory’s actual operations, and an apprentice. The regime was to supply the needed machinery and have it shipped to Goiás, with the expectation that once operating the factory would be sold to local investors.9 However, when Governor Fernando Delgado invited the participation of several of the wealthier men in the captaincy, he received no commitments. Comendador Joaquim Alves de Oliveira, for example, explained that he grew cotton and bought it from other producers, and that he already had slaves and machinery at work cleaning and spinning cotton and weaving the thread into cloth. At the moment, therefore, he had no money to put into the government’s scheme, though if it succeeded he might be willing at some time in the future to involve himself in it.10 For the next several years the governor and Duarte Coelho struggled to bring the textile factory into operation. One of the main obstacles, at least according to Delgado, proved to be master João Antônio de Souza.

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Despite the governor’s efforts to keep the Portuguese Duarte Coelho in the foreground, the fact that de Souza was a mulatto did not inspire confidence among an elite for whom “differences in color make the classes and will until long after slavery is abolished.”11 Finally, early in 1821 a new governor, Miguel Ignácio de Sampião, was able to report that by June, or the end of the year at the latest, the factory would be up and running, with one machine for carding, two each for spinning and weaving, and two to make stockings, all driven by water. But he complained too that the expenses involved had been a heavy burden on a poor captaincy.12 Before the factory could begin production, however, the economic and political turmoil of independence intervened, cutting off the subsidies and bringing work to a halt. De Souza abandoned the mill and the province, but Duarte Coelho stayed on, supporting himself by building and operating the machine used by the provincial government to mint copper coins, and later he dispensed medical advice.13 Only in 1828, and in response to prodding from the Crown, did the provincial government seek to reanimate the project. President Lino de Moraes committed 50$000 réis a month as a subsidy and ordered municipal authorities to encourage cotton cultivation in order to supply the factory with the necessary raw materials. In October operation of the long-awaited mill finally got under way. Although it reportedly furnished cloth for soldiers’ uniforms, and possibly other uses, the factory apparently never functioned efficiently or profitably, and private investors did not come forward to participate. One difficulty, and despite government efforts, was shortages of cotton. This is perhaps surprising considering that in the 1810s and early 1820s Goiás regularly sent raw cotton to the coast for export, but by the end of the decade the revived output from North America was depressing world prices. Poor prices, together with taxes, the Matutina Meiapontense complained, discouraged commercial production of cotton in Goiás.14 The fiber continued to be widely cultivated in the province but chiefly for home and artisan use, and the mill evidently found it hard to compete with these. The other obstacle the factory faced was shortages of labor. Both men and women worked for the mill, some in the building itself and others doing putting-out tasks: a list of those employed between 1828 and 1835, for example, shows men operating the spinning and weaving machines and predominating among the carders, while those engaged in “weaving outside the factory” were almost exclusively women.15 There is no direct evidence as regards their pay, but given the general shortage of money in the province and the practice in other mills, they probably received their wages in cloth from the factory. Though slaves apparently were too expensive for the mill operators to buy, occasionally rented ones turned up among the work

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force, as did orphans and several Indians. At least for the latter, the work may not to have been voluntary: in February of 1832, for example, the director of the São José de Mossâmedes received a request from provincial authorities that he find and return two Indian boys who recently had fled the factory and were thought to be headed back to the aldeia.16 By May of 1838 the textile factory was at a standstill, for want of cotton and workers, and perhaps markets. Poor communications hindered the expansion of sales within the province and, therefore, economies of scale. The following February rain dealt the enterprise a final, fatal blow. The Rio Vermelho rose to unprecedented levels, destroying the bridges that connected the two halves of the capital and damaging many buildings, including the mill; walls fell in and water ruined most of the machinery. Defeated, the provincial government abandoned the project and petitioned the Crown to relieve Duarte Coelho of the debt he had accumulated during his involvement with the factory.17 Subsequent attempts to develop textile manufacturing in the province did not get past planning stages, but local enthusiasts continued to argue that such a factory could be made viable: in 1891 the new state government of Goiás was signing yet another subsidy contract for such a project.18

Mining and Metallurgy Goiás had begun colonial life as a gold-mining economy and in its first half-century yielded substantial amounts of the precious metal. Given shipping costs this was certainly the most commercially viable activity available at the time, but already by the 1760s voices were questioning its long-term prospects: in 1762 the governor lamented that for ten years there had been no new strikes; a decade later another described the mines as “exhausted”; and a 1782 report devoted several pages to a discussion of the “decadence” of mining.19 But if gold mining declined, it did not disappear and instead persisted through the end of the colonial period and into the nineteenth century, even as state revenues from the activity all but vanished. In the early, heady days miners formed companies or associations to divert streams or to construct and operate machinery to sift gravel from the rivers, but these largely disappeared by the early nineteenth century as the major deposits became exhausted. Most of the work now was in the hands of faiscadores (artisan miners), individuals or small groups who panned gold from the rivers using only the rudest of techniques and equipment. Such miners seem to have been at once omnipresent and nearly invisible. Travelers remarked on encountering them at work in the rivers, but because most evaded taxes their efforts did not register in the normal run

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of official reports or statistics. Many mined only seasonally and at other times farmed or worked for wages, or, as their “betters” complained, lived in idleness.20 Suddenly, after a half-century of the stagnation and decline of gold mining came another big strike, or so it seemed, at Anicuns near the capital. Early in 1809 Captain General Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas reported to the Royal Treasury the discovery of a “rich vein” located sixteen leagues from the capital Vila Boa. His superintendent of mines surveyed the site and divided it into properly measured claims, and the governor was promoting the organization of a society, both to exploit the find rationally and to facilitate tax collection.21 One immediate problem proved to be the “blind frenzy” with which members of the local population abandoned their plantings and employments to flock to Anicuns. They forgot, Captain General Mascarenhas lectured, that agriculture was more permanent than mining and that there were good profits to be made in supplying the miners and their slaves with food and other articles. Not surprisingly, his remonstrances had little effect.22 Mascarenhas responded to subsequent pointed inquires from Rio de Janeiro about the mine by reaffirming his belief that agriculture and trade with Pará would be more important for the province in the long run than what might prove to be an ephemeral gold strike. Still, he admitted that the find could not be ignored and detailed what he had done to stimulate the exploitation of Anicuns and to bring activities there under state control. Above all, if the strike was to be made to last it had to be developed systematically, which was proving a problem given the “absolute lack of intelligent miners in the captaincy.” Instead, so far there had been mostly confusion and disordered digging by hundreds of free workers and slaves.23 Captain General Mascarenhas eventually managed to bring some organization to the work by setting up a mining society or association, which admitted both those who employed slaves and free miners laboring on their own account. Output soon rose from an average of 375 réis a day per miner to 531 réis, and the hopes were that such increases would continue. But dissention soon broke out. Some members rather shortsightedly complained that instead of putting all of the available labor to work digging for gold the society’s directors had instead employed some on road construction and drainage. For his part, Mascarenhas repeated that efforts continued to be wasted because of a general ignorance of proper mining techniques, and everyone accused everyone else of laziness and negligence. Output, after all, did not increase but instead by the end of 1814 had fallen to an average of 176 réis a day per worker, well below agricultural wages. Despite several attempts at reorganization, work slowly ground almost to a halt, in a mire of mutual recriminations. The society’s directors

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apparently “loaned” to themselves most of the gold that the mine yielded, owners sent slaves only when the prospects of immediate profits seemed good, and members quit the organization claiming they had been “scandalously robbed.”24 In an attempt to reanimate the enterprise Governor Manoel Ignácio de Sampião early in 1821 again overhauled the mining association, and though it limped along for several more years this effort ultimately met with no more success than had previous ones.25 Cunha Mattos rehearsed the reasons for failure: the political events of the early 1820s disrupted work, the miners “lacked capital and industry,” there were constant squabbles about who was actually working, and output suffered from turnovers in the labor force.26 But the biggest obstacle was water. As the miners followed the vein down, the excavations quickly reached the water table, causing the work to flood, and seasonal rains worsened the situation. Miners lacked the knowledge, capital, or equipment to mount an effective drainage operation or even to repair the equipment they had. By the end of the decade work was abandoned, and the lake that filled the diggings had become something of a tourist attraction, where visitors speculated on wealth that lay almost within reach.27 Small-scale gold mining continued in the nineteenth century, carried out typically by inhabitants of settlements in the interior when they were not occupied with agriculture or their cattle. Cunha Mattos found evidence of such activities at many of his stops in the 1820s, and Padre Silva e Souza suggested that gold allowed several towns an otherwise inexplicable positive balance of commerce.28 President Lino de Morais in 1830 surmised that overall it was the shipment of contraband or untaxed gold to the coast that covered the province’s few imports.29 In the 1840s Castelnau encountered the residents of Pilar washing out ore-bearing soil in their gardens, and Gardner reported that the inhabitants of Conceição carried water in buckets to wash for gold, because no one understood how to make a pump.30 In the mid-1850s there was a short-lived gold rush near Duro, and during the follow decade there was mining at São José do Tocantins and on the Rio Claro and Rio Pilões.31 One estimate in the early 1860s put the annual output of gold for several municipalities at one to eight hundred oitavas (eighths of an ounce) and Pilar’s at fifteen hundred, and certainly there were others.32 But these activities, a president grumbled, were carried on by a few prospectors who worked alone or in small groups and did not pay taxes, and about whom he had no information.33 Overall, then, smallscale mining persisted at various points in the province from the colonial period through the nineteenth century but failed to match either the imagined past or current hopes. There were efforts, too, over the course of the century to organize

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large-scale mining companies, but these did not prosper. At mid-century, for example, the Companhia de Mineração da Provincia de Goyáz, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, hired a French engineer to explore the banks of the Rio Maranhão and the Rio Claro for likely deposits; after fifteen months and, it was said, some twenty contos of capital expended, the company abandoned the effort. In the early 1860s the Agua Quente Mining Company similarly failed, reportedly because transport costs made it too expensive to bring in needed equipment. Then, during the last decade of the Empire the Compania de Mineração Goyana set out to exploit alluvial gold deposits at Abade on the Rio das Almas, above the town of Meiaponte. The company constructed extensive works and employed several dozen free and slave laborers but soon fell into disputes with nearby towns. Problems arose from the behavior of drunken miners in Meiaponte and Corumbá and from evidence that the mine’s activities were polluting Meiaponte’s main water source. The manager countered that he and his employees suffered constant threats and intimidation from the townsfolk. Tensions mounted until a group of masked men invaded the mine compound, destroying key equipment and injuring several employees. Brought to trial in Meiaponte, and with the peripatetic dentist Oscar Leal serving as their defense counsel, the accused predictably gained acquittal on all charges.34 Although it did not come up specifically in the context of the MeiaponteAbade dispute, because no one yet understood the problem, one danger subsequently linked to gold mining was the pollution of watercourses caused by mercury. Paulo Bertran has suggested that the origin of at least some of the idiocy and retardation among the local population remarked upon by travelers in nineteenth-century Goiás may have resulted from mercury poisoning.35 Miners used mercury in the eighteenth century, as they do today, to purify mined gold: heated in the presence of the ore mercury combines with impurities, but disposal of the resulting by-products can contaminate the water supply, or the miner may inhale mercury as a gas during the refining process. While it is possible that the residues of colonial mining practices continued to affect water supplies into the next century, there is no evidence for Goiás of the extensive use of mercury in mining after independence. The chemical must have been available, at least in small quantities, because it was the standard remedy prescribed to kill the larvae of the bluebottle fly, a parasite that invaded the wound left on a calf by the separation of the umbilical cord. But there are few indications in tax or notary records or newspaper advertisements of the sale of mercury, and its high cost would, in any event, have put it beyond the reach of the province’s generally marginal mining operations. Mixed in with Goiás’s alluvial gold in some areas were diamonds, typically small and of poor quality but found in substantial quantities. The

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best-known and most extensive of these deposits occurred in the gravel beds of the Rio Claro and Rio Pilões, in the western part of the province. During the colony diamond mining had been a Crown monopoly, typically leased to an individual or a partnership in return for fixed payments.36 In the mid-eighteenth century the state licensed the Rio Claro–Pilões area to the Caldeira Brant brothers of Minas Gerais. Reportedly they worked the rivers for three years with some two hundred slaves but managed to extract only a pound and a quarter of diamonds.37 When their contract lapsed the Crown interdicted mining of any sort on these rivers and stationed troops there to keep out interlopers. This had no more success than did most such efforts, and soon illegal diamond and gold seekers overran the area, dodging cavalry patrols and hostile Indians and risking fevers and mining accidents. Most of the travelers who crisscrossed Goiás in the years just before and after independence visited the area. Pohl, for example, passing through in 1819, remarked that the Crown only recently had rescinded the ban on mining but still required the sale of all diamonds to the state. Because the government had no money to buy these, however, the illegal traffic in the stones continued. Both he and Saint-Hilaire commented on the high local food prices and on the “laziness” of the predominantly black and mulatto population, but they noted too the “astonishing” amount of gold jewelry the women wore.38 A small resident population grew up during the 1820s and 1830s around the government checkpoint at the Rio Claro crossing, and each year at the end of the rainy season hundreds of hopeful miners from across the province flocked to the region to look for gold and diamonds. The industry remained largely outside the law: for example, in June of 1822 the province’s new Provisional Junta explained that it was impossible to collect taxes from the miners, who worked spread out along eight to ten leagues of river and moved constantly. The provincial regime considered reviving the buying monopoly, but it too lacked the necessary capital, and the unregulated mining and trade in stones continued.39 In the early 1860s Antônio Gomes Pineiro attempted a more systematic exploitation of the Rio Claro deposits. For several years during the months between July and September Pineiro mined the river, employing some thirty free workers. He managed to extract fifteen oitavas and nineteen vintíns (twentieths of an ounce) of diamonds, as well as some gold, the first year, and twelve oitavas the next, but then abandoned the project.40 Why is not clear, though it may have been related to an outbreak of fevers reported in the area during these years. More likely, poor returns and escalating Indian attacks drove him out. With the end of the Mossâmedes aldeia, Kayapó raids increased across the southwest of the province: in May and June of 1861 the president reported that the activities of the Kayapó had depopu-

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lated much of the Rio Claro and Rio Bonito districts, and the following year he identified the attackers specifically as ex-residents of the aldeia.41 Mining for gold and diamonds in nineteenth-century Goiás remained a risky, seasonal activity that occupied a relatively small number of men, who were forced to keep one step ahead of the Indians, of each other, and, after the defeat of the Indians, of the gunmen employed by local elites who sought to monopolize the industry.42 Occasionally word circulated of diamond finds in other parts of the province, for example, Flores in 1853 and Posse the following year. Each attracted a similarly turbulent population, and none lasted.43 Gold and diamonds offered flash and the promise of quick wealth, but if the province was to modernize a much more important mineral was iron. Its weight made importation from the coast expensive, and this in turn raised the cost of all items with iron components, including agricultural implements and equipment, horse and mule shoes, nails and fixtures for house, cart and boat construction, artisan tools and machinery, durable bridges, and materials to make or repair firearms. The availability of adequate quantities of iron and steel at reasonable prices was undoubtedly a central requirement for provincial development and remained a focus of concerned attention by both local inhabitants and state agents throughout the nineteenth century. Blacksmiths commonly made small amounts of iron and steel for their own use from raw materials available locally, but efforts to mount production on a commercial scale encountered a number of obstacles, including ore of uneven quality, shortages of wood or charcoal, imperfect technical knowledge, and, again, market constraints imposed by poor roads.44 The first serious attempt in Goiás came during the late 1820s with the organization of a “mercantile society” capitalized at 120 shares of 50$000 réis each. The intent was to build a foundry, either at Traíras, where the vicar Manoel da Silva Alvarez already produced small quantities of iron, or near Mossâmedes, where there evidently were large quantities of ore, together with stands of trees for wood to fire the smelting process. The president opted for Mossâmedes, but the death of Alvarez, who seems to have been the one who possessed the necessary expertise; the reluctance, again, of local “capitalists” to involve themselves in an unproven scheme; and what turned out to be after all poor-quality ore doomed the project.45 Provincial officials returned to the idea after mid-century and over the next several decades made repeated efforts to have a foundry brought into operation. Apart from an evident shortage of technical knowledge, which seems odd given that many small mills operated successfully across the border in Minas Gerais, the principal impediment was a scarcity of capital. For example, in the mid-1850s Manoel Xavier de Valle Costa e

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Abreu negotiated with the government to set up a forge near Santa Luzia, but asked for a substantial loan. After agonizing over this, the director of the Provincial Treasury recommended in favor, arguing that the need for “this metal, of all the most precious,” justified risking the province’s fragile finances. The president agreed to advance Costa e Abreu ten contos, in return for which he was to have the factory operating within two years, to supply the government one hundred arrobas (an arroba = approximately 33 pounds) of iron a year for four years free of cost, and to charge customers no more than 5$000 réis an arroba for iron and sell steel at 320 réis a pound. The proposal quickly evaporated, however, and may have been nothing but a confidence scheme from the start.46 But already another project was afoot, this one for a foundry at Formosa to be built without government assistance. Under the direction of the Chaves family, and using labor recruited in Minas Gerais, this mill operated successfully at least until the 1890s, producing modest quantities of iron at 8$–12$000 réis an arroba, as compared to 25$000 réis for metal brought from the coast. However, droughts or, alternatively, heavy rains repeatedly caused work to shut down, and costs of shipping iron from the foundry’s location far in the east of the province limited its utility for the rest of Goiás. Output suffered too, it was said, from the inconstancy of the workers who commonly took wage advances and then disappeared.47 The province needed a more centrally located and more reliable source of iron and steel. Against a loan advance of twelve contos, the French mining engineer Mario Auguste Rochet proposed in the mid-1860s to set up such a mill close to the capital, promising iron at 5$000 réis an arroba and steel at 8$000 réis. Lacking the funds for such a loan, the government borrowed almost ten contos from the religious brotherhood of Nossa Senhora do Rosário of Meiaponte. Rochet acquired the necessary land, commissioned construction of buildings, and departed for Europe to purchase equipment, leaving three contos of the loan with the provincial government to pay for transporting the machinery from Santos to Goiás and to hire workers. But when Rochet returned to Brazil the provincial administration in Goiás refused to release the remaining money, and after repeated failed appeals he left the equipment in customs and took a teaching position in Rio de Janeiro.48 What could have caused the province to abandon the project and its investment? Probably the difficulty lay in the original contract, obtained by Rochet from an interim administration headed up by his brother-in-law, Dr. João Bonifácio Gomes de Siqueira; a change of presidents may have doomed the undertaking. In the last decade of the Empire Goiás tried once more, guaranteeing 12 percent on a capital of twenty contos for construction of a foundry near Goiás. But when Oscar Leal passed the site two years later he described

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the mill in the past tense and noted that nothing of it could be found.49 Though production of iron and steel in small amounts at local forges persisted, overall the province suffered shortages and high prices for these critical materials until the end of the century.50

Commerce Tying Goiás’s settlements and fazendas together and linking these to other provinces and the coast were trade and commerce, but during the nineteenth century these connections remained weak and subject to vast uncertainties. Limiting exchange were the now-familiar problems of distance and poor communications, as well as the simple poverty of much of the population, slave and free. Scattered throughout the countryside were many small and medium-size units most of which engaged in the same subsistence and petty commodity activities, offering few opportunities for specialization or trade. A trade map of nineteenth-century Goiás would have shown a number of local and regional circuits, a few of these continuously interlinked and others that joined only occasionally. As one result, supply and demand tended to be uncertain and prices volatile; for example, transport costs could render surplus food products effectively worthless even when a demand for these existed in nearby markets. Interwoven with local and regional circuits were threads of national and even international commerce. Such conditions tended to promote the availability of a wide variety but uneven quantities of consumer and capital goods, at least in the main towns, and, because of a shortage of cash, a dependence on credit. Regions and producers found that the ability to enter the market and the profits or losses they encountered there varied widely and unpredictably over time. The most rudimentary level of commerce joining the local and national economies was that conducted by peddlers, or mascates. These traveling merchants carried a limited range of merchandise, by horse or cart or on their backs, and traded this in the hamlets and on the fazendas for animals or other products, cash, or credit against future delivery. Some worked the Rios Araguaia and Tocantins in canoes, and others had regular occupations, dabbling only part-time at peddling.51 For the more isolated rural populations mascates were the source of manufactures most readily available to them. Customers understood that these purchases carried higher prices and a more limited selection of goods than could be found in town,52 but buying from peddlers was convenient and it meant that farms and families did not have to be left undefended while the men traveled to the nearest settlement. Town merchants resented the peddlers, considering them interlopers and unfair competition, and municipal governments commonly burdened them with special taxes, but their activities persisted. Mascates

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were particularly important in the north, with its poorer economy and scattered population. According to Castelnau, “commerce [in the north] is in the hands of traveling merchants, who move about the countryside trading their goods for cattle,” and he encountered them in Natividade, Duro, the Vão do Paranã, São Domingos, and Arraias.53 Peddlers not only facilitated trade but brought the latest news and served as heralds of civilization, if only in the form of the latest trifles from the coast. But valued though he might be, the mascate was still an outsider and at some level distrusted, not always without reason. These traders, like gypsies, sometimes traveled in groups or with helpers, and might pose a threat to isolated families: in November of 1855, for example, the subdelegado at Campinas reported the murder of a rancher by a mascate who had been in the area, selling goods and collecting debts.54 Indeed, debts were often the problem, as a tax agent explained: “The peddlers gladly advance merchandise and then leave, but come the time to collect they show up with a large group of armed retainers and force the ranchers to give them cattle for less than their value.”55 Somewhere between the mascates and the more established merchants of the towns were those traders common to any frontier who ventured their hand at various businesses, moved often, and occasionally found themselves operating on the margins of the law. Such was the career of Antônio José de Bittencourt, as he explained it to the police of the capital in the spring of 1861. Originally from Palmeira dos Índios in Alagoas, he had left there, he said, to trade in Crato, Ceará. But unspecified “disturbances” in his business dealings forced him to move after five years to Joazeiro, Bahia, where he opened a distillery, trafficked in goods transported on the Rio São Francisco, and became involved in trading at the diamond washings at Assuruá. The details on this last part were a bit vague. A drought caused him to uproot again, this time entering Goiás and buying hides at Posse, São Domingos, and Palma, with the intent to sell these downriver in Pará. Word of an epidemic in Belém, however, decided him instead to strike out for Mato Grosso with his brother. In Meiaponte they ran into Pedro José da Silva, but when Bittencourt learned that da Silva had a criminal past, he explained, he headed for the capital, while his brother and da Silva went north to trade at the Moquém fair.56 If hard for historians to track, there must have been many such small traders and hustlers inhabiting the lower and intermediate reaches of provincial commerce, sometimes sliding over into manual labor or crime or perhaps encountering a run of good fortune and settling down in a town. The more substantial settlements of the province hosted retail and wholesale shops and stores of varying sizes and activities; indeed, among the country folk the common appellation for any such place was “the commerce.” The most humble of these establishments were the taverns, which

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typically combined sales of small quantities of food and items of daily necessity such as soap or candles or tobacco with dispensing alcohol by the drink. Because few of the owners could afford to buy in wholesale quantities and did not, in any event, have storage facilities for large volumes, they instead purchased what they needed retail from bigger establishments and hoped to make profits two ways: by selling at higher prices but giving credit to residents of the neighborhood, and by taking advantage of the often imperfect measurement of large quantities to gain a bit more for their money.57 Another name for these establishments was venda, and they could be found also along the main roads used by travelers and sometimes on the larger fazendas.58 Taverns served several important functions. They provided an almost respectable living for poor women and widows who otherwise had little chance of finding employment.59 Taverns also gave the urban lower classes access to consumer goods in the quantities they could afford to purchase on a day-to-day basis: for example, in July of 1835 the estate of Ana Souza Rodova sued Damiana Anna da Silva over debts owed to such a store. These amounted to only some 19$070 réis but involved the purchase over an extended period of corn, bacon, beans, soap, rice, salt, cotton cloth, coffee, rapadura (cakes of raw sugar), cheese, lard, and manioc, and loans of copper money.60 Competition from the taverns made it difficult for larger merchants to monopolize essential items and force up prices. But police officials complained too that taverns were gathering places for slaves, exslaves, and all manner of dubious persons. Whereas the city of Goiás might have fifty to seventy taverns at any one time, and even a village such as Bonfim or Corumbá could have twenty or thirty, only the largest towns had more than two or three general stores, or lojas. These stocked imported products divided into “dry goods,” e.g., hardware and cloth, and “wet goods,” e.g., wine or canned food, as well as local products such as artisan textiles, grains, hides, and leather goods, and tools and furniture. They engaged in money and barter trade and extended credit to their more substantial customers; a sack of salt, for example, might cost three hides now or five hides on credit.61 Outside of the capital business practices could be haphazard: in Meiaponte, for example, the French engineer Paul Wallé noted that merchants were very casual about business, opening and closing their shops at whatever hour, and of Santa Luzia Oscar Leal complained that shopkeepers displayed their goods with no order, opened their stores only when customers knocked on the door, had little knowledge of the what they handled and less of proper pricing, and sold on credit but failed to collect debts, leaving their widows and families in misery.62 In fact, though, notary records reveal that at least some of these men participated in quite extensive and sophisticated

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commercial networks, linked through powers of attorney that licensed one merchant to act for another in a distant town, for trade and in civil matters such as debt collection.63 Any one familiar with a nineteenth-century provincial town should have understood that it made no sense to keep a store open all day when foot traffic might amount to a half-dozen persons in an afternoon, and up-to-date information on prices or products was difficult to obtain in the interior. In the money-short sertão most commerce depended on credit, and whether creditors were able to collect on a debt depended more on opportunity and power than on good business sense. Most imported goods reached Goiás, and much of the province’s exports left, by land. Although water transport generally was cheaper,64 the available rivers of the province served chiefly the sparsely populated and poorer northern districts and emptied far in the north, in Pará. By comparison, the overland communications upon which the south depended were expensive, and their cost increased over time. Before mid-century freight rates to or from the coast were 2$000–3$000 réis per arroba. By the 1850s these had risen to 5$000 réis, and over the next decade they jumped to 12$000 réis; as a result, goods could be three times as expensive in Goiás as in Rio de Janeiro.65 Small wonder that government officials sent there complained of the high cost of living. In part, rising shipping rates were simply an effect of the general inflation and increase in prices characteristic of the 1850s and early 1860s, but they also reflected specific shifts in the national economy. Expanding coffee production in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo pulled animals, men, and carts away from other parts of the center-south, making transport more expensive for non-coffee traffic. Expenses and delays on the road notwithstanding, the selection of imported goods to be had on this distant frontier was little short of astonishing. If trade with Pará served chiefly the north of the province, products imported over this route did arrive in the capital too, and by the 1880s these included wheat flour, salt, pepper, German beer, Portuguese wine, canned English butter, lead, American tools, Singer sewing machines, and iron ovens.66 But most of the trade of Goiás’s south had always been with Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and in the nineteenth century this grew further as coffee prospered and opened new markets for the province’s products. For example, an advertisement by the store “The House of Good Taste” that appeared in the 12 December 1867 issue of the newspaper the Correio Official covered more than half a page with a list of goods just arrived from Rio de Janeiro. Apart from a wide selection of specialized fabrics and adornments for women’s and men’s clothing “for the dances,”67 the list included wallets, with spaces for photographs, combs of buffalo bone, ivory, and horn, cinnamon, steel pens, paper, purple and black dyes, seals and sealing wax, envelopes, “modern” pipes, scissors and sewing accessories, pencil sharpeners, silver, gold, and

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colored beads, playing cards, flutes, toy swords and guns for children, dolls than cried and rolled their eyes, brushes, French polish for shoes, pocket knives, glass for lanterns, sugar pills, primers, books of model documents, kerosene lamps, laxative pills, clock keys, buckles, snuff and snuff boxes, colored pictures, flower jars, men’s socks, glass bottles, wax matches, woven gold-silk chains, pins, Portuguese needles, muskets and shotguns, sword canes, fine canes and riding crops, sun hats, colored paper, Indian tea, fine chocolates, fine soap in bars, assorted cigars, fuzes, peanut oil for the hair, mirrors, small oil lamps, tacks and nails, bolts, gilded horseshoe nails, white lead, string, thimbles, basins, pots and pans of wrought and forged iron, pomade (Brazilian and Portuguese), English talcum powder, touch holes for muskets, half boots for men and children, sheet metal mugs, magnesium, rhubarb, kerosene, English butter, pepper, peppermint, thread, guitar strings, iron tackle and harnesses, glass latches for cupboards, wicks for lighters, string and cord, horseshoe nails, horseshoes, garlands and orange tree branches for brides, hoops for skirts, hats, assorted china, “and many more items, whose enumeration would take too much space.”68

Resisting the urge to analyze each of these items in detail, two aspects of the list stand out: the wide variety of consumer goods already available in the 1860s in Goiás for those able to afford them and the premodern chaos of the list itself, probably simply following the order in which the items came off the mules, and reminding us of the merchants’ limited marketing expertise. Over the next two decades lists of this sort published in the newspapers became shorter and better organized or more focused, as the sophistication of retailers and consumers grew.69 But because each store attempted to capture as much as possible of the business of the relatively few customers available, each carried a wide range of goods but could not stock these in depth, forfeiting the advantages of specialization. As a result, it was not unusual for even a common item to be suddenly unavailable: on more than one occasion, for example, local newspapers appeared printed on colored wrapping paper because of a shortage of newsprint, and in 1887 the newly opened brewery shut down after only a few weeks, to await the arrival of key supplies from the coast. An impressive array of consumer goods found their way to Goiás, but the prices necessarily were high, markets limited, and lines of supply precarious. Goiás stood at the end of a long and fragile connection to the Atlantic economy, both economically and psychologically.

Communications Goods shipped by land to and within the province moved either by mule train (tropas) or ox cart (carros de boi). Mule trains found particularly wide use in the center-west and remained in service there long after other parts of Brazil had abandoned them.70 A writer remembered as a

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small boy watching one arrive in Santa Cruz: “Following the lead animal came the first lote (group), walking in single file. They carried large leather bags, strapped on in pairs and covered with red mud. Then another lote arrived and then another and then another, until the square filled with animals.”71 Mule trains were of various sorts and sizes.72 Some belonged to a large landowner or rancher and carried his produce to market, returning with the goods he needed for his own use or perhaps to stock a store on the fazenda. In other instances the animals were the property of a merchant or a businessman who shipped cargo for others as well as himself and employed a manager (tropeiro) to oversee the operation; for example, Comendador Alves de Oliveira of Meiaponte early in the century shipped cotton to Rio de Janeiro and Bahia and sent imported goods to Mato Grosso, using mule trains supervised by his son-in-law. Finally, some mule trains belonged to the tropeiro himself who traveled with the animals, negotiating cargo along the way in the manner of a nineteenth-century tramp steamer’s captain.73 All travelers in nineteenth-century Goiás encountered tropas, on the road and at rest stops, and some journeyed with them and recorded descriptions of their organization and procedures.74 For example, in the 1840s Castelnau encountered a large mule train on the road between Goiás and the Rio Araguaia, bound for Cuiabá, a journey of several months.75 Such long distance tropas could be quite large, with two or three hundred animals and organized in military style: in front rode an armed vanguard of horsemen, followed by the madrinha or lead mule or horse, typically decorated with silver ornaments and wearing a bell for the others to follow. Coming behind were the cargo animals organized into lotes of six to ten or more, depending on whether the mule driver accompanying them walked or rode horseback. Each driver carried a musket or at least a knife, and supervising the whole operation was the tropeiro, who rode constantly back and forth along the line, keeping order and resolving problems. At the rear came more armed guards. Most tropas were smaller but all followed the form of madrinha in front and division into lotes. At the close of the day the convoy camped at a pouso (rest stop or inn) if one were available,76 or in an open field, hopefully near water and forage. The men unloaded the mules, treated any cuts or abrasions, checked the shoeing, and gave the animals a ration of corn before putting them out to pasture. Despite being hobbled, the mules commonly wandered off, and each morning the men had to round them up and load the cargos again. This process demanded special care to balance the load and to cinch up the belts tightly enough to prevent bags from working loose on the trail but not so tight as to hurt the animal. The need to load and unload each day not only made tropas laborintensive and time-inefficient but threatened damage to the cargo at every stop, as did rough trails and frequent river crossings. Limiting the loads

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was not only weight, eight to twelve arrobas depending on the condition of the animal, the terrain, and the corn and pasture available, but also the size of what could be strapped on the side of a mule. Such restrictions made impossible, for example, the importation of large or heavy machinery. The risks, uncertainties, and delays of the mule trains also raised costs: in May of 1885, for example, merchants in the capital were threatening to refuse to pay a tropeiro because of his failure to deliver their cargo in a timely manner.77 A common reason for damage and delays was the loss of animals to accidents or disease. Referring specifically to the interior of Rio de Janeiro but certainly applicable to Goiás as well, a merchant called the trails “a cemetery for thousands, for tens of thousands of poor mules.”78 Mule drivers relieved dying animals of their cargo and left them where they fell or covered them with branches so as not to frighten those that came after. Indians attacked mule convoys specifically to kill the animals and strip them of their iron shoes.79 In 1870 the provincial president summed up the difficulties for Goiás of continued dependence on tropas: “These normally take sixty days from Rio de Janeiro in the dry season and many more when it is raining. The need to load and unload cargo every day, the rain and the burning sun, the dust of the road, and the brutality of the mule drivers, and the frequent accidents that cause damage or loss of cargo, contribute to the province’s high prices and scant importations.”80 Along the better-developed roads and sometimes at the rest stops at night mule trains encountered carreiros (carters) and their oxcarts, the other mode of overland cargo transport common to nineteenth-century Goiás. There was no love lost between the two groups and scuffles sometimes broke out, particularly when the carters took for firewood the stakes the mule drivers needed to secure their animals for unloading and loading. The men had different cultures for different sorts of work and formed something of a division of labor: tropas typically followed far-flung and unpredictable routes that kept them gone from home for months at a time, whereas the carts tended to ply more restricted and established circuits. As they did with the mule trains, nineteenth-century travelers encountered the large oxcarts on the roads and marveled at them. The English engineer James Wells described the carts as “plunging and heaving . . . like a ship at sea, hauled by the brute strength of four to a dozen pairs of oxen,” and Oscar Leal called them “moving houses.”81 Probably making their appearance in Goiás late in the eighteenth century, oxcarts had become widespread by the 1830s, though they were more common in the south of the province where the roads were better than in the north. Local craftsmen constructed the vehicles. The larger ones measured as much as five meters in length by two meters in height, but

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they all shared the same basic design, with the weight riding on a single fixed axle joined to two head-high wheels; pulling a cart would be one or more pair of oxen, with names such as “Fidalgo” (nobleman), “Farofa” (toasted flour), “Navigante” (navigator), or “Benfeito” (well done).82 The axle employed no bearings, and its wooden mount had to be constantly greased to keep it from bursting into flames. Even so, each cart emitted a distinctive moaning sound highly prized by the drivers. Typically, a cart carried a ton or more of cargo, three to four times what a mule could, but lacking brakes it had to be laboriously reversed when descending a hill, using the animals to hold the weight back. Because the cargo was not unloaded until it arrived at the destination, carts needed only a man or two, helped perhaps by a boy to accompany them, directing the animals with a long pointed stick. A hierarchy of carts and carters existed. The newest and best vehicles found employment in long distance trade, for example, bringing salt from Coxim and Uberaba and distributing this throughout the south and southwest of the province. Older and more worn carts carried agricultural products to town, and tools, wood, and building materials between and within fazendas. The capital involved in carting was substantial, at least by the standards of the time and place: in 1886, for example, Goiás’s president estimated that just the salt trade in the south of Goiás and the Triángulo of Minas Gerais involved some twenty-five hundred carts each valued at 250$000 and twenty-five thousand yokes of oxen at 100$000 each, and employed seventy-five hundred workers each paid 40$000 a trip.83 Attempts to introduce more efficient cart designs utilizing wheel bearings and a moveable axle failed, rejected by carters, it was said, because the axle did not “sing.” In truth, the existing design was comparatively cheap and easy to build, rugged, and well suited to the conditions of rural Goiás. But it required fairly level, well-developed roads, and therein lay a difficulty. The cart’s narrow wooden wheels, rimmed with iron studs, tended to tear up the roads they traversed, especially during or immediately after the rainy season. Travelers and tropas found passage difficult as a result, and even the carts themselves bogged down. Furthermore, their great weight damaged bridges and ferries.84 A “heavy and crude machine, a proper symbol of backwardness”85 the carro de boi may have been, but it served Goiás well for over a hundred years and its use persisted into the twentieth century, despite complaints. The inhabitants of the fazendas and the small towns of Goiás necessarily had complicated relationships with the men who worked the mule trains and carts. On the one hand, these provided vital transport services, as well as bringing the latest news and fashions from the distant coast and forwarding money and letters between families and merchants. Their arrival

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jolted isolated ranches and settlements out of the day-to-day routine, if only for a moment. But that was the problem. As outsiders they could not be entirely trusted, and as transients without local roots they were suspect of, and apparently sometimes engaged in, socially disruptive behavior that alarmed the sertanejos. The men who accompanied the mule trains seem in particular to have consciously cultivated a persona of carefree violence that, together with their worldly sophistication and distinctive dress, must have mesmerized many a small-town girl and boy. Mixed with a bit of drinking and dancing, this could lead straight to trouble. The citizens of Natividade, for example, felt it necessary to forbid such strangers to enter the town carrying “muskets, pistols, and pointed knives,” and another town, bypassed by the tropas because of construction of a new bridge, rationalized that what it had lost in business it gained in morals.86 Generally the carters were more locally rooted, but the men of the mule trains, together with other such marginals as remeiros (riverboat men), capangas and boiadeiros (cattle drovers), embodied at several levels what the sertanejo both feared and admired, and their arrival unavoidably shot bolts of tension through rural society.

Roads and Rivers Mule trains, cattle drives, and oxcarts, as well as the mails, all traveled the province’s roads, or what passed for roads, the condition of which preoccupied fazendeiros, merchants, and government officials throughout the century. Nothing was more constant in official reports and private correspondence than laments about bad roads and the adverse effects of these on the province, and every traveler’s account was a catalog of the horrors of the roads.87 Not long after independence a president reported that these were “in terrible condition and cause fear and danger to anyone forced to use them”; two decades later another confessed that “from all points of the province rain pleas to improve our so-called roads”; and as the Empire ended, little seems to have changed: “insuperable obstacles to crossing fearsome mountains, dense forests cut only by the trails of ferocious animals, [and] passages over wild rivers where not even a canoe is available to save the audacious traveler from the dangers of an inglorious and imminent death” characterized Goiás’s roads. The province, a newspaper lamented, was “choked from all sides” by bad roads.88 Particularly damaging were the effects of the annual rains. A road barely passable when dry became “a sea of liquid mud” when it rained, and the sun, ran a common quip, was the province’s only road engineer.89 The rains also caused the rivers to rise. Not only might this block passage for hours or days where bridges were not available or if the waters had carried these

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away, but even where the bridges survived, the overflowing water could “create great sloughs in the bed of the road and dig out the approaches to the bridges.”90 Ironically, complicating the problem was the very proliferation of “roads.” Many, in fact, were simply cattle trails, and following one of these and becoming lost was a staple of travel accounts. In other cases, those mounted on horseback purposefully struck off on supposed shortcuts, to avoid the long sweeping curves in the roads that the carts needed or the muck of heavily traveled sections. The resulting confusion led everyone astray. Bridges themselves could be a problem, as might the river crossing points (portos) served only by rafts or canoes. Rarely were bridges constructed of stone. Wooden structures tended to rot or to be lost in the high water and swift currents of the rainy seasons, and others burned in the annual fires used to clear fields and pasture.91 To cross major rivers where there were no bridges travelers depended on portos, but here too they commonly encountered approaches sunk in muck caused by the herds of cattle that passed through, or they risked their lives on faulty or unsafe equipment. A judge described the experience: “River crossings are made in a variety of craft, all of which tend to fill with water. They patch the various holes with soft mud that quickly dissolves and water pours in again, threatening to sink the boat. The passenger watches this negligent, slow, and badly done service, upon which he has risked his life, as a frightened spectator.”92 Worse, in most areas such facilities, terrifying as they might be, did not exist, and travelers had to make their own way as best they could across the innumerable creeks and rivers that cut the province. People and animals drowned and cargos were lost or damaged.93 Provincial presidents routinely excused themselves from collecting taxes or returning some item of information the central government had requested because bad roads and overflowing rivers, they explained, had stymied their efforts.94 President Fleury was wrong, however, or at least unfair, when he claimed in 1837 that “perhaps the province of Goiás is the only one in Brazil where the roads have had no improvement.”95 In fact, nothing occupied the attention of Goiás’s public officials more than efforts to improve communications. Each year the presidents’ annual reports detailed projects to construct and repair roads and bridges, attempts to obtain more financing for this work, and the frustrations such efforts encountered. The year following President Fleury’s remarks, for example, the province contracted Captain João Luiz Brandão to repair the main highway to Bonfim, including construction of a series of bridges; João Gomes to open a bypass around a notorious sink hole; Colonel Felippe Antônio Cardozo to fix another stretch of this same road; José Rodrigues Jardim to repair the Bugres bridge; Captain Joaquim Alves de Oliveira to rebuild roads in

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the municipality of Meiaponte, and so on for several pages. Relatórios from the rest of the century were no different. Not until the 1850s, however, did the province gain the assistance of even a single civil engineer,96 leaving untrained local merchants and ranchers to supervise most of the construction and repairs. Typical, too, were shortages of skilled artisans and materials,97 with the result that road work, even if completed, might have been improperly planned or engineered and the works hurriedly and shoddily constructed and likely to come apart in the next rains. To pay for road and bridge improvements Goiás cobbled together money from provincial and local revenues, subsidies from the central government, and popular subscriptions.98 But roads competed with demands for funding from other projects such as jails and schools. There was never enough money available to permit the hoped-for progress on capital projects, and in many years even repairs lagged. Communications to and from the north, for example, evidently worsened in the first part of the nineteenth century.99 Still, every year the presidents’ correspondence and reports were full of contracts and hopes. The sparse population and low tax revenues of Goiás, the absence of a valuable export commodity to attract capital or pay taxes for improved communications, and the difficulties posed by the environment made road construction and maintenance a Sisyphean task. It is hardly to be wondered at, then, that local residents dreamed of rivers and of what these might do for the province. Logically, the most attractive of these should have been the ones in the south, the Paranaíba and its many tributaries, offering potential direct access to Minas Gerais and, later, to the markets of São Paulo’s coffee counties. But perhaps because they were more immediately available and their obstacles better known, these rivers attracted less interest than did those of the north. They left scant space to dream. Late in the colonial period several expeditions had attempted to reach São Paulo via the southern rivers but either failed or simply disappeared. Interest revived briefly in the 1830s but again this came to naught.100 Certainly small-scale, local commerce, much of it illegal and escaping the notice of the state, continued along the Rio Paranaíba in these years, but only after a generation of experience on the northern rivers made clear the difficulties there was the provincial government again willing to consider exploration of a southern route. The 1862 presidential report rehearsed the hoped-for advantages of the southern rivers for transportation: “without the obstacles encountered in the north, having to cover much shorter distances, and traversing areas more populated and abundant in resources.”101 An expedition departed for the south led by a descendent of one of the survivors of an 1816 attempt, but a new provincial president, with a strong personal commitment to the northern rivers, soon abandoned the idea of looking for access to the south,

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and again the effort brought no positive results. Projects in the 1870s and 1880s were similarly fruitless.102 While rocks and shallow stretches made the southern rivers evidently unpromising for large-scale commercial navigation, these were, on the face of it, no worse than the obstacles confronting traffic in the north, yet most in Goiás continued to favor northern schemes. In part, this derived simply from a century-old fascination with the possibility of direct access to the sea. But it also reflected the failure of provincial leadership to recognize the market potential of the São Paulo coffee economy. Instead, the siren of the north fixed the attention of Goiás’s political and commercial elites for most of the century. Barring the arrival of railroads, which from the province’s point of view were moving depressingly slowly west and north from the coast, land-based transport could not support profitable commercial agriculture. Possibly rivers could, and the biggest in the province were the Araguaia and the Tocantins. Once the colonial government had lifted an earlier ban meant to restrict smuggling, trade on these rivers began to flow legally, as it certainly had moved illegally before, based on the export of gold and then hides to Belém do Pará, in return for salt and manufactured goods. Most of this traffic favored the Tocantins and provided the scattered cattle fazendas and mining settlements of the north with salt and other imports at prices said to be cheaper than those that burdened the south.103 Early in the nineteenth century the Crown also had a strategic interest in exploring a possible interior route from Rio de Janeiro to Pará via the Tocantins, because of the vulnerability of coastal shipping to enemy attacks. To these ends, the government of the captaincy in 1806–7 helped organize a Mercantile Society of Traíras, to trade with Belém, and financed construction of several large rivercraft for the venture. The poverty of the items to be sent, however, hints at the problems this trade faced: 109 bales of cotton, 153 pieces of leather for shoe soles, 129 barrels of sugar, 106 rolls of tobacco, and “some packages” of hides. The undertaking did not prosper. Much of the cargo arrived damaged or spoiled in Pará or failed to find good prices there, and the authorities in Belém showed little interest in the project, leaving the boats to return without adequate crews or supplies.104 A similar, if more ambitious, effort a few years later to promote another such society never passed the planning stages.105 Nevertheless, a modest commerce on the northern rivers continued without state assistance and grew erratically over the next decades. Trade with Pará via the Rio Tocantins made use of an array of craft, including rafts, boats, and canoes of all sizes. Some of these were quite large, displacing up to twenty tons and worked by crews of thirty or more, usually mixed-bloods or Indians from settlements along the river. One

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traveler described these vessels as looking like “floating shacks.”106 Accompanying the larger boats or trafficking on their own would be rafts. These typically had a hut at the center to shelter the crew, and the deck would have been piled high with cargo. When going downstream to Pará, usually a voyage of only a few weeks to a month, the larger craft followed the current and the crew used long poles to work the vessel through the rapids and shallows and to push off from snags. But the return upriver was arduous. The men poled and pushed the boat yard by yard against the current or winched it from the banks with ropes fastened to trees.107 This was a grueling and time-consuming process, if perhaps less dangerous than the sometimes wild ride down stream; it could easily take five or six months to get back to Porto Imperial. Finally, accompanying the rafts and the boats were small canoes, used by the hunters and fishermen who kept the crews of the larger vessels supplied with game. Canoes also carried cargo and passengers between settlements on the river or all the way to and from Pará,108 though their small size could hardly have made long-distance trade cost-efficient under normal circumstances. Outsiders dismissed the boats found on Goiás’s northern rivers as crude, uncomfortable, and unsafe for the crews, and they chided the builders for their ignorance. Given the cost of materials, however, and particularly of the iron needed for nails and fittings, the dangers of the route, and the limited profits possible, the craft were probably about what the trade could bear. None used sail power, though why is not entirely clear. Perhaps the locals were unfamiliar with the technology, though this seems unlikely as sail-driven craft frequented the Rio São Francisco, or they thought the river too narrow, or, as some argued, they feared that a sudden gust might capsize the craft.109 Apart from Indian attacks, which declined after mid-century, and disease, which seems to have worsened, the chief obstacles to navigation of the northern rivers were the rocks and rapids that choked their course. Travelers described the dangers of shooting the rapids at high speed.110 In other instances, crews proceeded more deliberately, “trying to slow the pace of the descent, holding the boat back with ropes, sometimes swimming, sometimes climbing over the rocks.”111 Not surprisingly, though, shipwrecks were a staple of the traffic: in July of 1870, for example, the Provincia de Goyáz reported the recent loss of three boats on the Tocantins, together with their cargos. Destruction of a vessel typically ruined a merchant, for only the wealthiest could afford to spread their capital over more than one or two shipments.112 Problems vexed the traffic in high water and in the dry season both. During the rains the river rose and covered many of the obstacles but the mass and rapid flow of the water made it difficult to keep a boat under control and threatened sudden catastrophe. When the

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rains slacked off, low water allowed easier handling of boats, but the craft then tended to run aground on sandbanks or to become wedged between exposed rocks. Goods had to be unloaded and packed around shallows. The obvious solution was to open deeper channels by digging or blasting, but, again, a shortage of machinery impeded such efforts, and the high cost of explosives forced clearance efforts to rely most often on the heat from fires built on the rocks to break up obstacles, a slow and laborious process.113 Neither government subsidies nor private initiative scored significant successes in opening the Tocantins during the nineteenth century, and the trade remained risky and, necessarily, an enterprise of limited scale. After traffic grew slowly in the 1830s and 1840s, because of both a stagnant provincial economy and conflicts with the indigenous population, the decades from the late 1840s to the early 1880s witnessed the high point of nineteenth-century activity on the Tocantins. Late in 1849 a judge at Natividade wrote to the provincial president describing the trade: over the last five years, he said, an average of some eleven large boats, carrying 700–1,500 arrobas each, and about twenty smaller ones, each with cargos of 300–400 arrobas, had participated in the commerce with Pará. Usually accompanying the larger boats were several smaller craft, each of which carried 150–240 arrobas and were used too to transfer cargo around rapids or over shallows. The numbers of the crews on the vessels varied but a total of some 480–500 men worked in the traffic: 50 from Palma and 50 from Peixe, 30 from the fazenda Santa Clara, 150 from Porto Imperial, and 100 each from Boavista and Carolina. Added to these were the Indians who manned the canoes, hired through the missionary at the Boavista aldeia. Merchants at Porto Imperial largely controlled the trade but were themselves in debt to others in Pará and paid high interest rates, in part because Belém creditors found it difficult to collect debts in Goiás.114 Hides, mostly from cattle but also from deer and other wild animals, dominated the downriver traffic and salt was the chief item brought back. For example: Traffic, Porto Imperial–Belém via the Rio Tocantins, 1857 Boats: 19 Crews: 259 Hides exported Quantity: 10,340 arrobas Value: 20:680 milréis Salt imported Quantity: 3,451 arrobas Value: 45:000 milréis115

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In reality, the quantity of hides exported was likely two or three times that reported or taxed, as the imbalance above between the value of exports and imports suggests, and this did not allow for other imported goods such as canned food, household items, and iron. For example, in April, 1863 the tax collector at Boavista reported that whereas he estimated that some 28,000–30,000 hides had gone down river recently, he had been able to tax only about 7,000 of these.116 The problem from the point of view of the ranchers and merchants was that a hide worth 2$000 réis in Porto Imperial, after paying an export tax of 200 reís, a municipal tax of 80 réis, and transport costs, and not allowing for those lost or spoiled along the way, brought only 3$200 reís in Belém.117 And their capital remained tied up for six months or more of the round trip. Sellers argued to no avail that the state should only collect taxes when they returned, on the value of the hides that survived the trip to the coast.118 Throughout the decade of the 1850s the presidents’ annual reports indicated the gradual growth of this traffic, and by the early 1860s President Couto de Magalhães was reporting that it employed some seventy-five craft, with a total of more than seven hundred tons, and almost seven hundred crew members.119 The trade persisted well into the next century, when local residents in the north still referred to the river as “the salt route,” but available statistics become rarer. In part this may be because in the 1860s official interest shifted to the Rio Araguaia, so that some of the decline in traffic on the Tocantins may have been more apparent than real. But longdistance trade on the Tocantins does seem to have fallen off by the 1870s. Perhaps other opportunities undercut the willingness of the residents of the north to endure the risks and hardships of the work, or increasing disease outbreaks on the lower river may have discouraged them.120 In 1869 the town council at Porto Imperial lamented that business with the north was “bad,” and a few years later Palma reported that “commerce with Belém has decayed, both because of the difficulties of navigating the Tocantins and, and chiefly, because of the unhealthfulness of the place.” Salt that once had come up river now arrived by mule train from trading centers on the Rio São Francisco, an old trade connection now apparently revitalized.121 Ultimately, too, Pará in the nineteenth century, and even had there been better communications, was not a market sufficient to act as an engine of growth for Goiás’s economy.122 The alternative to the Tocantins in the north was the Rio Araguaia, which stirred fantasies among the inhabitants of Goiás far out of proportion to its real potential.123 The river had the genuine advantage that overall it was easier to navigate and less obstructed than the Tocantins, and if the Rio Vermelho could be made passable the two together held out the tantalizing prospect of a water link directly from the capital and

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center-south of the province to the ocean.124 Against these attractions, however, weighed the problems of continued Indian threats, the lack of a “civilized” population along the river to support the traffic, and greater distances to the coast than via the Tocantins. The failure of several Araguaia trading companies organized with the support of provincial governments drove these points home, or should have.125 But in the 1850s the government returned with new tax exemptions to encourage settlement along the Rio Araguaia and plans for a new round of forts and aldeias, to subdue the Indians and to support river trade. The holy grail of navigation on the Araguaia was steam. Steam-driven boats operated in the Bay of Guanabara as early as the 1830s, but the technology penetrated the sertão more slowly, in part because of the difficulties of transporting the necessary machinery. In the mid-1860s, though, steam navigation on the river became the project, indeed the obsession, of exprovincial president Couto de Magalhães, and he successfully lobbied for imperial and provincial subsidies.126 After a struggle of Fitzcarraldian proportions, he succeeded in bringing a small steam vessel in pieces by oxcart from Cuiabá and putting it into operation on the Araguaia. Over the next decade his company acquired several additional vessels and worked a more or less regular schedule on the upper Araguaia, if rarely going as far down river as Belém. Ultimately, though, there was insufficient traffic to support the enterprise.127 Steam navigation on the Rio Araguaia was a heroic but not a profitable undertaking, and customers complained of high rates, poor accommodations, and irregular service. By the 1880s railroads were approaching the province from the south, and ranchers were more interested in shipping their products directly to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo than in a roundabout route through Belém. Going north was precisely the wrong direction in the 1880s. In January of 1885 the province rescinded Couto de Magalhaes’s contract, and subsequent attempts to revive the project came to nothing.128

4

Agriculture and Food Supply It seems that here men find themselves in conflict with agriculture. —Raymundo José da Cunha Mattos, Itinerário . . . pelas Províncias de Minas Gerais e Goiás

Most of the attention to Brazil’s agrarian past has focused on export crops such as sugar and coffee. This is logical both because historically these have been responsible for integrating Brazil into the world economy and because they have served as the chief financial props for the elites and the state. But export production is not what has occupied the time and energies of most of the country’s rural population for most of its history. Rather, day-to-day activities have focused on the so-called “internal economy”: the production, consumption, and exchange of food products, raw materials, and artisan items for subsistence and for sale and exchange on local and regional markets. Only indirectly, if at all, do these engage national and international commercial circuits. In recent decades some historians have begun to look seriously at this nonexport economy, but even these have limited their attention largely to the littoral, to the agriculture that supplied food for the slave workers in the export sector and for nearby urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro.1 This chapter shifts attention to the sertão, to regions isolated for much of Brazil’s history from direct involvement with overseas, export commerce. Inhabitants of colonial and early nineteenth-century Goiás generally showed little interest in agriculture, holding gold mining to be a much superior activity: “Agriculture,” Cunha Mattos lamented, “is viewed with a contempt unparalleled for a civilized country.”2 The Crown itself initially tried to discourage agriculture, in order that labor and capital should not be diverted from mining, and to collect taxes on food brought from São Paulo. What resulted was a haphazard supply system, marked by frequent shortages, high costs, and repeated crises.3 One, perhaps apocryphal, price list from the eighteenth century included “an alquire [approximately fourteen liters] of corn flour at 18 oitavas of gold, and of grain corn, six to seven [oitavas]; the first pig that appeared sold for

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eighty oitavas and the first milk cow for two pounds of gold.”4 Despite such extravagant prices, and even though state regulations actually banned slaves only from sugar and alcohol production, slave owners had strong incentives to keep every available captive at work mining, particularly during the years in which a head tax (capacitação) in gold weighed on each slave. This opened opportunities in agriculture for small producers, for those without slaves or with only one or two bound workers and shrewd enough to grasp the possibilities: one prospector, for example, upon discovering gold in a remote creek, instead of developing the claim himself planted large areas of food crops, and soon earned, it was said, better and more reliable profits selling these to the miners than he would have done from sifting through the gravel.5 Well before either the Crown or most of Goiás’s inhabitants were ready to acknowledge the imminent exhaustion of mining, several of the captains general worried in their reports to superiors about the problem, and they sought to encourage new economic activities in the colony. Captain General Luíz da Cunha Menzes, for example, in the early 1780s hoped that “the tendency of the population is toward agriculture and stock raising, as the gold washings are abandoned and the settlements emptied.”6 By the late 1790s tax lists reported some 1,189 farms in the south of the captaincy and 458 in the north, unfortunately without information on size or production, and another survey a few years later also pointed to increased agricultural activity, particularly in the south.7 Early in the next century Captain General Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas pronounced mining “through.” If much of the population continued to dream of the “happiness” that they imagined mining had brought their ancestors, he declared, others realized that gold offered at best an ephemeral prosperity and now saw their future in agriculture and cattle ranching.8 Agriculture, nevertheless, continued to be a hard sell to Goiás’s inhabitants,9 and Mascarenhas soon found his hopes complicated by the gold strike at Anicuns. In an attempt to stem the rush to the mine, the captain general ordered local judges at Jaraguá and Meiaponte, two of the towns vital to the capital’s food supply, to provide him lists of the small farmers of their districts, to be used to exclude these people from the mines. Given the limited policing capacity of the state such measures could have had little effect, but Anicuns, if not necessarily the hope of finding gold, soon faded. Gilded dreams notwithstanding, by the early 1820s the focus of the economy of necessity was shifting from mining to agriculture and stock raising, and with this came increasing attention to how such activities could be made more profitable.

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Small-Scale Agriculture Most subsistence agricultural and food production for local markets in nineteenth-century Goiás took place on small plots. In some cases this was public land (devoluta), but because most accessible areas near towns had owners, or at least claimants, farming open land necessarily pushed these agriculturalists to the limits of settlement, making transport to market difficult and exposing them to Indian and bandit attacks. This was the situation of the poorest and most “miserable” of rural inhabitants.10 Better off was the small farmer of the sort described in Bernardo Elis’s Veranico de Janeiro: “He lived on subsistence plantings that he, his wife, and two brothers-in-law worked. He sold a bit of what he grew, fattened a few pigs, ran some twenty cattle, and made a few loads of rapadura in the mill behind the house, which he sold in town.”11 Most such smallscale cultivators would have had less stock, and ownership of cattle among such farmers probably declined over the course of the century as access to pasture became more difficult.12 But the real problem, “the devil of it all,” added Elis’s character, “was Capitão Eplípio Chaveiro who owned the land he used.”13 Those who cultivated the land rarely owned it. They lacked the money to buy land or to secure clear title or the power to defend this if they did. Instead, most were agregados, sometimes called sitiantes or moradores, who worked land they rented or “borrowed” from large fazendeiros. These were substantially peasant producers, meeting most of their own needs, supplying food or handicraft items or labor as required to the large holder, and disposing of what goods or labor remained for cash or barter, if the opportunity became available. Those living close to the larger towns such as Goiás or Meiaponte could engage in market-oriented agriculture on a more regular basis if they wished and if they had sufficient land and labor power available. However, these activities rarely advanced beyond petty commodity production: supply and reproduction took place through the mechanisms of the market, but profits were neither sufficient nor consistent enough to allow the expanded reproduction central to capitalism. An 1819 survey of a district near Meiaponte, for example, found that of some 140 plots under cultivation, only 71 employed slave labor, and with a median of but two slaves each most could work only a tiny portion of the land they claimed.14 A generation later in nearby Corumbá, an area that supplied food to both Meiaponte and the capital, less than one in ten among the small farmers owned slaves, and few had more than one or two; of 130 agregados only three had slaves.15 This points to the declining use of slave labor for food agriculture in these years, a result of both an absolute fall in the number of captives available in the province and, as their value rose, the redistribution

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of those that remained to either more profitable tasks such as sugar production or to conspicuous consumption by urban or ranching elites. Smallscale farmers had to rely instead chiefly on family labor: wives, children, and, sometimes, relatives or in-laws.16 The more successful of these cultivators turn up on tax lists, but many evaded the eye of the state altogether. Food production in Goiás continued throughout the nineteenth century to suffer the problems that it was neither very remunerative nor very prestigious. Goiás and Meiaponte were the only settlements capable of absorbing agricultural surpluses on a regular basis and because of transportation difficulties their populations could draw on only a limited supply area. The expense of hauling bulky, low-value items such as corn, beans, and manioc on muleback or by oxcart could be prohibitive, making such products unmarketable if moved more than a few kilometers: by one estimate of such costs, for example, moving an arroba 20 kilometers cost 250 réis, 75 kilometers cost 750 réis, and at 250 kilometers this doubled to 1$500 réis.17 “Distant from markets,” a newspaper explained, “agriculturalists either plant only for subsistence or they have great trouble to get their surplus to market and as result they are generally poor and everyone suffers a lack of food outside harvest season.”18 Regional differences in supply and demand could be acute and not readily resolved: Wilson Nogueira remembered from his boyhood the sharp smell of beans rotting in the streets of Pires do Rio, beans for which there was no demand locally but for which transport costs shut off alternative possibilities.19 Poor communications meant that each part of the province of necessity had to be largely self-sufficient, providing little opportunity for regional specialization or exploiting comparative advantage. Markets were not only poor but poorly understood and easily thrown out of equilibrium by chance or bad judgment: for example, when short supply of a given commodity prompted high prices, farmers tended to throw themselves into growing it, with a resulting oversupply and low prices the following season.

Agricultural Techniques The technological level of agriculture in Goiás was low and changed little over the course of the century. A president complained that “our farmers feel no need for even the most elementary education.” And those who did become educated usually abandoned the countryside for office holding, commerce, or the military. Cultivation continued to depend on slash-andburn and other techniques adopted by the first settlers and little advanced since: “Hoe, axe, sickle, and fire are the favorite instruments of our agriculturalists.”20 Late in the 1820s the municipal council of Crixás explained local agricultural practices to the province’s president: “The method of

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cultivation is to clear the ground and cut the brush during the dry season and then burn this in August or September and with the first rains to plant corn in raised rows. Some farmers plant castor beans between the corn and some grow black beans or cotton. Others prefer to cultivate these crops separately, because they produce better.”21 The method commonly used for clearing ground was fire, and its effects could be dramatic: “In the middle of the mata (scrub/forest) they had cut the trees over several hectares, to make a planting. As was customary they had set fire to the downed trunks and this quickly spread through the forest. I saw giant trees that, burned at the base, fell with a roar, taking down with them others that the fire had not yet reached.”22 In addition to clearing away unwanted vegetation and converting this to ash from which new vegetation could absorb minerals, fire had the advantage that it at least temporarily rid the area of pests: “To escape the flames bands of seriemas [birds] fled with a great uproar, and lizards and snakes sought safe places, defending themselves against the vultures that, watching from the trees, sought to pick them off.”23 Ranchers also burned pastures to clear away dead grass and weeds and to help bring up new shoots with the rains, and cattle gravitated toward the smoke of these fires to find relief from insects that tormented them and to lick the ashes for salt.24 From the point of view of the farmer or rancher, fire was labor- and capital-efficient and the logical way to recondition existing areas or open new ones to exploitation. While slash and burn may have been the logical recourse for inhabitants of nineteenth-century rural Goiás, in the long term it threatened to lay waste to the countryside. The widespread use of fire, when put together with the introduction of iron tools and the food demands of a growing population of Luzo-Brazilian immigrants and their slaves, contributed dramatically to increasing the speed and efficiency of forest destruction in the province. Custom and folklore of the time and place had it that in the predominantly infertile soil of Goiás’s cerrado, food plantings only flourished on freshly opened and burned forest land, preferably in low, relatively humid areas. Once cleared, however, this land typically produced at high levels for only a few years before fertility declined, forcing the farmer to move on and open up new sites. Passing through the Mato Grosso, Goiás’s largest forested area, the early nineteenth-century traveler Johann Pohl found “parts of it devastated. And we saw abandoned plantings that were the motive for this devastation, which the forest was slowly reclaiming with grass grown to the height of a man.”25 When a farmer stopped using a clearing, forest cover usually did not return, but instead tough grasses, some accidentally introduced from Africa, took over. These made subsequent cultivation difficult, were of limited use, or so folk wisdom had it, for grazing, and did little to rebuild the soil for future agriculture. As the population increased

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and cleared areas expanded, the effect was to drive farmers further from town and town markets or force them to reuse depleted land, permanently degrading the soil. If widely used, fire was equally widely condemned, both nationally and locally. Everyone who cared to think about it understood the damage burning caused, and more broadly, the problems that resulted from the crude and destructive agricultural techniques that burning symbolized. Year after year provincial officials railed against the “wanton” destruction of the matas: “I see with anguish the damage done each year to our forests, without attention to the valuable wood, without considering the work involved in clearing and fencing new areas or the greater and greater distances to the plantings.”26 Fire destroyed forest resources, disrupted the habits of some animals and killed others, and dried the soil, opening areas to the erosive effects of heavy seasonal rains: “bit by bit the ruin of future generations is being prepared.”27 With few means to control the fires once set, these sometimes spread, burning wide and unintended areas and destroying not just timber and brush but houses, fences, and bridges as well: “Thus, in exchange for a few [pounds] of corn, our agriculturalists by their improvidence risk destroying whole forests.”28 Put another way, what might have been rational acts for the individual when taken together constituted “collective crimes” against society.29 From the point of view of the state, slash-and-burn agriculture had the additional defects of dispersing the rural population, impeding social control and tax collection, and making defense more difficult. But low returns and the absence of obviously better, or more affordable, alternatives, at least as much as “ignorance” or “apathy,” were responsible for preserving rudimentary agricultural methods. The plow, for many in the province the very symbol of modern cultivation, was useless in slashand-burn fields full of stumps and fallen trees.30 And the general lack of domesticated cattle, which could have provided both fertilizer and traction, further impoverished agriculture. In an unusually reflective analysis, the town council of Santa Luzia late in the 1840s meditated upon the question why agriculture did not seem to be prospering.31 Local residents, it complained, refused to pay attention to their crops or to adopt new methods; stuck in “routine,” they found the productivity of their plantings falling. Whereas in the past the town had exported food products, it now had to buy these from neighboring municipalities. People acknowledged the need for change, “confessing their errors and admitting the advantages of new techniques,” but continued just the same in the old destructive ways: “This might have been acceptable while plenty of forest remained, but now the municipality needs to conserve its soil.” Meiaponte’s town council voiced similar concerns. Local farmers made no efforts to improve their

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techniques, its members explained, with the result that much of the forest in the area was being destroyed, threatening the town’s water supply, and this even as agricultural production continued to fall.32 But, the councilors went on, when the câmara passed regulations requiring residents to improve their plantings and clean their properties, and encouraging the cross-breeding of animals, the Provincial Assembly disallowed these as infringements on private property rights. Not all of Goiás’s agriculture was backward, but the exceptions make clear the limits of provincial development under prevailing conditions. For example, every foreign traveler to visit Goiás for a generation inspected and remarked upon the size and efficiency of Engenho (later Fazenda) São Joaquim, near Meiaponte, property of Comendador Joaquim Alves de Oliveira. According to D’Alincourt “the organization, the administration of his great fazenda and mill was admirable, as was the good order and control that he has imposed upon the slaves.” Cunha Mattos described the mill, with what must have been a bit of exaggeration or the result of limited travel, as the largest he had seen in Brazil, and Castelnau paid Alves de Oliveira the ultimate complement, saying that visiting him was like being in a house in Europe. But it was the owner’s agricultural techniques that excited the most admiration: “On a part of his lands he has put aside the primitive methods generally employed by Brazilians in their plantings. Here he uses the plow and fertilizes the soil with the residue from the crushed cane. This way he does not have to burn new matas each year.”33 Fazenda São Joaquim was an anomaly, however, and even here, as the quote makes clear, “primitive methods” still reigned on much of the property. Alves de Oliveira’s commercial and trading wealth underwrote his agricultural experiments, but as he aged and as Meiaponte declined as a mercantile center so did Alves de Oliveira’s fortunes. By the mid-1830s he had largely stopped exporting cotton, the number of his slaves was declining, and innovation had effectively ceased.

The Farmers’ Enemies In the day-to-day agriculturalists worried less about the possible long-run consequences of “routine” than they did about such more immediate problems as parasites and pests, taxes, what they saw as a lack of government support, and Indian and bandit threats. Most would certainly have agreed that in Goiás “nature surrounded man with many enemies.”34 Insects, including leaf-cutting ants,35 attacked crops, and locusts rose up in unpredictable swarms, suddenly devastating wide areas: “We came upon bands of grasshoppers that covered the countryside, destroying all of the plantings they encounter.”36 Larger animals, for example, “wild pigs . . .

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tapirs, coatis, capivaris,” and deer bedeviled farmers, but the most difficult to deal with were “the green birds called [variously] periquitos, maracanás, [and] maritacas whose vast numbers made clouds when they appeared to devour the corn.”37 In 1830 the Provincial General Council considered, but later abandoned as impractical, a tax that would have required adult males to turn in each year the head of at least one bird that was destructive to agriculture.38 Against larger animals such as the deer and tapirs the usual recourse was fencing, though this rarely was very effective. While some of the better-off farmers or ranchers could afford ditching or even stone walls, for mobile slash-and-burn agriculture in the midst of the scrub, and before barbed wire became available at the end of the century, the only economic fencing material was wood. But this washed or rotted away quickly in the rainy season. More immediately, small animals dug under fences and larger ones knocked them down. Cattle and pigs caused the same sorts of problems. Under Brazilian law and tradition, and in contrast to the situation in, for example, North America at this time, responsibility for protecting agricultural plantings from damage by domestic animals fell to the farmer, not the owner of the invading stock. At one point the provincial government attempted to require that cattle on unfenced range be attended by a guard and corralled at night,39 but the ranching industry was expanding rapidly on the basis of open range, and both politically and economically the interests of ranchers outweighed those of small farmers. Instead, municipalities sought to require cultivators to defend their plantings: “They [are to] construct secure fences that prohibit the entrance of neighbors’ cattle, under the penalty of not being able to complain about damages done to their plantings, as well as having to pay for any cattle they kill.”40 Such regulations notwithstanding, conflicts continued and on occasion led to violence. In July of 1871, for example, the provincial police chief was busy trying to arrange a settlement between neighbors along the Rio Agapito where pigs had been invading and destroying plantings. More serious was a case the next decade near Catalão involving cattle invasions that led to a string of killings.41 The rancher had law and power on his side, leaving the small agriculturalist little recourse. Protection from precisely these sorts of abuses was a powerful incentive for the poor man to seek out an effective patron-client relationship.42 Apart from a few short-lived, local instances, drought was not a problem for Goiás during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the first cattle in the province probably drifted there on their own from the sertão of Bahia or Piauí attracted by the availability of water, and throughout the nineteenth century families hoping to escape the terrible droughts of the northeastern interior periodically streamed into Goiás. Rather, uneven or excessive rain-

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fall was more often the cause of difficulties. Already early in the century local residents were claiming to see the effects of deforestation in raised temperatures and erratic rains. In March 1831, for example, the newspaper A Matutina Meiapontense was reporting food shortages, the result, it claimed, of recent unusually heavy and prolonged rains that did not allow farmers to bring their products to town. On several occasions the Rio Vermelho rose and flooded the capital, at least in part, it seemed, in consequence of the deforestation of the surrounding hills.43 But annual flooding was most persistent and its impacts on man, animals, and agriculture most severe in the Vão do Paranã. Once the Vão had been the province’s premier cattle- and horse-raising region, but years of uncontrolled fires left wide areas barren, and the fires had dried and hardened the soil, so that by the early nineteenth century serious floods regularly visited the region.44 From the farmers’ point of view, the single most vexing parasite to fix itself upon agriculture was the state, in the form of taxes, and the worst of these was the dízimo: “Unfortunate agriculturalists of Goiás, subjected to all the abuses of the dízimo: the assessor or arbitrator, the agents and collectors of the public treasury, the judges, the militia commanders, the governors, to all of the violence and adversities.”45 By the late eighteenth century Crown income from the quinto (one-fifth) tax on gold had fallen to only a fraction of what it once had brought in, and increasingly the state turned to other taxes, and particularly to the dízimo, for revenue. A levy on agricultural and animal production, the tax suffered a reputation for arbitrary assessment and abusive collection: “The quinto impoverished Goiás, the dízimo killed it,” a captain general claimed.46 For much of the eighteenth century the state farmed the tax, with all the abuses this entailed, and only in 1794 did it take over direct control. The chief area of conflict lay in the assessment process, for the tax was not, in fact, on production but rather on anticipated production. Prior to the harvest a government-appointed inspector checked the area each farmer had under cultivation, estimated what this was likely to yield, and using a standardized price list calculated its value and, from this, the taxes due.47 Those who failed or refused to pay could have their crops and property seized. It is a measure of both the importance and the dislike of the dízimo that exemption from this tax was one of the chief incentives offered to encourage people to move into undeveloped, dangerous, or disputed parts of the province. In January of 1806, for example, a royal order granted relief from the dízimo for ten years to those who settled along the Rios Maranhão, Araguaia, and Tocantins, to support navigation and to help keep at bay the Indians terrorizing these areas.48 The provincial government on several occasions made similar exemptions for the same reasons: Law number 11 of 5 September 1838, for example, exempted from dízimos for ten

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years those who took up residence in the districts of Salinas, Amaro Leite, Porto Imperial, and Carolina, as well as the area between the Rio Verde, the Rio Turvo, and the Rio Pardo in the south. Unfortunately for state policy, the effect of such laws was not so much to attract new inhabitants to the areas as to prompt those living nearby to simply shift their economic activities into the exempted zone, and then to abandon the area when the tax relief expired.49 Because of the difficulties involved in collecting the dízimo and because of popular hostility to it, and as part of the transition to a new government, the 1820s and early 1830s witnessed an extended debate over the tax. Its biggest recommendation was its “antiquity, seen by many as one of best qualities of any tax,” and, of course, although it had long ceased actually to be a church levy, the dízimo had the advantage of being sanctioned in “Divine Law.”50 By contrast, any innovation in taxes threatened to provoke even greater resistance and possible financial disaster for the state. Thus, the initial impulse was not to abolish but to revise the dízimo, and in April of 1821 the Crown issued new colony-wide rules. To avoid both the abuses inherent in farming the tax and the costs of directly administering it, the dízimo now would be collected only on products sold in towns or along the main roads or on those sent from one captaincy to another.51 The new regulations were intended as a three-year experiment, but difficulties quickly surfaced with this. Goiás’s Provisional Junta pointed out that a good portion of the population of the province, and especially that scattered through the mountains and hunting gold along the rivers, was very mobile, and much of the rest lived isolated on fazendas. Rarely did these send produce to town. The province had few exports and no way to track food sales along the roads.52 Faced with the evident failure of the new approach, and not just in Goiás but “in almost all the central provinces,” the Empire threw up its hands and in December, 1824 ordered a return to the old system, at least until the government could design a better one. An imperial “instruction” (provisão) the following year specifically mandated collection of the tax in Goiás by assessment, “as [is] done in Minas Gerais.”53 This did not resolve the dízimo problem, however, and confusions and conflicts continued: “Everywhere are uncollected debts. No one wants to pay the dízimo; no one wants to make declarations; the judges think themselves superior to the administrators and give different interpretations, with resulting confusion.”54 Indeed, there was some question as to even whether a provisão could cancel a decree or a law, so that by the middle of 1829 the national Ministry of the Treasury again was insisting on the collection of dízimos at the entrance to towns and that they be levied on interprovincial sales. Goiás’s municipal council now favored to this approach,

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explaining that while earlier in the decade provincial tax officials had resisted the change for fear of a loss of income, commerce in the town now was increasing, as was trade among the provinces, and such an approach would be a good way to capture additional revenue.55 The council’s comments reanimated the debate. Advocates of the several possible systems of collection rained letters on the Matutina Meiapontense,56 and various government agencies weighed into the contest with discussions and reports. In April and May of 1831 the province’s General Council considered the issue, with a majority coming down on the side of collecting in the towns. The problem with the system of assessments, they argued, was a shortage of honest and competent persons for the task, given the small income such a post provided. As well, the annual visits were a violation of private property and forced agriculturalists to waste time waiting for the officials to appear. Because the government’s agents received a percentage of what they collected, they had a strong incentive to overestimate the likely harvest and to resist claims for tax reduction based, for example, on animal or weather damage. On the other hand, farming the dízimo made it easy for the government but hard on the people, who inevitably would find themselves squeezed and abused. Much better would be to collect the tax in the towns on items actually brought to market, rather than on some “arbitrary” estimate of a future harvest.57 Perhaps not surprisingly, though, Goiás kept the traditional system of assessments for another two decades. Given the precarious financial situation of the province and the real and threatened political upheavals of the 1830s and 1840s, it probably did not seem the moment for sweeping changes. And there remained the problem that in a province such as Goiás a town-based tax promised to miss much of the population. Each year the province’s budget law detailed the procedures to be used in collecting the dízimo, procedures, however, that changed little over time. During May or June in each parish a board of four sworn citizens, two agriculturalists and two consumers, were to calculate local prices for tax purposes. Fiscal agents complained, however, that the boards sometimes put these prices unreasonably low. In June of 1847, for example, when the going price for corn at Rio Claro was 1$280 réis an arroba and for beans 3$000 réis, the local board fixed these at $240 réis and $500 réis respectively, and it did this again the following year. Either the members had inaccurate information, a treasury official remarked, or they had no scruples and no respect for their sacred oath. The president was forced to intervene.58 But the most immediately offensive part of the dízimo process for most farmers was the assessment. The district agent set and publicized dates for which agriculturalists were required to be present on their properties for tax

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evaluation: in the case of Meiaponte in 1831, for example, these were June for the Mato Grosso area, July for Antas, Capvarí, and the banks of the Rio Corumbá, August for Rio do Ouro, and September for those settled along the Rios Maranhão and Peixe.59 This immobilized cultivators for extended periods, even assuming the assessor kept to his schedule. Often he did not. In 1838, for example, the agent at Porto Imperial first excused his failure to evaluate plantings because of a fear of Indian attacks and then, a few months later, reported further delays provoked, he said, by an epidemic that had caused a shortage of horses. Alternatively, tax assessors sometimes rushed to complete evaluations ahead of schedule, because, as one explained, “from what I hear the harvest will be poor and the later I do the assessments, the less income will result.”60 The encounter with the assessor could be arbitrary and humiliating, particularly for the small agriculturalist without powerful friends or connections. A “farmer without a farm” wrote the Matutina Meiapontense, claiming to have given up agriculture altogether because of the abuses of the dízimo assessment. He described “a circle of men, all dressed humbly and bare-footed, and among them was an old man outfitted in antiquated style and said to be the assessor for the treasury. With them also was a very young man sporting imported clothing, and by the comments addressed to him I knew him to be the administrator of dízimos for the district. The assessor said to those standing around: ‘You planted so much this year, infallibly you will harvest so much, and as a result your tax will be so much. You can write it down, Mr. Administrator, in the usual form.’“61 Other problems attended the functioning of the dízimo. Particularly in the north fazendeiros commonly claimed that they could not pay because of the effects of Indian attacks: in 1842 one farmer, for example, reported that he had left a cartload of manioc on the road overnight and come back the next day to find that Canoeiros had taken it.62 Raiding Indians killed or drove off cattle and other domestic animals and slaves, and burned crops and equipment. Political disturbances such as the Baleão and the Bemte-vi or the 1842 Liberal uprisings, and even when these did not directly involve Goiás, affected agriculture and tax collection in the province. On the one hand, they disrupted trade and labor supply and, on the other, they prompted migration to Goiás. Some of this new population came from areas where the dízimo was no longer custom or where mechanisms of collection differed, and they resisted Goiás’s practices and encouraged others to do the same.63 Making the dízimo more burdensome, too, was the requirement that it be paid in cash. This was meant to prevent the tax collector from taking for himself the best of the farmer’s produce, but it caused serious problems

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in 1830s–40s Goiás.64 If an agriculturalist found a market for his products he almost always had to sell these on credit or enter into barter arrangements, and there were multiple demands on what cash he managed to obtain. It should not be a surprise, then, that dízimo collections ran years and even decades behind. As of 1854, for example, farmers at Catalão owed 1:543$225 réis in arrears dating back to the mid-1830s, Cavalcante owed 1:177$737 réis, Jaraguá owed 3:891$634 réis, Santa Cruz owed 3:711$208 réis, and Santa Luzia owed 3:302$986 réis; for just these five towns the province was short at least fourteen contos in overdue agricultural dízimos.65 The dízimo thus suffered the double defect of at once being the “scourge of the small farmer”66 and failing to provide the province an adequate or stable source of revenue. Still, dízimo income amounted to almost a quarter of what Goiás’s government took in, so that to abolish it or even to seriously disrupt collections threatened disaster. But changes were at work in the economy that offered the province new possibilities. One was an evident growth in cattle exports from the province, suggesting that these might be taxed. Indeed, a small levy of this sort already existed, but the province had never gotten around to mounting the infrastructure needed to collect it.67 Another idea was to resurrect the earlier scheme of taxing food products brought to town. Over the course of the 1850s the province in fact made the transition to a new revenue structure based on precisely these two taxes. After several false starts, the provincial legislature in 1857 abolished the dízimo, and the president wrote its epitaph: “always vexatious and onerous for the taxpayers, especially the poorest and neediest who frequently were the victims of the collectors’ abuses.”68 The chief levy on agriculture now was to be a tax of 5 percent on the value of all food products sold in urban markets or to travelers along the highways. This exempted much production previously liable for the dízimo, but even so the “5 percent” almost immediately became one of the most important financial props of the provincial regime, in most years second in revenue only to the cattle export tax. Nevertheless, it provoked little protest or resistance. The tax impacted not primarily producers but consumers and these chiefly in a few towns. Indeed, almost the only place that the state managed to consistently collect the “5 percent” was the capital. Returns from the other settlements were minimal: in 1860, for example, the city of Goiás yielded 8:000$993 réis from the tax, versus 2$201$847 réis for the rest of the province; two decades later a government commission looking into ways to bolster Goiás’s finances found that while in the capital the levy now brought in some 1:200$000 réis a month, for the remainder of the province it was still worth only 2:500$000 réis a year.69

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Markets The key to the effective collection of the 5 percent tax was a wellsupervised system of markets, but despite repeated efforts, the provincial government never managed to establish these apart from one in the capital and, off and on, one at Meiaponte.70 Initially the operation of the “5 percent” actually paralleled that of the disgraced dízimo in several ways. For example, because there were not enough fiscal agents available to monitor every market transaction, a board of assessors instead set prices for the main items traded and used these to calculate taxes. Buyers and sellers complained, however, that such did not reflect actual transaction costs, 71 and the system eventually gave way to one based on average sale prices from the previous week. Apart from tax collection, advantages touted for a central market included improving the quality of the capital’s food, guarding public health, and repressing the activities of would-be monopolists. Concern about the damage done by speculators dated to the colonial period, and among the first topics taken up by the Matutina Meiapontense in the early 1830s was the problems and hardships these caused consumers: “Those who would monopolize food carry out their activities publicly, buying at cheap prices to resell to the people at high prices.” Town councils and the provincial government repeatedly passed laws outlawing hoarding and other such speculative practices, suggesting that such regulations had little effect.72 In July of 1859 the president explained how the would-be monopolists worked: some purchased food from arriving farmers on the outskirts of town, saying it was for their own use, or they bought the food at night as it came into the market, later reselling it for “extraordinary” prices. Others smuggled food products into town and held these for a rise in prices or made arrangements with producers to hold back part of what they brought to market and to sell it to them later. When the government imposed buying limits in times of shortage, so that everyone would have a chance to obtain scarce items, speculators sent their employees one at a time to buy as much as they could and then bulked this for later resale at monopoly prices.73 Belatedly fulfilling a requirement of the capital’s 1838 municipal regulations (posturas), the Provincial Assembly in August of 1859 authorized purchase or construction of a proper building for a municipal market. The town council struggled for the next decade to find a suitable location and raise the necessary money, as well as to develop a set of rules that would address the market’s several purposes.74 Under the regulations adopted by the council in 1869, the market was to be chiefly for retail sales, and only after goods had been “exposed” for twenty-four hours could half of what

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remained be put up for wholesale. Products might not be kept in the market without being offered for sale, no transactions could take place at night, and sellers were to immediately remove and destroy all spoiled or damaged items.75 Ever ingenious, speculators and would-be monopolists sought ways around these rules, prompting the provincial regime on occasion to enter directly into market transactions in an attempt to drive prices down: for example, several times in late 1858 and early 1859 the president bought cartloads of salt and had it resold in modest quantities at cost.76 Not everyone was happy with the market. In May of 1886 the newspaper O Publicador Goyano, admittedly no friend of the government, noted that while it was certainly a productive source of revenue, the capital’s market continued to serve consumers and sellers alike poorly.77 For example, because the system based taxes on the previous week’s sales, unexpected deliveries of a product could force prices down and, effectively, push taxes up unjustly, and the requirement that sellers retail what they brought sometimes meant that farmers had to remain in town longer than they wished. To avoid such inconveniences some were again selling to speculators on the outskirts of town, bringing the problem of food supply and tax collection more or less full circle. Adding to these problems, the market facilities themselves were said to be in poor condition, with doors and fences down and trash strewn about, inadequate protection from the rain, insufficient numbers of weights and scales, and a lack of security for the vendors.78 Such complaints notwithstanding, it is clear that with the market the government had achieved several of its goals, including increased tax collection and closer supervision of the quality and supply of food to the capital.

The Slaughterhouse Together with state efforts to systematize the marketing of agricultural food products came attempts to regulate the butchering, distribution, and sale of meat, chiefly beef. From the late colonial period a public slaughterhouse had operated in the capital, but already by the 1820s it was said to be “falling in ruins.” Four decades later the situation had not improved: the building lacked drainage to rid it of waste blood and guts, and cattle sometimes remained ten days or more crowded in a small pen without water or food, “mired in bloody mud, each one waiting for the sacrifice they witness.”79 Not surprisingly, complaints abounded about the quality of the meat available in the capital. Competing with the public slaughterhouse were both legal and clandestine private butcher shops. In August of 1872, for example, complaints surfaced of a licensed operation on the Rua do Presidente that nevertheless cleaned pieces of rotted meat in a nearby public fountain and gave off a

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“terrible stench.” Worse still could be the illegal shops that killed and cut up animals in backyards or on the street, in order to evade taxes.80 Shortly after work began on the municipal market building, provincial authorities turned their attention to the slaughterhouse. This too should have been undertaken by the capital’s town council but the city had no funds, and since the chief provincial authorities lived in the city of Goiás they had a direct interest in the quality and availability of meat there. Early efforts to construct a new building ran up against the same shortages of funds that plagued the market, and reformers initially had to settle for modest improvements in the existing structure, including expanding the corral, providing pasture for the animals, and cleaning the interior of the building each day.81 But by the early 1880s concerns about the potential public health problem the slaughterhouse presented were widespread. According to one observer, the operation was “an assault on good sense.” Arriving cattle, A Tribuna Livre reported, were kept “for many days tightly corralled, standing in infected mud saturated with putrefying animal remains, without eating or drinking and watching the daily killing of others.”82 Under growing public pressure the provincial administration again took on the project, financing construction of a new building on the left bank of the Rio Vermelho. A large corral surrounded by a stone well attached to one side of the structure and in the center of the patio was a water trough for the animals; the interior of the building was tiled and provided with adequate drainage. In November of 1882 the municipality took possession of the building, though questions of financial improprieties in the construction continued to dog the project for some time.83

Food Supply and Prices Even with a new market and slaughterhouse, food supply for the capital remained precarious and prices unstable and sometimes prohibitively high, and this could be even more the case in some of the smaller settlements. As we have seen, transport costs, together with limited buying power, impeded development of provincewide or interprovincial regional markets, so that at the same moment prices could differ considerably among towns (Table 4.1). Even disregarding Natividade,84 a consistent outlier, in a typical year corn prices might vary among local markets by 100 percent and beans even more. Similarly, if we look at changes from year to year for a single town these also could be substantial, even in the capital, which drew food from a wider hinterland than did most settlements (Table 4.2). In some areas and in different years, or months of the year, food was available in abundance and relatively cheaply, while in others prices were

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table 4.1 Food Prices, 1842 (in réis)

Goiás Bonfim Catalão Natividade Flores Cavalcante Formosa

Corn*

Beans**

400 300 400 960 480 400 320

1000 900 640 3840 1920 1280 640

Corn*

Beans**

400 450 480 320 240 450 320

900 900 960 800 600 960 640

São Jose T. Arraias Traíras Meiaponte Santa Cruz Santa Rita Paranaiba Rio Claro

* Per alqueire. ** Per arroba. note: These are dízimo not market prices. source: AHEG, Municípios, Traíras, “Tabela Demonstrativa dos Preços . . . 1842.”

table 4.2 Average Prices, City of Goiás, 1846–1854 (in réis)

1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854

Corn*

Beans**

640 620 480 480 400 320 400 540 520

2$000 1$640 1$000 2$000 1$600 1$280 1$280 1$160 1$000

* Per alqueire. ** Per arroba. note: These are dízimo prices. source: AHEG, Municípios, Goiás “Avaliações.”

impossibly high and hunger pressed on the population: “The people were reduced to eating coconuts and roots.”85 The reasons for shortages and high prices were both general and specific. During the second half of the 1850s difficulties with the food supply and resulting high prices afflicted wide areas of Brazil, prompting national inquiries and discussions.86 In the case of Goiás the reasons offered by the authorities for the province’s difficulties were unimaginative if largely correct: destructive and unproductive agricultural techniques, a lack of modern machines, or even enough iron tools, and inadequate transport and storage facilities.87 As a result, even in good years food prices could rise sharply a few months after harvest.88 When the overall demand for food suddenly went up, as, for example, during the Paraguayan War, existing structural barriers restricted the ability of farmers to increase their output

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quickly or to deliver what they did produce to consumers rapidly enough to stave off price increases. But precisely because of such market irregularities, there was little incentive in normal times for the individual producer to invest capital or labor in increasing output substantially beyond subsistence needs. None of these problems were particular to the second half of the 1850s, however, nor do they offer reasons for the notable price rises in these years. Instead, receiving much of the blame were labor shortages, and specifically the effects of the abolition of the international slave trade in 1850. Whatever applicability this may have had to the rest of the country—and at least for the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo region the real villain seems to have been the shift of resources to export coffee production not the end of overseas slave imports—in Goiás, despite local complaints,89 it is hard to imagine how putting a stop to the traffic could have had any significant effects on food agriculture. Slaves were simply not that important as a part of the labor force in the province: in 1850 they amounted to 10 percent of the population and by 1872 this had fallen to 7 percent, so their numbers were small and the decline of these gradual. Nevertheless, many among local elites and the officials sent to administer the province remained ideologically wedded to slavery, and linking food scarcity and high prices to supposed labor shortages was another weapon, and a particularly effective one, with which to attempt to ward off threatened changes to the status quo. In April, 1858, Goiás’s president reported to the central government that food costs in the province were two to four times what they had been just six to eight years before.90 How accurate this was and what might be the causes is hard to know. Available statistics do not allow the tracing of an exact trajectory, but they do show that the costs of basic food products apparently did rise sharply in Goiás in the two decades after midcentury(Table 4.3). More important than any shortage of slaves, however, were other reasons for the price increases. All of Brazil suffered from the inflation associated with the Paraguayan War and the effects upon the labor supply of the forced recruitment of young men, and Goiás the more so for being on the front line. Substantial amounts of food that would otherwise have supplied Goiás’s consumers were diverted to the troops in Mato Grosso, where they brought better prices.91 These decades, too, witnessed an accelerating shift in the economy of southern Goiás from mixed and subsistence farming to extensive cattle production for interprovincial sale. That is, the south began to look more like the north, where food prices had always been higher. Compounding this was population growth, as immigrants from Minas Gerais and São Paulo moved into Rio Verde and Jataí to raise cattle. These showed little interest in agriculture, so that soon food

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table 4.3 Average Food Prices, Goiás Province 1840/50s versus 1860s/70s (in réis) 1840s/50s Corn* Beans**

1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852

640 — 480 480 400 320 400

1860s/70s Corn* Beans**

2$000

1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873

1$000 2$000 1$600 1$280 1$280

3$060 — 4$920 3$200 1$360 — 3$120

4$260* — 14$920* 8$720* 6$600 — 5$600

* Per alqueire. ** Per arroba. note: Prices for the 1840s/50s are dízimo prices; those for the 1860s/70s are market prices. sources: 1840s/50s: AHEG, Municípios, Goiás, “Avaliações”; 1860s/70s: Newspapers.

table 4.4 Average Food Prices, Goiás Province/State, 1874–1894 (in réis)

1874 1884/85 1894

Corn*

Beans**

2$500 4$000 5$800

1$800 1$600 2$250

* Per alqueire. ** Per arroba. note: These are market prices. sources: Newspapers.

prices in the southwest of the province were on the increase.92 Contingent circumstances associated with the war pushed prices up and population growth and changes in the local economy tended to keep them high. By the mid-1870s food prices had fallen off a bit, and they rose only gradually after this into the 1890s, though seasonal and year-to-year variations continued (Table 4.4). Except for the persistence of high prices in the second half of the 1860s, surely related to the local effects of the war, events in the province seem generally to have followed the country’s broader patterns of food prices in the half-century after 1850. Perhaps this was in part an indirect result of the networks of mule trains and oxcarts that interlaced the countryside. Although the mules and carts usually could not shift large amounts of basic food products long distances economically, the men who attended these had price information and certainly

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transmitted this along their routes. This may have had the effect of helping to create regional cost-price expectations even in advance of actual markets; people knew what goods “should” cost even if current prices deviated from this. What did these wide variations in the prices of corn or beans or manioc mean to the residents of the province? For most they meant little, as these produced their own food. The market price of what they consumed was irrelevant, and because most farmers could get their products to town only occasionally, if at all, fluctuating prices there were perhaps only a source of wonder. For urban dwellers, on the other hand, food costs could be allimportant. Among the better-off many brought provisions from their rural properties, but the bureaucrats and soldiers, the school teachers and the priests residing in the capital or other towns had to buy some or all of their food in the money economy. Estimates are that a family of five, a couple and three children, would have needed 20$000–25$000 réis a month for food, and this at wholesale prices; if they bought in small quantities on credit at the neighborhood tavern, prices could easily have been 40 percent higher.93 With a salary of 300$000–400$000 réis a year teachers could spend 60–100 percent of their income on food, and a priest’s 200$000 réis salary might be exceeded half again by food costs. Under such circumstances public servants obviously could not devote full time to their government duties and had to seek additional sources of income.94 There remains the question of price fluctuations over the course of the year. These, together with shortages, must have been dramatic on occasion, particularly in some of the smaller towns; travelers reported settlements where there was no food to be had at any price. Unfortunately, we only have serial data for the capital, and these intermittently and for a limited number of years. Spotted over the course of the century were local crises brought on by floods or droughts or epidemics, but these affected different towns at different times and reveal no evident pattern.95 Typically, for example, prices for corn in the capital showed a modest tendency to rise over the course of the year and then declined in November and December when the new harvest began to become available.96 But other basic food items had different price cycles, corresponding to their peculiar growing seasons or to problems afflicting one crop but not another: manioc, for example, was famously indifferent to the effects of uneven rains or drought and could be left in the ground for up to two years, characteristics that tended to even out the price.97 Only the market of the capital was strong enough to draw food products on a regular basis from more than a few kilometers. Using data from the 5 percent tax, we can plot its supply hinterland (Table 4.5). Coffee also came from São Paulo, the only product here that arrived from another

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table 4.5 City of Goiás Market Sources of Supply Ourofino

Sugar Rapadura Corn flour Manioc flour Peanuts Chickens Fatback Beans Rice Coffee Castor oil* Cheese Pork Lard Corn Tobacco Dried meat Distance to the capital (km)

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 18

Barra

Curralinho

Anicuns

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 24

x x x x x x x x x x x x

x x

x x x 42

x x x 81

x x x x x x

Jaraguá

Corumbá

Bonfim

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 125

x x x

x x

x

x

x x x x x x

x x x x x x

x x 174

228

* For illumination. source: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 202, “Tabela Demonstrativa dos Gêneros e mais Objetos Importados para o Mercado desta Capital na Semana Finada” (40 weeks, 1871).

province. What stands out, of course, is the lack of specialization. Each of the towns furnished most of the same items. A number of small-scale producers competed with each other, and, again, poor communications meant that there was little awareness of the overall supply or demand situation. From the perspective of the buyer, because of the small amounts each cultivator brought to market and because of varying local conditions, supplies would have arrived in the capital from constantly shifting sources and in widely varying quantities, with no way to anticipate what might be available or when. Undersupply and oversupply must have been chronic, destabilizing market prices and discouraging those who might have contemplated more systematic production. Towns such as Catalão, Santa Cruz, and Santa Luzia also had commodities available that were in demand in the city of Goiás, but because of distance they could not place these there profitably; their markets, such as they were, remained, instead, in Meiaponte or across the Minas Gerais border in Paracatú and the towns along the Rio São Francisco. For the smaller settlements, where a single cartload of manioc might saturate demand for a week or two, centralized markets could not function efficiently and prices and availability must have remained even more unpredictable.

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Sugar A reason sometimes advanced to explain food shortages, although this was as much a moral as an economic critique, was a supposed preference among some agriculturalists for the easier and more certain profits of sugar and alcohol rather than basic food items.98 Colonial authorities had not lifted restrictions on growing sugarcane until the 1770s, but by that time cultivation of the crop seems already to have been widespread. Or so it appears from a partial inventory taken early the next decade that showed Vila Boa with 46 mills, Traíras with 24, Crixás with 23, and Santa Luzia with 14, and a dozen more mills scattered through various parishes;99 unfortunately, the list does not indicate the size or output of these mills or their labor force. Sugar and sugar products such as rapadura had the advantage of relatively high value per weight and bulk, and small and largescale growers alike could produce these advantageously for the local market. Alcohol was even more profitable but required a capital investment in distilling equipment not all could afford. Early in the nineteenth century travelers encountered some quite substantial cane plantations and grinding and distilling facilities. Indeed, before the expansion of cattle production most large properties carried the name of engenho rather than fazenda. The grandest, not surprisingly, was that of Comendador Alves de Oliveira at Meiaponte, but others were almost as impressive: Pohl, for example, reported visiting Engenho São Sebastião belonging to Captain Pascoal de Rocha Clemente which boasted a water-driven wheel and large copper boiling vessels, though the refining and distilling processes, the German sniffed, remained “primitive.”100 To judge, however, from the abandoned and ruined mills that early nineteenth-century travelers encountered, large-scale production seems already to have been fading by the end of the colony. As the mining economy fell off so did urban markets for sugar and alcohol, slaves were becoming expensive relative to productivity, and refining and distilling operations had destroyed much of the readily available forest, making it difficult and expensive to obtain firewood.101 The larger engenhos may have declined but small-scale production continued and perhaps increased. It was one of the few ways a farmer could make a good bet on a cash return for his work. These mills were simple, constructed of local materials and animal powered, and tended to specialize in rapadura.102 In the mid-1840s the provincial president queried towns about local sugar production and received, as was usual, only a partial response. Nevertheless, this does make clear the generally limited size of the surviving mills, though these were still more heavily capitalized than other areas of agriculture, and their continued reliance on slave labor (Table 4.6).

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table 4.6 Sugar Mills, 1840s

Santa Cruz Bonfim Palma Santa Luzia

Properties with 1–9 slaves

Properties with 10–19 slaves

Properties with 20+ slaves

13 17 6 12

-1 -3

---1

sources: AHEG, Municípios, Santa Cruz, “Relação dos Engenhos,” 7 Oct. 1841; Silvânia (Bonfim), “Engenhos,” 17 Oct. 1844; Paraná (Palma), “Relatório . . . Engenhos,” December 1844; Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 45–51.

Similarly, a decade later when most of Corumbá’s farmers employed no slaves or at most one or two, local sugar mills averaged eight slaves each. In reality, however, the number of sugar mills actually functioning, or at least those willing to admit to being in operation, varied greatly from year to year. Owners routinely petitioned provincial authorities to be relieved of taxes, claiming that although they possessed the necessary equipment they had produced no sugar or alcohol that year, usually because they lacked sufficient cane or had labor problems.103 Technology remained very basic. Whereas, for example, by the 1870s steam engines were already at work on Mato Grosso sugar mills, in the early 1890s Goiás’s government was contemplating tax exemptions to encourage the construction of the province’s first steam-powered engenho.104 As the century ended, Goiás’s governor summed up the state of the local sugar industry, finding that little had changed in a hundred years. Cane was widely grown, he reported, especially in the vicinity of the capital where mills converted it into sugar and also alcohol, for drinking and for lighting homes. But processors continued to use chiefly animal power and wooden crushing rollers, cultivation depended on the hoe not the plow, and the activity suffered generally from poor capitalization and an ignorance of modern techniques. In Corumbá, for example, there were over a hundred large and small mills, but all of these used wooden machinery and traditional copper vessels. None employed a water wheel, let alone steam equipment, and none operated with borrowed capital or had a mortgage. A serious problem was the worsening shortage of wood.105

Cotton and Tobacco Sugar and alcohol found their chief markets locally, while by midcentury Goiás’s interprovincial trade in cattle and horses was expanding, but landowners and political leaders never abandoned entirely the search

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for agricultural products that they might be able to sell to neighboring provinces or overseas. An early candidate was cotton, which during the last years of the colony had found ready markets in Europe. Unfortunately, both growers and merchants took advantage of this demand to mix damaged and poor-quality fibers in with the good, hurting the product’s reputation.106 Brazil’s exports expanded in the first part of the new century, but Goiás found it difficult to participate in these, because of competition from other provinces and, again, because of the distance to the coast.107 Authorities attempted where possible to stimulate local interest. The vicar at Traíras, for example, promised to buy all the cotton that local growers could not otherwise sell, and the province offered tax exemptions to those who planted the crop along the banks of the Rio Maranhão.108 Meiaponte’s Comendador Alves de Oliveira in the 1810s and 1820s “encouraged and helped cultivators and shipped the cotton of those who do not have the means to export their own.”109 Because he had access to credit through his mercantile pursuits and operated his own mule trains, Alves de Oliveira could grow cotton, or buy it at 3$000 réis an arroba, and dispatch it to the coast profitably. By 1819 he was sending some three thousand arrobas a year to Rio de Janeiro, sparking a modest revival of the municipal economy.110 But when North American production rebounded from the depression of that year, world prices declined and so did the viability of export production for Goiás. With the closing of the textile factory in the capital, only the demand from handicraft spinning and weaving remained. The spurt in world prices that accompanied the United States’s Civil War prompted renewed interest in cotton in Brazil.111 Goiás’s provincial government again took up efforts to stimulate local production, distributing seeds and offering prizes, and it renewed lapsed tax exemptions to anyone who grew cotton along of the Rios Araguaia, Tocantins, and Vermelho.112 By the 1870s, however, with the output from an impoverished southern United States flooding world markets, cotton went into general oversupply for much of the rest of the century, with prices that in no way compensated Goiás’s expenses. At the same time, of course, such costs helped protect homespun textiles, and well into the twentieth century domestic output still supplied the lower end of the province’s market.113 A Goiás-produced commodity that should have had good prospects for expansion in national and international markets was tobacco, well known and respected throughout the Empire. And there was a lively local demand too: travelers commented that in Goiás everyone smoked, even the women.114 Initially the province’s tobacco did well when exported, but, as had occurred with cotton, its reputation soon suffered from poor preparation, or at least preparation not keyed to European consumer interests,

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and from adulteration, in this case chiefly at the hands of merchants in Rio de Janeiro.115 As a classic “internal colony,” Goiás had little control over the conditions under which its products reached world markets. Goiás sold perhaps one-third to one-half of its annual production to surrounding provinces, including, for example, Mato Grosso, to which it sent rolls of tobacco for consumption in pipes and as hand-rolled cigarettes. The south of the province was said to sell tobacco for cigarettes “on a large scale” to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, but precisely how much was impossible to know because the farmers dealt directly with wholesale buyers, avoiding the towns and taxes.116 Provincial governments sought to promote tobacco production and improve the quality of the province’s output, much as it had with cotton: in 1863, for example, the president sent for better-quality tobacco seeds from Havana.117 But potential growers shied away from the crop, complaining of high taxes, and those that did produce tobacco showed little interest in increasing their output or learning new techniques; everything was tradition, Oscar Leal complained in the 1880s.118 Production continued, and even expanded in the late nineteenth century, but by the last years of the Empire Goiás’s tobacco was losing its favored position in even national markets. Part of the problem was that local growers continued to market much of their output in the traditional rolled form. This had the effect of maintaining a relatively high moisture level in the leaf, which gave the tobacco a stronger flavor ideal for cigarettes but not for the increasingly popular cigars or pipe tobacco. By the 1880s and 1890s commercial production concentrated in the south, at Bonfim, Antas (Anápolis), Bella Vista, and Pouso Alto (Piracanjuba), perhaps because of access to the approaching railroad, but the industry was not prospering.119 Goiás grew the best tobacco in the world, local newspapers claimed, but goianos did not know, or wish to learn, how to prepare the leaf for changes in demand.120

5

Stock Raising . . . 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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 consump-

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tion, 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,

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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-

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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

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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-

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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 northcentral 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

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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 specifi-

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cally 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

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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

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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

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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 semiwild 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

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table 5.1 Cattle, 1862 Region

Herd size

South North Total

135,334 162,574* 297,908

Production

Export/sales

50,000 52,873 107,529

14,530 20,844 35,308

* Missing Boavista. source: Relatório-1862, 122.

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

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Average production

Average exports

South

25,878

8,880

North

38,473

10,287

sources: AHEG, Municípios, Taguatinga, “Quadro do Recenseamento do Gado Vaccum e Cavallar Organizado em Vista das Tabelas dos Distritos . . . 1870–1872” and individual cattle/horses censuses for 1870–1872 and early 1880s for various municipalities, including Porto Imperial, Jataí, Formosa, Rio Bonito, Catalão, São José do Tocantins, Palma, Santa Luzia, Jaraguá, Arraias, and Ipameri.

table 5.3 Cattle Prices, 1820s–1880s (in réis)

1820s 1830s 1840s 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s

South

North

4$200 6$000 7$000 9$600 12$000 12$000 12$200

2$000 3$000 4$200 5$000 5$000 6$000 7$000

sources: Notary records.

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 provincewide 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 For the agents, attempts 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.

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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 well 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. 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

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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. 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

6

Land They [pastures] do not constitute property in the legal or common sense. —Collector, Curralinho, 1890

Land was an important but not a particularly contentious issue in nineteenth-century Goiás. With the shift from mining to agriculture and ranching, settlers more and more sought access to land. Given the size of the province, the limited population, and the nature of the economy, however, and quite in contrast to the situation in the new coffee areas,1 there was little incentive to struggle over actual ownership. For ranchers wealth was in animals not land, “the least valuable of what they have.”2 Extensive forms of stock raising and shifting agriculture militated against the costs and concerns involved in measuring properties or marking or defending boundaries. There might on occasion be disputes over access to specific scarce resources such as salt ponds or water, but sharing arrangements typically best served everyone’s interests. Where conflicts did arise, typically between agriculture and cattle, the ranchers set the rules. Farmers had no independent vehicles, for example, associations or political parties, through which to organize or articulate their interests, and had limited standing before the law; most used borrowed land and existed at the sufferance of the large holders. Power, not surveyor’s marks or laws, determined the possession of land.3

Colonial Brazil Legal land holding by Luzo-Brazilians began during the colonial period with sesmarias. These royal grants had become important in late medieval and early modern Portugal as a way to spur the economy in the wake of war and epidemic disease.4 Those able to mobilize capital and labor could apply to the Crown for devoluta, “returned” or abandoned land, for their use. In Brazil devoluta obviously could have had no such meaning, unless one considered the rights of the indigenous population,

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which colonial society generally did not. Nevertheless, the term continued to be applied, coming to mean simply unoccupied or state-owned land. Because of the costs and risks encountered on this overseas frontier and given the apparently near unlimited quantities of land available in the colony, Brazilian sesmarias generally were much larger than had been those in Portugal. The standard unit for the colony was a grant of one by three leagues (a league = approximately six kilometers), but often sesmarias were even larger, particularly away from the coast and in cattle-raising areas, and individuals sometimes solicited multiple grants, under their own names or those of family members.5 Such an approach by the state to the distribution of land was not inherently unreasonable given that applicants were few, much of the land in question was of poor quality, and the risks involved in attempting to put it into production were many. The policy’s effect, however, was that the powerful quickly filled the sertão, with claims if not occupation, leaving little open space for subsequent arrivals. In terms of acquiring sesmaria grants, two main patterns emerged. Often applicants already had control of all or part of the land in question, sometimes for years or decades, and only sought now to legalize possession for purposes of sale or inheritance. In other instances, speculators asked for grants that they were unlikely ever to take up but hoped instead to sell to others. In the specific case of Goiás, Professor Gilka V. F. de Salles has identified four stages of sesmaria development: (1) early grants made directly by the Crown to the original bandeirantes. Few in number, these were generally larger than later ones and gave the recipient the right too to collect fees at river crossings;6 (2) issuance of the Real Proviso of 13 April 1738 that required land holders in Goiás to be able to produce a valid sesmaria document and limited the size of grants in some areas; (3) efforts in 1749, when Goiás became an independent captaincy, to enforce land laws, efforts that provoked widespread indignation and resistance; (4) a 1756 renewal of Crown demands for regularization of the land situation in the captaincy, together with heavy-handed efforts to collect associated taxes, touching off near rebellion.7 Early sesmaria applications in Goiás were for land along the road from São Paulo to the mining communities and in the areas surrounding these. How many of these properties the claimants actually developed remains unclear,8 but few ultimately fulfilled the necessary steps for legal ownership. The law required that the Crown confirm all grants made by the governors, and the recipients were to measure and mark the property and put it into productive use or risk losing it. The government restated these requirements several times over the course of the eighteenth century, suggesting less than complete compliance.9 Certainly such conditions did not obtain on the Goiás frontier: in 1779 the captain general reported that

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“my predecessors [have] given more than a thousand sesmarias, of which Your Majesty has confirmed some dozen, more or less.”10 For practical purposes, then, all of Goiás’s landed elites were squatters; they were a land-holding but not a landowning class, which would have been typical for most of the interior of Brazil at this time. With a marginal presence in the interior, the state had no choice but accept this situation, continuing to insist on obedience to the laws but at the same time recognizing the validity of customary possession.11 In 1822 the new regime abolished the sesmaria system12 preparatory to writing a new constitution and land law, but the process soon bogged down in political disputes and the promised law failed to emerge. Perhaps for this reason land holding and land use garnered considerable attention during the decade, with various reform proposals being advanced and debated. All of these shared the nineteenth-century liberal assumption of the superiority of small and medium-sized private property to “idle” large holdings. Even José Bonifácio de Andrade e Silva, generally identified as a conservative, favored the breakup of large estates, though in his case the purpose was more political than economic.13 A few years later Padre Diogo Antônio Feijó argued in favor of “democratizing” land ownership: each free citizen would receive one hundred square braças (a braça = 2.2 meters) of land, and more if married and with a family, though Feijó conceded that existing large properties could remain intact where they made efficient use of resources.14 And in the tumultuous early 1830s radicals advanced a plan for a general redistribution of land, to free the poor from the control of the rich “who live in idleness.”15 Not surprisingly, none of these schemes gained much support from the political and economic elites that controlled government and none became law. As a result, until mid-century the only way to acquire public land was through posse (squatting), and this meant that land continued to accumulate in the hands of the powerful and the well connected. But given the failure of most colonial-period sesmaria recipients to properly secure their properties, the predominance of posse after 1822 was a less dramatic shift than is sometimes imagined. In truth, few at the national level cared who controlled what or where in the new country’s vast interior, nor had they much interest in examining closely the bases of this possession. This only began to change, and then chiefly in the interior valleys of Rio de Janeiro and on the São Paulo frontier, during the 1830s and 1840s with the advance of export coffee production. Coffee bushes took three to five years to fully come into production but could remain profitable for up to twenty years, and the crop required expensive processing and transportation facilities. As a result, the industry needed long-term, relatively large-scale capital investment, investment more likely if clear title to land could be guaranteed. This

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became even more of a concern as British attacks on the slave trade not only raised labor costs but threatened the traditional availability of slaves as collateral for loans.16

The Land Law of 1850/1854 Ultimately, too, posse mocked the state: in the words of one historian it “undermined the authority of the government, divided the landowning class, and gave practice to the landless in the employment of weapons against their social superiors.”17 As coffee cultivation spread and land values rose, and in the absence of adequate legislation to regulate land sales and ownership or state capacity to enforce such legislation had it existed, land conflicts multiplied in areas of export production.18 Apart from economic concerns, a strengthened land law was attractive also to supporters of political centralization because it promised to extend state power into the countryside, penetrating rural society to an unprecedented degree.19 Not surprisingly, then, with the triumph of the centralizers in the 1840s interest in the land question revived.20 Introduced in 1842 and debated the next year, a proposed land law promised to address two of the new export economy’s central problems: how, on the one hand, to secure legal possession of land and, on the other, to ensure that immigrants, or the Brazilian free poor, would find it difficult to acquire land, forcing them instead into the labor market. The country imported an unprecedented number of slaves in the 1840s, but the end of the trade clearly loomed in the increasingly aggressive activities of the British navy and in debates among elites themselves. A new source of labor for the expanding coffee economy had to be found, and hopefully one more productive than Brazil’s native-born poor, the despised “national workers.” To this end, the law proposed doing away with posse and requiring instead that in the future public lands could only be acquired by purchase, and at competitive prices. The state would then use the income from land sales and registrations to subsidize immigration from Europe, improving the quality of the local population, as well as flooding the labor market and depressing wages. There could be grants of land to support selected colonization schemes, but there would be no “Homestead Act” for immigrants or Brazil’s poor.21 Thus, if properly drafted and enforced, the new law promised to regulate property relations by providing clear titles, facilitate agricultural credit, lower the incidence of land-related rural conflict, encourage property holders to expel unproductive hangers-on into the labor pool, help subsidize immigration, and increase state power in the interior. And for most of these reasons the “lords of the sertão” opposed it. They resented and resisted any state intervention that challenged or threatened to limit their power.

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The proposed reforms could also burden them with unnecessary costs: for example, those who acquired state land would have to have the property measured and marked. But outside of the export zones the expenses involved in this vastly outweighed the value of the land involved, and elites in the interior did not face the labor problems of the coffee areas or need or expect substantial European immigration. The law was “a project to serve the interests of the province of Rio de Janeiro,”22 they protested, not theirs. A Liberal ministry took power in 1844 and, suspicious of centralization, allowed the land bill to languish. With the return to office of the Conservatives in 1850, however, and facing the imminent end of the international slave trade, the Senate again brought forward the draft law and quickly passed it, together with other standardization measures such as Brazil’s first commercial code and the civil registration of vital statistics. The main provisions of what became the land law of 1850/54 included: 1. public lands would only be sold; 2. the invasion or burning of public land was subject to fines; 3. existing sesmarias had be revalidated with the state and posses had to be registered and legitimated under procedures to be established; 4. all land, whether purchased, revalidated, or legitimated was to be properly measured, marked, and put to use; 5. municipalities might own land, and the inhabitants might use this in common or the municipality could rent it; 6. the government reserved land for the indigenous aldeias, for immigrant colonization, and for new towns and highways; 7. the proceeds from the sale of public land were to go to support foreign immigration.23 Not until 1854, however, did the state issue the regulations (reglamento) necessary to put this law into effect,24 allowing ample time for mischief by those so inclined. For example, the law did not require legitimization or revalidation of property obtained by purchase,25 so it should not be a surprise to discover that in many municipalities the numbers of reported land “sales” and “purchases” jumped astonishingly in the years 1850–54. Whatever those who drew up the 1850/54 law anticipated, the Crown in the event proved unwilling or unable to confront local power in order to enforce the regulations. For the most part the law remained a dead letter. This weakness is evident in the very definition of public lands as “those that [were] not private property.” The burden of proof of what was devoluta lay with the central government. But by law the state could not measure private properties in order to determine the location or size of public lands unless invited to do so by the owners, and it could not force owners to make such a request. Unless and until land holders marked the

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boundaries of their properties the government had no way of identifying, much less selling, public lands. And private land holders in the interior were in no hurry to do anything that might limit their power or the possibilities for future expansion of their properties. Notwithstanding any ownership requirements the law imposed, however, it immediately contradicted these by offering an effectively unqualified guarantee of private property rights, whatever the basis of possession: “Every possessor of land that has a legitimate title for his domain, whether this land was acquired by the posse of his ancestors, or by concessions of sesmarias that were never measured, confirmed or cultivated, is guaranteed his property whatever its area.” Second- or third-generation owners, no matter how their property had been obtained originally, were secured in possession under rights of inheritance, and disregarding the usual requirements for the notarization of contracts, the 1854 regulations specifically recognized private instruments as acceptable evidence of past sale, purchase, and transfer of land. All else failing, the demonstration of “peaceful possession” for an unspecified period of time could serve as the basis for legitimate title. In the regulations’ most far-reaching stipulation, Section IX required that those who held land, on whatever basis, were to register this with the state. Charged with this task was the parish priest, theoretically literate and hopefully impartial; hence the name “parish registers” by which these books came to be known. Claimants were to provide their name, the parish and specific location of the property, its size “if known,” and its boundaries. Because registration required no supporting evidence and because the priest could not refuse to register a property even where the application included notorious defects, claims made under the 1850/54 law were not to be the basis for future legal titles. In fact, however, and in the absence of subsequent more systematic or accurate surveys, the parish registries soon became, and remain today, one of the chief references in weighing the validity of competing rural land claims. The 1850/54 law was generally reckoned a failure at the time and since, both in Goiás and broadly across Brazil.26 The problems were both structural and conjunctural. At the simplest level, the state could not overcome the resistance of entrenched local elites. Even recouping illegally occupied state land proved impossible: “It would so damage the interests and upset the social relations that are based on existing facts that it would be prudent to accept what exists,” the minister of agriculture confessed. 27 In practical terms, too, there were few surveyors available in the sertão to measure and mark land, and where one could be found the costs involved almost always were more than the land’s worth: one estimate, for example, put the expenses involved in legalizing a sesmaria at 300$000–400$000

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réis, but few properties of this size even approached such value in midcentury Goiás.28 Additionally, some priests were incompetent or corrupt in recording claims, and the registration costs of two réis a letter may have discouraged some among the poor from applying; others were reluctant to put forward claims for fear of offending powerful neighbors.29 Provincial bureaucrats commonly showed little diligence in enforcing the various deadlines provided by the laws or in ferreting out illegal practices. Registrants, for example, forged documents and records.30 Efforts over the following decades to overhaul or modify the 1850/54 land law failed, no doubt because as it was the law that best served the interests of those with the power to enforce it.31 By the 1870s and 1880s, in any event, national and international market forces not legislation increasingly determined the status of land holding and labor relations in the more dynamic sectors of the economy, leaving the interior to its own devices.

Occupying the Sertão If Goiás in the 1830s and 1840s was a world away from the booming economies of the littoral, property questions nevertheless were beginning to appear even there. In the north of the province land and cattle remained for practical purposes free goods, unregulated and largely untaxed, despite the state’s best efforts. In the south and southwest, however, a growing stream of migration from Minas Gerais and São Paulo pressed into the province, feeding an expanding cattle industry that was raising land values and prompting closer attention to ownership and boundaries. In 1835 Goiás’s president pointed to problems in that area, caused, he said, by “vagrants and criminals” who invaded the properties of recently established ranchers and farmers and sought to force them out or tried to extort money from them by making false claims. The provincial legislature agreed, noting that without an adequate land law “there are no legitimate titles, no demarcation and each extends his claims to where he wishes, and from this comes discord, conflict, and even crimes. What horrible ills!”32 Hoping to regularize the situation Goiás’s Assembly asked the imperial government to permit the president to grant sesmarias from public lands. When this brought no response, the president revisited the question. He noted that in recent years the south and southwest had become “inhabited by many families from Minas Gerais, and other parts [were] not yet settled but claimed, almost all of it divided into posses by rural inhabitants accustomed to do as they wish, without a clear area and indicated only by marks on trees and creeks. Because of this such a claim can easily be challenged, as has often happened.”33 In the absence of action by the national government,

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he went on, he felt it necessary to decree that no posse in the area could be larger than three square leagues for cattle or half a square league for agriculture, that squatters must apply to the government to have their land measured, and that they would lose their rights if they did not develop the properties within three years. Such a law conflicted with existing national policy, or lack of policy, and did not take effect, but the intent was clear. If the government had little hope of bringing the cattle economy in the north of the province soon under control, the southern parts were beginning to attract closer state attention, both as revenue sources and in efforts to limit real or potential violence. The 1850/54 land law first manifested itself in Goiás early in 1855, as a circular from the Ministry of the Empire indicates. Article 28 of the 1854 regulations had provided that upon publication of the present regulations, the Presidents of the Provinces will require of the law judges, municipal judges, delegados, and justices of the peace detailed information on posses subject to legitimization, [and] on sesmarias and on other government concessions in their districts that are subject to revalidation.

The Ministry now reminded Goiás’s president of this requirement34 and ordered him to obtain the relevant information and to punish those who delayed or refused to cooperate. What the Ministry sought proved difficult, and in many cases impossible, to get, however, as a series of provincial presidents and government ministers discovered.35 Virtually no municipality in Goiás, or, for that matter, anywhere in the interior of Brazil,36 was willing, or probably able, at this time to provide a detailed list or description of posses in its jurisdiction; at least in the case of Goiás only few even mentioned sesmarias (Table 6.1). Because almost everyone’s title was to some degree defective, local governments would have met strong opposition had they attempted a close examination of the land-holding situation. But since in most areas local land-holding elites controlled the municipalities, these were unlikely to press the point. Thus, when in October of 1859 the president again sent a circular to the towns requesting information, the response was no more enthusiastic.37 A few communities, for example, Santa Luzia, did provide at least partial lists of properties that needed to be legitimated, but others such as Natividade and Formosa complained again that they had not had time to obtain the information. Several towns explained, probably quite correctly, that over the years inheritance, marriage, and sales had so tangled local land claims that only surveying could clarify the situation, and there were no surveyors available.38 The problem of public lands was equally complicated. Some have suggested that it was in the interest of municipalities and local elites to iden-

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table 6.1 Sesmarias and Posses, 1850s Sesmarias

Santa Cruz Bonfim Santa Luzia Capital Santa Rita Jaraguá Pilar Corumbá Meiaponte Traíras Cavalcante Arraias Formosa Palma Peixe Conceição Taguatinga P. Imperial Carmo Natividade Boavista

Posses

Basis of possession

1 yes held by 2d/3d generations — yes many subject to legitimization 1 yes many subject to legitimization — yes some held by second generation — yes — yes many subject to legitimization various yes many subject to legitimization —* —* 11 yes a few held by 1st generation nothing subject to legitimation/revalidation — yes nothing subject to legitimation/revalidation land held in common by the community — yes many subject to legitimization — yes many subject to legitimization nothing subject to legitimization/revalidation nothing subject to legitimization/revalidation yes yes many subject to legitimation 1 yes some subject to legitimization, others in hand of 2d/3d generations — yes many subject to legitimation all posses in hands of 2d/3d generations

* No information. sources: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência do Presidente com o Ministério dos Negócios do Império,” 27 July 1858. For examples of more detailed lists, by municipality, see: Doc. Av., box 117, Corumbá, 23 Nov. 1857; São João de Palma, 11 March 1857; and Bonfim, 5 January, 1857.

tify state-owned land for colonization and immigration, to improve local agriculture and boost labor supplies.39 This may have been applicable for the municipalities in the southern provinces or along the coast but not for Goiás. The extensive nature of frontier cattle ranching pushed land claims up to those of neighbors: the 1850/54 registrations almost always defined property boundaries as “the lands of” one neighbor or another, leaving few interstices into which small producers might insinuate themselves. Much of the countryside remained unoccupied but most of it had claimants, and commonly multiple claimants, sure to turn up were a new family to attempt to establish themselves without permission. Elites never succeeded entirely in cutting off alternative employments or access to land, but by combining control of the best and most accessible land with political and judicial power and social prestige they imposed upon much of the rural nonslave poor either the subordinate status of agregado or the more informal links of political and social clientage.40

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After delays of several years, and in response to repeated demands, some municipalities eventually did return estimates of public lands that might be available in their districts. Apart from the municipal council of Goiás, however, which enthusiastically pointed to large areas south of the capital as being open to settlement, and a few of the communities on the far southwestern frontier,41 town councils typically reported either that they could identify no public land remaining in their district or found only small, residual, and disconnected parcels; and this despite a small and widely dispersed provincial population. Much of what they did report as possible devoluta bordered rivers and lakes, areas settlers shunned because of possible flooding and disease: Jaraguá, for example, suggested that the only state land to be found locally was at the headwaters of the Lagoinha Creek, at Lagoa Grande, along Bonito and Diamante Creeks, and on the banks of the Rios Urubú, Almas, and Peixe; São José do Tocantins similarly reported public land available only bordering the Rios Traíras, Baggagem, Bagaginha, Tocantins, and Maranhão. Towns such as Natividade responded that there was no public land left in the municipality, except perhaps for some small odds and ends between private properties that only survey measurement could determine. Santa Maria Taguatinga reported that all of the municipality’s land was in the hands of squatters, except for parts of the Gerais, the desolate area along the border with Bahia. And at Santa Cruz the only devoluta to be found was two tracts originally set aside to support now-abandoned fiscal checkpoints on the Rio Corumbá.42 When the imperial government again raised the question of posses and legitimization in the 1870s it found that time had resolved much of the problem. Now, even less-open land was said to be available.43 Perhaps alone in Goiás, the law judge at Santa Maria Taguatinga made an evidently serious effort to collect the information requested, gathering material on some two hundred properties in his district. On questions of title, most respondents were vague. Typically they claimed to have purchased or inherited their land, though rarely did they offer documents to substantiate this. In the separate category provided for the “original title,” most protested ignorance or claimed possession “from time immemorial” or simply left it blank.44

Effects of the Law Open or unclaimed land did not serve the ranchers’ interests and so would not to be found,45 but even with the best of will Goiás’ authorities would have had great difficulties carrying out the 1850/54 law as intended. If public land was identifiable only by first marking private properties then the key was surveying, and Goiás had no qualified surveyors. In July of

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1858 the president excused himself for not having appointed the survey judges prescribed by the law, explaining that there was not a single individual in the province with the training required to measure land, and he repeated this explanation eighteen months later.46 Military engineers could examine and certify surveyors, but there were no competent officers in Goiás and no candidates for examination. Twenty years later the situation had not improved. Instead, squatters “in their transactions measure whatever way they wish, just making calculations more or less.”47 The parish registries of Goiás eventually included some seven thousand properties recorded in approximately four thousand entries.48 The last official deadline for registration was September of 1862, fully twelve years after the enactment of the law, but in Goiás, at least, the books actually remained open several more years. While each entry was supposed to carry the property’s location, size, and boundaries, given the purposes of registration land holders commonly included other information as well, for example, the basis on which they claimed to hold the property or its price or value, while at the same time others left out required material. Any effort at bureaucratic standardization in nineteenth-century rural Brazil was bound to fall afoul of a thousand local customs, and there was tremendous variation even from one municipality to another within Goiás as to what information the entries actually included and how the priest put this down. Material often appears in forms that make valuation of the property or comparisons among properties or municipalities difficult or impossible. For example, registrants almost always referred to the limits of their lands, but they did this in terms of local accidents of geography, such as creeks or hills, which could and did change, or with reference to others’ properties; none indicated surveyors’ markers. Many of these inconsistencies seem to have resulted not so much from subterfuge or fraud, though this certainly existed,49 as from either local practices or a particular priest’s ideas of property. The priest at Meiaponte, for example, listed almost every holding as a posse, unlikely after a century of settlement, though in a strictly legal sense probably true.50 A confusing category involved land held in common by families or groups of sócios (associates). Brazilian laws provided equal, partible inheritance among children. If obeyed, this tended to impoverish families in marginal areas as properties divided and subdivided with each generation, quickly becoming uneconomic. A common way to avoid this, or at least slow down the process, was to leave a property intact and operating, with the heirs sharing in the income.51 The registries for some of Goiás’s municipalities list multiple owners with the same or linked family names for many properties, suggesting a predominance of this pattern. In others, however, single names predominate. In these latter cases, does a single name always indicate

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individual ownership or did registrants in some instances simply use the name of the family patriarch or matriarch? Such differences suggest either that patterns of property holding varied markedly between even adjacent municipalities, and there is no other evidence to support this, or that different communities or priests applied peculiar local criteria to the descriptions of the land they registered. In recent years two Goiás scholars have analyzed the registry books in detail, achieving similar but not identical results. Among other topics, Professor Maria do Amparo Albuquerque Aguiar looked at forms of acquisition or possession, as did Maria Aparecida Daniel da Silva.52 Generally they agree that some 33–35 percent of the properties were said to have been purchased, 23–24 percent obtained by inheritance, and the rest held by posse and in mixed forms, though they differ on the specific numbers for some municipalities. In truth, reading and deciphering the registrations is difficult, and the texts commonly leave room for more than one interpretation. Single entries sometimes included multiple properties, and which form of ownership referred to which parcel is not always clear. Identifiable properties sometimes turn up more than once, having been sold or inherited over the decade or so that the books remained open. More importantly, and to repeat, the law was quite clear that land held by the second or third generations, whether as a result of inheritance or gift, or land obtained by purchase, even if the original form of acquisition had been posse, was to be considered legal property. If the claimant had paid the proper taxes, and even without a notarized bill of sale, these holdings did not have to be revalidated or legitimated, though they were to be measured. By contrast, posses and sesmarias did have to be legitimated or revalidated. Remembering that none of this demanded proof, there were tremendous incentives to declare possession by purchase or inheritance rather than as a result of squatting. Logically, possession by purchase and inheritance should have been more common in the older, more settled municipalities, whereas squatting should have predominated on the cattle frontier.53 However, a sample of municipalities suggests a more complicated situation (Table 6.2). Several factors seem to have been at work here, and these apart from any idiosyncrasies of the local priest. Towns such as Bonfim, São Domingos, Cavalcante, or Traíras fit the expected pattern, as do, at the other end of the scale, Rio Claro or Antas. But how to explain the relatively few posses reported, for example, in Rio Bonito, despite the fact that a generation of settlement without a land law would have made movement into this new cattle-raising region impossible on any basis but squatting? Part of the answer is that a common tactic among first settlers was to sell off parts of what they claimed to subsequent arrivals, effectively reinforcing

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table 6.2 Type of Possession, Selected Parishes, 1850s (percentages of properties registered)

Flores Bonfim Campinas São Domingos Traíras Cavalcante Santa Luzia Natividade Rio Bonito Porto Imperial São José Tocantins Curralinho Rio Claro Jaraguá Antas

Posse

Purchase

+ Inheritance

=

— 1 1 2 3 7 14 16 30 50 52 59 68 73 82

56 58 77 40 41 49 55 52 65 21 22 29 24 27 >1

44 41 23 58 56 44 31 32 5 29 25 12 9 — 15

100 99 99 98 97 93 86 84 70 50 47 41 33 27 16

sources: These figures are taken from data sheets prepared by a Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (CNPq) financed project for the computerization of the registries in Goiás under the direction of Prof. Dalíísia Elisabeth Martins Doles. Unfortunately, due to technical problems the project was not completed but the data sheets are available in the library of the postgraduate history program, Federal University of Goiás.

their title and building up a like-minded interest group with a stake in the status quo. But there are other mechanisms working here, too. If one is to believe the registries, quite a number of the reported sales and inheritances took place during the years immediately following the passage of the initial law in 1850 and before it took effect locally: in the case of Santa Luzia, for example, some 40 percent of all sales/inheritances recorded occurred between 1850 and 1858, and for Bonfim the figure was 38 percent, suggesting a rush to create at least on paper a status that did not require legitimization or revalidation. Much remains to be explained, however, such as the wide difference between São José do Tocantins and Traíras, adjacent municipalities for decades closely linked economically and politically, or the unlikely absence of any inheritances at all in Jaraguá, after a century of settlement. From another point of view, does a 30–35 percent rate of ownership by purchase indicate an active land market in the first half of the century and does such activity, in turn, reflect a higher level of integration of Goiás into the capitalist world economy than, perhaps, heretofore imagined? Probably not.54 Leaving aside for the moment the problem that an unknown number of these transactions were certainly fictitious, there is little evidence of

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a strong market for the sale and purchase of land even after 1850 when the economy was expanding more rapidly. Professor Maria Amélia Garcia de Alencar studied notary records for land transactions in three municipalities, the capital, Morrinhos, and Rio Verde, for the years 1850–1910.55 Even with the inclusion of the cattle frontier of Rio Verde and the developing agricultural region of Morrinhos, two of the more dynamic local economies in the province during the second half of the century, Professor Alencar found a total of only some 650 transactions, or slightly more than 10 a year for the three municipalities together, with an average value of no more than 1:350$000 réis. Omitting the inflationary years of the 1890s and the turn of the century, the total drops to but 375 transactions, or about 9 a year, at an average value of less than 1:000$000 réis. This amounts to only 3 transactions a year per municipality, each worth about the price of a single slave. Allowing for missing data might double the number of sales but would not alter the fundamental picture. In the year before the fall of the Empire agricultural land in Goiás had a value of only 100$000–400$000 réis “per half square league,” and pastureland was worth so little that it was “not routinely bought or sold.”56 Thus the average transaction in Alencar’s study involved at most one to two square leagues, less than a single eighteenth-century sesmaria. But, as always, there are problems with these figures that limit their usefulness: most importantly, an unknown number of transactions continued to take place informally, without being notarized, to avoid taxes or simply to save the trouble and expense of traveling to town. When sellers/buyers did register their documents at the notary’s office, they routinely understated the values involved, to reduce taxes and fees. Striking differences are nevertheless evident among the municipalities Alencar examines. The provincial capital was little involved in the emerging commercial cattle industry, particularly as its southern and southwestern parts separated after mid-century to form new municipalities. The local economy rested more on office holding and commerce than land. Properties there continued to fragment over the course of the half-century, becoming weekend retreats, small farms producing food for the town market, and the subsistence plots of agregados subordinated to the remaining large, and largely traditional, estates. The breakaway municipality of Rio Verde, by contrast, was on the leading edge of the southwestern commercial cattle-raising economy after 1850. Immigrants acquired extensive tracts of land and developed large ranches; there was no room or role here for small farmers. Finally, in the southeast the town of Morrinhos prospered as an agricultural producer, based on a combination of good soils and a location on major trade routes. Properties here were smaller but more highly capitalized than in the southwest, and structured by a capital-

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ist rationality attenuated on frontier fazendas. Morrinhos, too, provided the clearest example of links between land and political power: early in the next century a leading member of Morrinhos’s local oligarchy bankrolled the temporary overthrow of the Bulhões clan that had commanded local politics for half a century.57 Provincial governments sought repeatedly to stimulate sales of public land, but a decade after the implementation of the 1850/54 law a president regretted that “in this province there has been so far no concession of land by sale.”58 The costs involved in legally acquiring state land continued to outweigh the advantages. Most ranchers still preferred to simply occupy land as squatters or to buy it privately, typically at prices cheaper than that of state land but with dubious title.59 The exception was a brief burst of interest during the mid-1870s in the land around São José de Mossâmedes. Not until 1873 did the province finally declare the aldeia “extinguished” and put the area up for sale. Here was good land, much of it already cleared and with relatively easy access to the capital. The Crown approved the change but the familiar problem of a lack of surveyors held up transactions; finally, the president himself did the measurements.60 For a moment sales flourished, at least by local standards, but these soon fell off. Perhaps the capital’s market did not prove as lucrative as the first purchasers had imagined. Applications to buy state land in other parts of the province remained sporadic and of little consequence.61 The sale and purchase of land and the development of the commercial economy raise the question of capital flows. There were no banks or, apart from the activities of a small Caixa Econômica in the 1880s, formal lending institutions in the province during the Empire and there is no evidence that merchants advanced credit beyond current accounts. The Tribuna Livre in the late 1870s reported that thirteen years after the enactment of a national mortgage law none of Goiás’s notaries had registered any mortgages.62 The sale of pieces of their claims by the first squatters may have helped to capitalize what they kept, though given the low values involved this would not have raised much money, and they may just as well have consumed this or invested it in commerce or education as in their properties. Professor Alencar’s analysis of notary records does show a net transfer of funds from São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro to Goiás through the purchase of land, but this misses the much larger shift of capital goods in the form of slaves, animals, and equipment that accompanied migration. The inflows that fueled the expansion of stock raising in nineteenth-century Goiás came chiefly not as bank loans but through the informal channels of family credit and the physical transfer of capital assets to the province. Returning to the registry books, and even admitting the problems of inadequate measurements and fraud, it is worth examining more closely

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Rio Verde Rio Claro Rio Bonito Amaro Leite Campinas Santa Luzia Natividade Palma Porto Imperial Pouso Alto Arraias Bonfim Meiaponte Antas São Domingos Flores Curralinho Corumbá

Number of properties

Mean

90 59 60 35 139 335 100 106 50 74 171 420 233 62 168 197 221 275

311 270 267 151 108 76 72 68 61 60 38 37 36 29 25 24 23 22

Size in km2 Median

144 108 131 108 81 34 32 36 36 27 36 16 14 9 18 18 18 9

sources: See sources for Table 6.2.

property sizes for a sample of parishes (Table 6.3). The older municipalities, such as Arraias, Bonfim, Corumbá, and Meiaponte, exhibited, as would be expected, a greater number of properties of generally smaller size, while larger properties tended to concentrate on the frontier, for example, Rio Bonito, Rio Verde, and Rio Claro, and in the north of the province. Preservation strategies might slow but ultimately could not prevent the fragmentation of property over time. An exception to this might appear to be the colonial mining center of Santa Luzia with a substantial number of properties but a still relatively large average size for these. At mid-century, however, this municipality still included much of the province’s southeast, where the larger holdings of recent immigrants tended to elevate the average. Finally, the ratio between mean and medium indicates considerable inequality, with a few large properties and many more modest ones. Professor Aguiar reaches essentially similar conclusions. In a review of the thirty-one parishes for which, she argues, the registries provide enough material on property sizes to be statistically useful (70 percent), what stands out is the number of relatively small holdings: approximately one quarter of those registering declared parcels of land of 1,000 hectares or less and these together amounted to less than 1 percent of the land registered. Another 50 percent of the properties fell in the range of 1,000–5,000 and occupied less than 17 percent of the land. That is, 75 percent of those

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who registered had parcels of 5,000 hectares or less and together held no more than 18 percent of the occupied area of the province. On the other hand, 25 percent of those who registered controlled more than 80 percent of the land, reinforcing the picture of skewed ownership and power. If, as suggested, many of the smaller or more precarious holders failed to register at all, the actual inequality must have been even greater. Finally, looking at these figures from a slightly different perspective, in only seven parishes, concentrated in the south, did more than 50 percent of the families63 register land. Of course, an unknown number of individuals and families had access to land either through kinship relations or as renters and agregados, even if they did not put forward possession claims. The 1850/54 also allowed communities to own land. Communal property in Latin America is usually associated with the indigenous populations of the Andes and Mesoamerica or sometimes with escaped or ex-slave communities,64 but Europeans too had a strong tradition of common lands. And recent research suggests that community ownership may have been more widespread in the interior of Brazil than previously imagined.65 For nineteenth-century Goiás, possession in common manifested itself most often in the form of the “lands of the saint.” Just as original settlers sold off pieces of primitive posses to solidify their claims, some of these also endowed local chapels with land for the same purpose. As well, a chapel drew traffic, served as a center for social life and commerce, and raised property values. Over time others might endow the chapel with land, and the sum of these gifts and acquisitions came to be associated in the popular mind with, in other words to “belong to,” the patron saint of the chapel and, by extension, to the community. For example, as the town council of Formosa in the 1850s explained, “for more than a hundred years the town has been located on the patrimony of Our Lady of the Conception, patron saint of the parish, and the pastures and agricultural lands of Our Lady have been and continue to be used in common.”66 Any local resident in need could run a few cattle on the saint’s land or cultivate a patch for subsistence there, without cost or for a modest rent, depending on local custom. Cattle belonging to the municipality pastured here too, providing the town a reserve fund and resources to pay for local improvements. The land offered not only an economic safety net for the community’s inhabitants but served as well as the ideological and emotional glue that bound them together. Best known of these, perhaps, was Flores, but other towns founded on chapel lands included Catalão, on the property of Nossa Senhora Mãe de Deus; Rio Verde and Jataí; Pedro Afonso; and Ipameri, on land belonging to the Divino Espírito Santo.67 Over time, however, the tendency was for this land to be appropriated into private holdings. By the end of the nineteenth century the saint’s land of Flores, for example,

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totaled almost half that of the municipality, watched over and guarded by a popularly elected committee. But during the 1930s the provincial church hierarchy wrested control of the property from the committee and in the 1980s sold it off to ranchers migrating from the south.68 Civil municipalities also might own land. As of 1850, however, only the capital Goiás did, four square leagues around the town acquired under an eighteenth-century royal grant.69 The town council leased parcels to local residents but fought losing battles to collect rent and against squatters. By the first years of the twentieth century most of the land had disappeared into private hands.70 Other towns that sought municipal lands before 1850 were reminded that neither the president nor the Provincial Assembly had the power to make such grants.71 But Article 12 of the 1850 land law provided that the Crown could give “lands . . . for the formation of towns.” The intent was to provide for new settlement colonies of European immigrants, but at least in Goiás several already existing municipalities sought to use this provision to obtain community land. Goiás’s president evidently subscribed to this same interpretation of the law and in July of 1857 sent a circular to the province’s towns soliciting information and applications for land. Although the president deemed a few towns’ aspirations “excessive,” most of those that responded in fact sought only a sesmaria of one by three leagues or less, all or part of which many claimed to already control informally. In other cases, for example, Arraias, Pilar, Conceição, and Palma, town councils saw this as an opportunity to attempt to take control of the saint’s land away from the local committee. Santa Cruz and Catalão, reflecting the recent explosion of settlement there, repeated that there was no unclaimed land available. And, of course, many municipalities explained again that because most private properties remained to be measured they did not know if there was public land to be had in the district.72 Nothing came of this, but in the 1870s the Ministry of Agriculture again circulated a request to the provinces for information on property owned by municipalities or on what might be suitable for this purpose.73 And again there was no action. Only in 1893, after the fall of the Empire, did a new law of the state of Goiás provide a general mechanism for towns to acquire municipal property, where available public land could be discovered.74 More generally, after 1889 the new federal government turned over all remaining public lands, and public land claims, to the states, most of which adopted variants of the 1850/54 law as their own. Goiás in 1893 issued new regulations for the sale of public lands and the legitimization of property:75 —the state might sell public land for cash or on credit but no one could purchase more than 150 km2;

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—devolutas continued to be defined as land not privately held; —those with posses were to register these and pay taxes; —common land might continue in customary use; —all rural owners with less than 12 km2 had “the privilege of inviolability or indivisibility whatever the cause” (except inheritance);76 —land was reserved for colonization, towns, roads, and the exploitation of mineral deposits.77 Although the new regulations innovated over those of 1850/54 by allowing the purchase of state land on credit, there continued to be little interest in Goiás’s public lands. The fundamental problem remained that most pasture land was not worth the costs of the measurements involved and in popular thinking continued to be available to anyone with the power to assert a claim. For state authorities, however, these intruders were squatters and should be made to pay for their appropriation and use of public resources. But as might be imagined of a government now even more than before under the control of local interests, the new law was extremely accommodating to large holders burdened by illegitimate possession. In addition to recognizing sesmaria grants, even where none of the subsequent requirements had been met, and all registrations made under the 1850/54 law, the new regulations accepted as legitimate all posses still in the hands of the original occupants: anyone who had acquired property since 1854 could legalize it, as could anyone who owned a pre-1850 tract still not legitimized or who had purchased or inherited such land. In effect, the 1893 law extended the date for legal squatting from 1850 up to the early 1890s, but its provisions for legitimizing this property proved as ineffective as had been those of the 1850/54 law. Few bothered with what they viewed as unnecessary expenses. Thus, when he reported on the land situation in 1896, the governor rehearsed a host of familiar problems: sales of public lands were few and those that took place did not always conform to the law; buyers gave very vague boundaries in their applications and refused to measure their properties in the expectation of later being able to illegally engross more land; and boundary disputes continued with Mato Grosso, hindering land sales in the most dynamic area of the state’s economy. The deadline for legitimizing possession had passed with only two such petitions, he pointed out, but now everyone was crying for extensions. And a continued shortage of surveyors hampered sales and legitimizations.78 In response, the state legislature passed yet another land law in 1897, only to see this too largely ignored.79 As Goiás moved into the new century the governor repeated the familiar lament of the “worthlessness” of the province’s land regulations, pointing specifically to continued problems with squatting and the invasion of state lands.80

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Patterns of Land Holding Included in some of the proposals for what would become the 1850/54 law had been a national land tax. Not surprisingly, this found little favor with the deputies, and they struck the provision before enacting the regulations.81 However, in May of 1879 Goiás’s Assembly, searching for revenue to resolve the province’s perennial deficits and trying to find a replacement for the failed tax on cattle and horse production, revived the idea of a land tax, or imposto territorial, this time at the provincial level.82 In the tax law as enacted, all rural properties were liable for an annual levy of 1 percent of their value, excepting only those worth 200$000 réis or less and state and church holdings.83 Resistance was immediate and widespread: the tax collector at Santa Cruz, for example, reported “the strong protests on the part of owners” and the agent at Cavalcante noted the “reluctance of the taxpayers.”84 Newspapers, too, opposed the tax, attributing the deficits to incompetent provincial leadership and accusing the Assembly of subservience to the president for passing it, but they also counseled obedience until the tax could be overturned.85 In the province’s newly awakened partisan political atmosphere the Conservatives blamed the Liberals and already by June of 1879 had introduced a bill into the Assembly to repeal the tax. Some municipalities drew up tax rolls but apparently none attempted to collect the land tax, and with a change of administration the Assembly repealed it the following year.86 But with the declaration of the Republic Goiás’s new state government found itself forced to revisit the idea of a tax on rural property. The Federal Constitution abolished levies on interstate trade, including the cattle export tax which had sustained the province under the Empire, and left the new state’s leaders scrambling for revenue. Now even a ranching oligarchy saw no alternative to a land tax, and in 1892 the state legislature imposed an annual levy of 100 réis per square kilometer on land used for agriculture and stock raising.87 Again, the idea met with general rejection, but this time the state persisted, though it is clear from surviving tax rolls that at least initially failure or refusal to pay was widespread.88 Using these digests, together with lists of unpaid taxes, it is possible to make comparisons between the land situation in the province in the 1850s and that of a half-century later (Table 6.4). Properties in the older settlements such as Bonfim, Corumbá, Curralinho, and Natividade had continued to fragment, as would be expected. In Corumbá the fall in the mean/median with a stable number of holdings probably resulted from redrawing municipal boundaries. A similar phenomenon may explain the opposite developments in Santa Luzia and Meiaponte, where the number of properties fell dramatically while the

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table 6.4 Property Sizes, Selected Municipalities 1850s versus 1890s 1850s Properties

Rio Bonito Santa Luzia Natividade Palma Porto Imperial Pouso Alto Arraias Bonfim Meiaponte Antas São Domingos Curralinho Corumbá

60 335 100 106 50 74 171 420 233 62 168 221 275

Size Mean Median

267 76 72 68 61 60 38 37 36 29 25 23 22

131 34 32 36 36 27 36 16 14 9 18 18 9

1890s Properties

196 210 245 127 64 191 288 525 153 203 174 247 272

Size Mean Median

154 80 28 45 41 11 19 12 34 20 22 13 14

40 27 18 32 23 5 14 4 20 18 11 6 6

sources: For 1850s, see sources for Table 6.2; for 1890s, see tax digests, AHEG, “Docmentação Avulsa” and “Municípios.”

mean/median sizes did not vary greatly. On the province’s southwestern frontier the total of properties in Rio Bonito had more than tripled while the sizes fell significantly, though on the average these still exceeded those of the older settled areas; a similar phenomenon appeared in the newly developing agricultural region of Pouso Alto (Piracanjuba). And because of available land the number of properties in Antas (Anápolis) could expand dramatically over the half-century, while experiencing an actual increase in median size. Again, comparing the mean to the median reveals for most municipalities a growing inequality of land distribution. Indeed, the numbers tended to understate fragmentation, remembering that many of these properties had multiple owners and likely supported a growing population of family members and dependents.89 These patterns become clearer if we look in more detail at one municipality, for example Rio Bonito. Sixty properties in the 1850s had become 196 a half-century later, while the average size had fallen in these years some 40 percent and the median by 70 percent. Clearly property was subdividing rapidly. But at the same time some fazendas grew: in 1850 the largest registered property was of 756 km2, and most were considerably smaller, whereas fifty years later at least two exceeded 1000 km2 and a half-dozen owners reported multiple fazendas totaling more than 1,000 km2. If we look at individual properties we find diverging patterns: Fazenda Arcias in the 1850s was 270 km2 but by the 1890s had doubled to 552, though seven individuals now claimed part of it; Fazenda Bocaina had gone from 18 km2 to 431 km2, with three owners; and, most dra-

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Santa Luzia Rio Bonito Bonfim Jaraguá Palma Porto Imperial Arraias

Avg. property size, hectares

Avg. herd size

Avg. hectares per animal

7,800 21,000 2,500 2,400 5,700 5,100 2,900

70 250 70 110 270 470 720

111 84 36 22 21 11 4

sources: See the sources for Tables 5.2 and 6.2.

matically of all, Fazenda Perdizes had increased from 72 to over 1,000 km2, with a single owner listed. Characteristic of the opposite trend were properties such as Fazenda Galicia, 270 km2 in the 1850s but 65 km2 in the 1890s with four owners; Fazenda Bom Jardin reduced from 162 to 60 km2; and Fazenda Morrinhos, 540 km2 in the 1850s but only 483 km2 fifty years later, and this divided among thirteen owners. Marriages and Brazilian naming customs make it difficult to be precise, but only about half of the family names present in the 1850s registries were still evident in the 1890s, while some of the new names were among the largest holders, suggesting an active circulation of elites. In all, a clear pattern of polarization of land holding emerges from the data. In 1886 the newspaper O Publicador Goyano concurred, remarking on the recent impressive growth of Rio Bonito but suggesting that hampering future development was not only the “the rights given the old squatters by the law of 1850, but also the large land holders who keep their capital in land and leave the large part of it uncultivated and uninhabited for dozens of years.”90 It is now possible to have a better picture of nineteenth-century rural Goiás. For cattle ranches, a sample of municipalities in the early 1870s is shown in Table 6.5. Remember, of course, that these figures derive from a count for tax purposes and at least as regards cattle could probably easily be doubled. If we assume five hectares per animal as a necessary minimum for sustained reproduction, and in many areas it would have been much more, ranchers in areas such as Arraias and Porto Imperial may already have been pushing the edges of ecological degradation, and this despite the popular vision of the “empty” north. But in most areas overuse was a problem not yet even on the horizon. Properties in the south had yet to develop comparable cattle populations, calculated on the basis of hectares per head. Overall, while the province boasted many enormous properties, equally typical were ranches of 1,000–10,000 hectares with cattle populations in the range of 200–2,000 animals and average yearly production of 50 to 400 calves.91 Some of these animals the owners consumed on

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the property, some they sold, and others they preserved to reproduce and enlarge the herd. Interwoven with these were thousands of small, and sometimes very small, agricultural and stock-raising plots, worked by squatters, agregados, and free holders. Depending on the location and existing conditions these could be chiefly subsistence or they might be producing for markets in the capital or one of the other settlements. Travelers commonly remarked on the “misery” of tumbledown shacks, scrawny animals, and ragged garden patches cut from the mata, but popular memory has this as period of fartura, of relative plenty for the poor.92 Land was readily accessible and burdened with limited obligations, the state made few demands and could enforce fewer of these, and the countryside was overrun with cattle, one sertanejo remembered, “like crazy.”

Land Conflicts Because of an abundance of land and an extensive cattle industry not much interested in exact boundaries, land conflicts were not the problem in nineteenth-century Goiás that they were, for example, for the sugarproducing areas or on the coffee frontier. This is not to say, however, they did not occur.93 Some of the most vicious grew out of inheritance disputes, not uncommon where powerful men regularly left large numbers of more or less legitimate children by various women. Wills, where they existed, did not always specify in detail the distribution of property, and, absent good will, disputes could and did arise over of the division of lands and cattle.94 Land conflicts most often appeared not over pasture but about areas in agricultural production, precisely because suitable land was comparatively scarce and involved arduous and expensive effort to clear and prepare. The justice of the peace or the municipal judge, as representatives of the local power structure, generally resolved day-to-day questions about the ownership of crops, damages done by strayed animals, and rights of transit or access to water, without recourse to higher authority.95 But as with so many disputes in nineteenth-century Goiás, conflicts over land or boundaries or animals sometimes escaped the legal system into the realm of direct action and personal violence: “Those involved may solve the problem with a gun, the only decision issued regarding the dispute.”96 Typical was a conflict that developed between two female land holders near Arraias and that eventually drew in various of their children and agregados: one of the women had planted coffee bushes on the bank of the river that separated their properties, but with the rains the course of the river shifted, putting the trees on the far side, and now the other was attempting to harvest the crop. In the confrontation that resulted at least three people died

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and others were wounded, forcing the state to intervene.97 Routine conflicts, the normal “background noise” of any small-scale rural society, were commonplace in nineteenth-century Goiás but also evidently not a major preoccupation for the population or the state. Finally, disputes over land occurred between settlers and the indigenous population, including both those not yet “brought into social life” and the residents of the aldeias. As hunter-gatherers and shifting agriculturalists, the “forest dwellers” defended not so much a specific area as the general right of free access to the rivers, forests, and scrub they needed for survival. Not only did the settlers’ cattle and their burning practices threaten these, but the new arrivals’ assumption that Indians were brutes, animals to be enslaved or exterminated, left little room for accommodation and less interest in attempts to do so. Those in the aldeias fared not much better. For example, Duro, in the east-central part of the province, had its origins in an eighteenth-century Jesuit mission populated by Xerente Indians. When these died or fled, a mixed Indian, mulatto, and white population replaced them.98 By the 1830s the inhabitants were complaining of increasing intrusions into their lands by non-Indians, and the resulting disputes continued for half a century.99 The community registered its claims under the 1850/54 law but this seems to have availed it little. In 1874 the police subdelegado at Duro described the town as existing on the land of the “extinguished” aldeia of the same name, claiming that “the remainder of the ancient indigenous race today is confused and dispersed among the [nonindigenous] mass of the population.”100 But many of those living in Duro found that it served their purposes to continue to describe themselves as Indians, to refer to Duro as a “mission,” and to claim community land based upon this assertion of ethnicity and colonial heritage. Local “Brazilians” responded that “there is no aldeia of Indians here but instead citizens, voters, and [National] Guardsmen.”101 Similar conflicts after mid-century set the Xerente Indians of the aldeia of Piabanhas (Tereza Cristina) against local cattle ranchers.102 Colonel Sebastio José Lopes d’Almeida apparently for some years had been intruding into the settlement’s lands with his cattle, seeking to make these and the Indian residents part of his fazenda. The priest serving the aldeia protested these aggressions to the provincial government, and the leader of the Indians went personally to the capital to argue the community’s case.103 The outcome is not known, but, as Professor Mary Karasch has argued, it probably mattered little in the long run whether an indigenous group opted for resistance or accommodation to Luzo-Brazilian expansion; generally they lost in either case.104 The1850/54 law was as much about labor as it was about land, or at least that was the intent of those who formulated it. If enforced, it would

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have denied access to public lands on any basis but purchase, which most of the rural poor could not afford. While the 1850/54 law allowed the government to allocate land for settlement colonies of immigrant Europeans, there were no similar provisions for land or subsidies for the “national worker.” Apart from the southern provinces, the immigration provisions of the law came to little. When the flow of Europeans picked up in the 1880s, the imperial government paid passages not out of the meager returns from land sales but out of general revenues. And few of the Italians or Spaniards or Germans who arrived in Brazil made their way to Goiás. Over the course of the nineteenth century immigrants did swell the province’s population, but these came chiefly from neighboring provinces, and many from the despised northeast. The central thrust of the 1850/54 law was the conversion of land into a capitalist commodity. Effective private property rights would bring, it was hoped, several advantages: security for long-term investment and mortgages, lower transaction costs, and an increase in land values, which would, in turn, limit the access of the poor and of immigrants to land, keeping them in the labor force. But on the frontier the law made little sense. Large holders specifically did not wish to define boundaries, both in order to allow for future expansion of their properties and as part of the strategy of labor control. Nevertheless, over the second half of the century many properties did fragment and become effectively subdivided, in fact if not in law. In Rio Grande do Sul a similar process apparently led to rising social tensions and contributed to the outbreak of a bloody civil war in the 1890s.105 This did not occur in Goiás. Perhaps other factors were at work in Rio Grande: for example, the loss of the safety valve of crossing over into Uruguay or a long history of warfare may simply have created a society more ready to take up arms. Goiás had less population pressure; the safety valve of nearby Mato Grosso, largely depopulated by the war, remained; and by the end of the century Goiás’s rural poor saw other economic opportunities, for example the rubber boom. Ironically, both the importance of slavery and the penetration of capitalist relation of production were less in Goiás than in Rio Grande: the contradictions had not reached the same point.

7

Work In truth, Brazil does not lack braços [workers] but has too many folded braços [arms]. —Tribuna Livre, 1872

Shortly before independence the French traveler Auguste SaintHilaire came upon a property near Arrependidos: “The Fazenda Riacho Frio is quite extensive by the standards of the region,” he noted, “nevertheless, the house of the owner, roofed in straw, differs little from that of the slaves.” A few miles further along he encountered “a dozen sparse small cane fields. One belonged to the owner and the rest were inhabited by slaves and agregados. All, however, were equally miserable, and it was impossible to distinguish that of the owner.”1 Did material culture in nineteenth-century rural Goiás not distinguish the rural employer from the employed or the wealthy from the poor, or even the slaves? Was race more useful? While successive censuses reported modest increases among whites as a percentage of the population, and declines in the number of Africans, what travelers actually reported seeing, and especially in the rural areas, was a predominance of dark-skinned mixed bloods, of pardos. Elites struggled to hold on to their “whiteness,” but for the majority of the population social distance based on color was narrow and, in the absence of European immigration, probably narrowing. Saint-Hilaire’s remarks would seem to indicate similar collapsing of class differences based on a generalized rural isolation and poverty. However, what was obscure to the outsider was perhaps more evident to local inhabitants. In fact, the distribution of wealth and power in the province became more uneven during the years of the Empire. As the population grew, slaves, cattle, and land accumulated in fewer hands. But local power, and even a profusion of cattle and square leagues of land, did not translate easily into usable wealth. What was needed was labor, to work the land and handle the cattle, and to defend the elites’ interests, and labor was in short supply, or so would-be employers lamented.2

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The “National Worker” From the point of view of the employer, the labor problem had several dimensions, including, apart from that of simple numbers, quality, mobilization, and control. The question of the suitability, or lack of suitability, of the “national worker” for a modern Brazil was a major topic of debate among political and economic leaders for much of the nineteenth century.3 Generally speaking, those who held power, together with most foreign visitors, argued that the mass of the country’s free population was racially inferior, lazy by nature, without civilized needs, and unwilling to work unless compelled to do so. According to one of Goiás’s late colonial governors, “the local free people are indolent and lazy, [and] the ex-slaves give themselves over to leisure to indemnify themselves for their time as slaves.” A hundred years later, a judge arriving in the province made an almost identical evaluation: “Goianos are indolent and lazy, especially those in the north; the tendency toward laziness and inaction is most notable among the poor.” And a visiting English engineer agreed: “They exist like the plants around them, each living for himself, sleeping away their lives, until death relieves them of their wearisome burden.”4 Was the “laziness” and “indolence” of the lower classes more than simply an elite construct, a self-serving exculpation for the province’s evident poverty or a preliminary to extra-economic coercion? Perhaps not. In part such characterizations grew out of misunderstandings: some of the poor’s “laziness” remarked upon by outside observers was in fact rest periods between bouts of seasonal work, or it was time taken off in the wake of hunting or prospecting expeditions, and in other cases diseases such as malaria, Chagas, and malnutrition contributed to lethargy. More importantly, for aspirant whites not to work with their hands was what set them apart from the mixed-blood mass of the population and from slaves: “They consider it shameful or a dishonor; they would rather go hungry than work.”5 To free blacks, mulattos or caboclos, manual labor was what slaves did, and for slaves, whose exertions rarely benefited themselves, work was to be avoided whenever possible. Broadly, if work was to be more than a reward in itself it had to either provide immediate material benefits or promise upward social and economic mobility. Pay in nineteenth-century rural Goiás was low and avenues for self advancement in the sertão few. A scarcity of schools and the labor needs of poor families limited access to education. The success of small-scale agriculture and cattle ranching depended largely on a clientage relationship with a nearby large holder, for access to land, pasture, and water, and often for credit to purchase salt or other necessities. The subsistence or petty

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commodity producer who managed to generate a surplus typically found this difficult to market, and should one prosper he risked the covetousness of these same neighbors.6 But, on the other hand, for simple subsistence a few months of labor a year usually sufficed. Women were kept busy with children, with weaving, and with tasks about the house, but for the men there were long weeks or months with little to do and small incentive to develop new activities. In the language of an economist, “low prices in the domestic agricultural sector were reflected in a small marginal value product for labor and, as a consequence, in a widespread substitution of leisure for monetary income.”7 Clearly, there was un- or underutilized labor power to be found in the sertão, but how to convert this into value, and for whom? Could this potential labor be used to capitalize ranching or agriculture or be realized in improving the built environment? Precisely because few among the small-scale farmers owned the land they worked, or if they did the strength of their title depended upon a justice system over which they had little influence, their position was always precarious. They had little incentive to invest in land they could easily lose. And in contrast to the custom in at least some other areas of Brazil, squatters or renters forced off their plots in Goiás did not receive compensation for “improvements”; this was one of the reasons, a priest explained, “why they did not plant fruit trees.”8 Slash-and-burn agriculture forced farmers to move every few years, and the same fires that cleared the fields also threatened not only bridges and plantings but houses, outbuildings, and fences. Near Chapada, for example, Pohl encountered a fazenda residence where stray sparks recently had destroyed the roof; the owner took this to be normal but it must have undercut his interest in upgrading his housing.9 In sum, there was scant incentive for small-scale farmers or ranchers to put time or effort into improving their living and working environment, and few alternative employments for their labor power were available. When the traveler Saint-Hilaire remarked disparagingly that “goianos are not industrious . . . because they allow themselves to be dominated by indolence and the pleasures of the senses,”10 he was reporting not so much an unwillingness to work as a labor surplus that had difficulty in finding worthwhile application. Did opportunities improve over the course of the Empire? Probably the reverse was true. A common pattern, for example, in the early part of the century had been for subsistence farmers and small-scale stock raisers from various parts of the province to come to the Rio Claro and Rio Bonito regions for a few months a year to pan for gold and diamonds. The declining quality and quantities of the available ores, however, together with a worsening disease environment and Kayapó Indian attacks, made this less attractive and less profitable after mid-century. As the cattle economy expanded and invaded previously marginal areas of the province these

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became more valuable and, therefore, less available to squatters, pushing the rural poor further still from markets. Regionally there was little to choose: in the south the growth and modernization of the cattle industry and the demands of new markets and technologies sidelined those without the capital to keep up, while in the north cattle raising was profitable only if one had access to large amounts of land. Overall, the “national” workers profited little from applying their labor to the resources they controlled and less from working for others, and they encountered little encouragement to individual initiative or to offset the evident advantages of “laziness.”

Black Slavery Where, then, might elites intent upon expanding production find the labor they needed under conditions they deemed acceptable? The answer for much of Brazil’s history had been Black African slavery. Coffeeproducing areas added significantly to their stocks of slaves before and after mid-century, bringing in large numbers of captives from Africa up to 1850 and then redistributing slaves within the Empire, especially shipping them south from the failing sugar economies of the northeast. This was not possible for Goiás. Instead, as we saw in Chapter 2, black slavery declined steadily in Goiás over the course of the nineteenth century both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, the result of faltering imports, sales, and, evidently, a modest reproductive rate.11 Because of the difficulties of travel and low productivity, slaves imported into Goiás had always been relatively expensive. In 1760, for example, the governor reported that a slave who sold for 120$000 réis in Salvador brought 370–400$000 réis in the captaincy; twenty years later another governor put the prices at 100$000 réis in Bahia and 300$000 réis in Goiás, with one to three years credit.12 As gold mining declined, however, buyers unable to keep up payments lost not only their investment but, by the laws then in force, they owed rent for the time they had used the captives. Annual slave imports oscillated during the half-century after 1780, rising dramatically, at least by local standards, in the mid-1810s with the hopes for the new discovery at Anicuns but then falling off after independence.13 The 1820s, for example, was the last decade in which Goiás’s death inventories regularly recorded the “nation” of a slave, indicating a growing predominance of the locally born among the province’s remaining captives. Censuses after 1830 consistently reported a predominance of “Brazilian” slaves. As the economy faltered, the only remedy that struggling eighteenthcentury miners could imagine was for the state to subsidize labor costs for them: “to bring from the coast two hundred slaves a year to be divided among the miners most worthy and most in need of them,

130$ — 190$ 250$ — — 325$ — 265$ 410$ 475$ 735$ 850$ 710$ 800$ 900$ 800$ 830$ 840$

130$ — 200$ 300$ — — 300$ — 265$ 385$ 475$ 635$ 800$ 850$ 800$ 800$ 700$ 750$ 700$

Goiás Female

— — — — — — — — 460$ 650$ 960$ 1:700$ 1:800$ 1:860$ 2:000$ — 1:770$ 2:200$ 2:130$

Rio Claro, SP

281$ — 552$ 289$ — — 400$ — 350$ 385$ 723$ 897$ 1:083$ 948$ 909$ 853$ 894$ 987$ 1:117$

Rio de Janeiro

— 150$ — — — — — — — 540$ — 1:222$ — 1:044$ — 987$ — 833$ 1:117$

Paraná

133$ 132$ 222$ 282$ 311$ 325$ 384$ 412$ 427$ 435$ 576$ 781$ 1:063$ 946$ 738$ 741$ 791$ 860$ 1:102$

116$ 207$ 185$ 247$ 270$ 283$ 328$ 348$ 375$ 395$ 508$ 703$ 923$ 846$ 659$ 615$ 576$ 541$ 664$

Minas Gerais Male Female

—

Female

197$ — 249$ 368$ — 417$ — 407$ — 695$ 1:004$ — 887$ 882$ — 616$ 583$

Bahia

— 170$ 266$ — 292$ 483$ — 558$ — 543$ — 874$ 1:261$ — 1:165$ 1:067$ — 784$ 800$

Male

sources: Goiás: Average prices from 410 inventários. For a discussion of nineteenth-century slave prices in Goiás see Salles and da Silva, “A Escravidão Negra”: these authors find average prices 10–15% higher than those given here. São Paulo: Dean, Rio Claro, 55 (male slaves only); Rio de Janeiro: Buescu, 300 Anos de Inflação, 146, and Sweigart, Coffee Factorage, 303 (“average nominal slave price)”; Paraná: Franco Neto, “Senhores e Escravos no Paraná,” 167 (five-year averages); Minas Gerais: Bergad, Slavery . . . Minas Gerais, Appendixes; Bahia: Mattoso, Bahia, 637 (the intervals are not exactly the same but within a year or two). Generally, on slave prices in nineteenth-century Brazil, see Bergad, Slavery . . . Minas Gerais, 167–73.

1822–24 1825–27 1828–30 1831–33 1834–36 1837–39 1840–42 1843–45 1846–48 1849–51 1852–54 1855–57 1858–60 1861–63 1864–66 1867–69 1870–72 1873–75 1876–78

Male

table 7.1 Slave Prices, 1822–1878 (in milreis)

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with the miner obligated to pay for these in quarterly installments.” The Crown did not oblige, but shortly before independence inhabitants of the province again raised the idea, claiming that such assistance was already in place for Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso. Governor Ignácio de Sampião supported the scheme, claiming that “without slaves there is no way that the lands of America can prosper.”14 But if the miners could not pay their existing debts, how could they handle new ones? Perhaps not surprisingly, the government rejected the idea. By the 1820s the tide was running against black slavery in Goiás, and the province began to experience net losses among this population, as the older ones died, few imports arrived, and owners sold slaves to other provinces where they brought higher prices (Table 7.1).15 In the early 1840s Goiás’s Provincial Assembly passed an export tax intended “to impede the exit of slaves from the province and for conditions not to continue as they have, damaging agriculture and mining.” When fears about rising food prices agitated popular opinion in the 1850s, the Assembly increased this levy, “to make it repressive; it is well known that because of the decline in available labor our economy has suffered in recent years with this export.”16 Still, a legal and an illegal traffic continued. For towns along the Minas Gerais border such as Catalão and Santa Luzia this was an important part of the local economy for several decades after 1850: between 1871 and 1885, for example, Santa Luzia exported 325 slaves legally and Catalão some 444, far more than any of the province’s other municipalities.17 Taxed exports of slaves for the years from the late 1860s to the early 1880s going through the southern portos ran 75 to 125 a year; probably as many left illegally.18 Mato Grosso was also a destination for Goiás’s slaves, but traffic in that direction fell off after the 1860s because of better prices in the south.19 Raising the export tax stimulated the contraband slave trade. Records for the years after 1850 are replete with accusations and investigations of the illegal and untaxed export of slaves even as these offer few numbers, making the actual size of this traffic hard to know. Travelers leaving Goiás brought along slaves as “servants” and then sold them in other provinces, and smugglers ran slaves across the borders at secluded spots or bribed or bullied customs officials to pass them untaxed, just as they did with cattle.20 Evident too was the kidnapping and sale of free persons as slaves. Men and women captured in Goiás and smuggled out of the province not uncommonly turned up in Minas slave markets.21 Just such a case attracted the attention of the police at Catalão in 1867: a young woman, Joanna, reputedly the illegitimate daughter of a local landowner and born a free person, was enslaved illegally and smuggled to Bagagem (Minas Gerais). There a merchant purchased the girl and sent her to Mato Grosso, but along the

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road local people recognized Joanna and uncovered the crime. In another case, the courts sentenced João Padilla de Araujo for false enslavement of an entire family, and in 1874 police in Uberaba, responding to a Goiás warrant, arrested one Ursino de tal for the false enslavement of a Flores girl.22 Similar cases turn up repeatedly in the records. Ultimately what is impressive is the extent to which provincial officials took seriously the presumption of freedom of even the poorest among the population23 and the efforts that they made to halt the illegal traffic, punish those involved, and find and free the victims. Brazil was a slave society but Goiás was not, at least not in the sense that the economy depended on slaves as its chief labor source.24 But neither did the Goiás’s free population hasten to abolish slavery as, for example, happened in some of the northern provinces; instead, it clung to a declining number of captives until national abolition. The use of slave labor in mining, for example, continued through the nineteenth century, although necessarily on a much reduced scale. Apart from such sporadically ambitious undertakings as Anicuns and Abade that demanded concentrations of workers, slaves panned gold and diamonds alone or in small groups at dozens of spots scattered across the province: Gardner, for example, encountered slaves in the 1840s working the Rio Palma, paying their owners a fixed sum each week and keeping the balance of what they found for themselves.25 Not surprisingly, this activity was popular too with ex-slaves because it gave them a degree of independence few other forms of work offered, evidently irritating their betters: “They work no more than is necessary to satisfy their needs [for] alcohol and women.”26 Already by the late eighteenth century some owners were shifting their slaves from mining into agriculture and ranching, and this continued in the next century, even as the overall numbers of captives in the province fell.27 If we look at the distribution of slaves in 1825 as a percentage of population by parish, the highest concentrations were still in the old mining districts, including Natividade and Pilar at 29 percent and Crixás at 35 percent, and in the commercial centers, for example, Palma and Porto Imperial at 24 percent, and Meiaponte at 23 percent; by comparison, relatively fewer were to be found in the south, in areas of agriculture and ranching: Santa Cruz and Santa Luzia, for example, each had only 16 percent.28 Initially, the low profits of agriculture and the resulting difficulties for capital accumulation, together with partible inheritance, tended to diffuse ownership of the declining slave population. But with time, as the focus of the provincial economy shifted to large-scale cattle ranching and the new districts took the lead, and as bound workers became scarcer and more expensive, slave ownership shifted to the districts with prospering economies. By 1872 the parishes with the highest proportion of slaves were those characterized also

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by increasing concentration of land ownership and the growing dominance of cattle exports, including Rio Verde (19 percent) and Rio Bonito (28 percent). Slaves accumulated in these areas not so much because they made a profit, and in fact, they most evidently worked in low-return food production, but because land holders there could afford them; slaves helped stabilize their work force, particularly in the despised area of agriculture. And they were a prestige item. Other districts, by contrast, showed more or less steady declines of both numbers and percentages of slaves in the population over the course of the century. For example, the municipality of Goiás fell from 18 percent in 1825 to 8 percent in 1872, Santa Luzia went from 16 percent to 7 percent over the same period, and Natividade had an even bigger drop, from 29 percent to 5 percent.29 The evident tendency was for a growing concentration of the ownership of slaves, together with an overall decline in numbers and availability, suggesting that wealth-based inequalities were paralleling those of land concentration. Apart from the use of their labor power, slaves in nineteenth-century Goiás also constituted an important reservoir of wealth for those who owned them. Almost without exception they were the most valuable property reported in estate inventories: a single healthy male or female slave could be worth more than thousands of acres of land or hundreds of animals or a relatively elaborate house. When Paulo Rodrigues Leite died at Meiaponte in 1839, for example, his estate of 869$880 réis consisted almost entirely of a house worth 200$000 réis and two slaves valued at 220$000 réis and 340$000 réis respectively. In Manoel Coelho Paiva’s 1860s Goiás inventory a good riding horse had a value of 50$000 and ordinary cattle were worth 10–12$000 réis each, but an eight-month-old male slave brought 800$000 réis and a twenty-eight-year-old female 1:000$000 réis. By the 1870s three leagues of land with a house and other buildings had approximately the same worth as a thirty-five-year-old male slave, and in valuing the 1876 estate of the prosperous merchant Joaquim de Mendonça Roriz at Formosa, the executors calculated that he had cash totaling 2:000$000 réis, animals worth 3:675$000 réis, land and houses totaling 4:656$000 réis, furniture and jewelry worth 6:153$663 réis, and slaves totaling 7:850$000 réis. At Porto Imperial in the mid-1880s, and even as the end of slavery approached, a league of land with cultivation and cattle brought only 50–100$000 réis compared to 500$000 réis for a slave.

Slaves’ Work What did Goiás’s black slaves do? The work experience of slaves, as well as free labor, was strongly but not exclusively gender-influenced. For example, although the 1872 census listed half of the 5,280 female slaves

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in the province as domestics, and another 1,535, most of whom must have been children, as “without profession,” there were also 1,525 women who worked in agriculture. Similarly, over 3,500 of 5,372 men were agricultural laborers, but the census also found male slaves in artisan crafts, including shoemakers, leather and metal workers, tailors and weavers, construction workers, crew members on riverboats, and miners. Enumerations done for the 1871 Free Birth Law and 1885 Sexagenarian Law refined some of these categories, identifying, for example, not just cowboys but also vaqueiros, as well as mule drivers with the tropas, and slaves who worked for wages, including some held in jail and rented out for daily labor to help cover their maintenance costs.30 But changes in the economy and in the availability of captives prompted the redistribution of the slave population, so that by the mid-1880s 88 percent of the men were concentrated in agriculture and of the women almost 100 percent did domestic service of various sorts. Goiás’s slaves gained their freedom chiefly through legal manumission. Only the municipality of Rio Bonito, on the southwestern frontier, suffered substantial numbers of runaways during the 1870s and 1880; this suggests either relatively harsh conditions, common in newly developing areas, or the opportunity for refuge across the border in lightly settled Mato Grosso, or both. Instead of taking flight, the majority of slaves who escaped servitude in Goiás bought their freedom, either with money or with the promise of future labor (“conditional manumission”). Occasionally, too, masters freed slaves in their wills or to celebrate a special event.31 In all, as of December 1885, of the 9,375 slaves matriculated in 1871–72, 1,145, or 12 percent, had achieved manumission; 1,230, or 13 percent, were said to have died; and 1,728, or 18 percent, had been sold legally out of the province, most of these to Minas Gerais.32 In an economy based on cattle, small-scale agriculture, and scattered alluvial mining, men had better opportunities than did women to accumulate wealth through legal or illegal means; by contrast, the street commerce that slave women used in more urbanized provinces to earn money to buy their freedom seems to have been absent or very limited in Goiás.33 A sample of three communities confirms that men indeed achieved manumission at a higher rate than did women, unusual for a New World slave population with a balanced sex ratio.34 Some women nevertheless found ways to liberate themselves: in October of 1881, for example, the Tribuna Livre reported the case of Carolina, a slave in Rio Bonito, who over several years had earned enough working on Sundays to purchase her freedom.35 Abolitionism as an organized movement arrived late in Goiás and had an only limited impact.36 Explaining the absence of benevolent societies devoted to helping with manumission or with the education of libertos (freeborn children of slaves), a president pointed to “the poverty of the

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inhabitants and the lack of will that reigns, to the point of seeming an effect of the atmosphere that saps any idea of change.” 37 Environmental determinism aside, owners do seem to have held on to slaves and to have preferred the labor of libertos to the indemnification the state offered.38 At the same time, however, in May of 1881 the Judge of Orphans at Santa Luzia founded the Colônia Blasiana, to take care of emancipated libertos and orphan children, “descendants of Ethiopia.” By 1885 the colony had several buildings, a school and library, and various plantings, and it housed some sixty-four individuals, thirty-five of whom were orphans; it was unusual enough to merit repeated mentions by the Ministry of Agriculture.39 But to what extent Blasiana functioned in fact as a genuine philanthropic institution, as opposed to a source of cheap labor for the municipality’s land holders, remains unclear.40

Immigration As the number of slaves in Goiás waned, the flow of free immigration into the province was picking up, if gradually. Popular history has it that with the decline of gold mining at the end of the eighteenth century the captaincy suffered a sharp drop in population, a fall not recuperated until well into the next century. In part this reflects exaggerated ideas about how many slaves and free miners actually labored in Goiás during the gold boom.41 Recent work suggests instead that at least in the main areas population probably remained fairly stable or declined only slightly, bottoming out in the early nineteenth century, and this temporarily.42 But some marginal towns did fail, falling victim to exhausted gold workings and Indian attacks. Among the self-defined white male elites who remained, some died childless and others, given the general shortage of European women and a reluctance to marry “beneath their station,”43 left only illegitimate, mixedblood descendants, often impoverished and only partially Europeanized. The most notorious example of such a fall from grace was the Anhanguera family, in three generations gone from Portuguese bandeirante and governors of Goiás to illiterate tenders of a crossing on the Rio Corumbá.44 Looking about, it is easy to understand why racist and Eurocentric travelers and Crown officials could imagine that the population and “civilization” of the province had suffered catastrophic losses. Yet, already by the 1820s Goiás was experiencing a counterflow of immigration, arriving chiefly from the neighboring provinces. In particular, a noticeable current of generalistas or geralistas from Minas Gerais was crossing the border in the south: “The cattle ranches are increasing all the time as immigrants from Minas Gerais arrive looking to improve their situation,” a report on provincial development explained. 45 While some

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observers found the new arrivals to be “people of good customs, relatively well educated, who introduce useful practices,” others had a less charitable view, suggesting that among the immigrants was the criminal refuse of Minas, fleeing debts and military service and seeking out parts of Goiás over which the government had little control.46 The unsuccessful Liberal revolts of 1842 may have spurred others to migrate. But most came for economic reasons, for land.47 The eighteenth-century, mining-based economy of Goiás had leapfrogged or bypassed much of the south, and at the beginning of the next century large areas remained unsettled and largely unadministered. The southwest of the province, too, if in theory part of the municipality of the capital, was effectively outside of the control of the town council. Only in 1838 did the government cut an initial survey track through to the area.48 Among the first parts of the province to experience the effects of immigration were the towns of Catalão and Santa Cruz, on Goiás’s southeastern border. Of Catalão Cunha Mattos reported: “This small settlement had its beginnings in 1820 and today [1823–24] is inhabited by geralistas, who come to get the rich land of this district”; and of Santa Cruz: “Some districts have had a considerable increase in population, principally Santa Cruz, where many of the arriving geralistas have gathered, drawn by the pleasant climate and the quality of the soil.”49 Other towns that owed their development in these years to an influx from Minas included Morrinhos and Bonfim, and in the southwest immigrants from São Paulo were moving into Rio Verde and Jataí.50 Basileu França’s historical novel Os Pioneiros outlines the typical pattern for this settlement: during the first part of the century a family, beset by land and political problems in Minas Gerais, decides to move west to Goiás; young men, accompanied by agregados and slaves, drive cattle overland and mark out a new fazenda, reaching informal boundary agreements with other recent arrivals; after planting food crops, the main character returns to Minas, marries, and brings his new family, together with more cattle and workers, to the ranch, living at first in a branch-covered lean-to. Movement into northern Goiás was less systematic and the population poorer, but given that region’s smaller number of inhabitants its effects were probably at least as important. Already by the late colonial period ranchers from Bahia, Pernambuco, Piauí, and Maranhão were following their cattle into the north of Goiás, and this movement continued throughout the nineteenth century.51 When one of the periodic droughts gripped the interior of the northeast desperate refugees fled to the coast, but others turned west to Goiás. In 1862, for example, the president explained that “the droughts that have devastated the sertões of Bahia and Piauí have caused the emigration into the eastern part of this province of some two

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thousand persons,” and in January of 1868 the town council of Conceição begged the president for a detachment of soldiers to protect them, they said, from “the great number of more than five hundred emigrants from Bahia that the misery of the drought has driven out.”52 Over time ranchers and some of the refugees pushed on further into the interior of Goiás, attracted, for example, to the still lightly populated sertão of Amaro Leite and the area around Porto Imperial. In 1853 the state offered land and reimbursement of travel costs to anyone willing to settle near the new presídio of Genipapo, part of efforts to clear the region of the Canoeiro. Several years later one of the ranchers who had fixed himself there petitioned the provincial government, claiming, perhaps with some exaggeration, that he had attracted six hundred additional immigrants from Piauí. 53 By the end of the century, and in contrast to the usual association for Goiás of baiano with vagrant or criminal, in parts of the north “anyone who was active or ambitious” was a “baiano.”54 What Goiás consistently failed to attract was immigration from overseas. The coffee planters of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo put up only a limited resistance to the end of slavery in large part because of the increasing availability of what they believed to be superior European workers, brought to Brazil on government-subsidized passages. These were cheap and plentiful enough to effectively render the existing populations of mixed-blood free poor and ex-slaves superfluous. Employers in the interior provinces did not have this opportunity, however. As early as the 1820s Goiás’s governor pointed out both the difficulties and the advantages of attracting Europeans. Though he felt that families would be too expensive and time-consuming to bring from the coast, he thought that young, single men from Portugal and the islands, who could walk and bring their baggage on animals, would be useful. The new arrivals would have little trouble integrating themselves into local society and by “crossing” with the existing inhabitants should improve the quality of the province’s population.55 The idea got nowhere, however, and most provincial elites understood that realistically Goiás would be hard put to compete with the littoral for Europeans: “The isolated position of this province and the difficulties of communications do not permit us to hope for a wave of European immigration, at least not in the immediate future.”56 At the same time, however, few were ready to accept a radical alternative put forward by the governor of Mato Grosso: “Perhaps it would make sense to attempt colonization with native-born Brazilians, offering them the same advantages guaranteed to European colonists.”57 By the 1880s as European immigrants began arrive in large numbers in Brazil, Goiás again pondered how these might be attracted to the province. The Assembly authorized the president to offer potential immigrants free

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transportation from the coast and to contract European colonization companies to recruit settlers; local newspapers ran hopeful articles in English, French, and German touting the advantages of Goiás.58 However, the two government-backed immigration efforts mounted during this period came to naught, for unsurprising reasons. In 1889 arrangements to have a group of Italians brought to the province fell through when sixteen of these got as far as Uberaba but proceeded no further, and the wasted money became a political scandal. A few years later a Lisbon company agreed to provide Goiás one hundred Portuguese immigrants. In fact, it managed to recruit only twenty-eight and on the boat over these decided against continuing into the interior. Commenting on this failure, the state governor returned to the points made by President Miguel Lino de Moraes seventy years before, that absent better communications or more evident economic opportunities Europeans had little reason to come to Goiás.59

Indigenous Labor There remained the possibility of incorporating Goiás’s Indians into the labor force for work in agriculture and cattle ranching. It is instructive in this context to consider the changing attitudes of province’s LuzoBrazilians toward this population. The settlers had discussed Indian labor since the eighteenth century but now the debate took on a more urgent tone. Put simply, as black slaves became scarcer and more expensive and as foreign immigration appeared unlikely, local Indians came to be seen less as an obstacle to development, an “infestation” to be eliminated, than as a potential source of cheap labor: “Indians are the only possibility for this province to have workers, to replace the [black] slaves.”60 At its most direct, the exploitation of indigenous labor meant slavery too, against the law to be sure but practiced nevertheless in Goiás until at least the end of the nineteenth century. Most common was the forced labor of Indian women and children, in various guises.61 These typically fell captive in the course of bandeiras authorized by the state under the doctrine of “just war”:62 in 1762, for example, a group of forty Xacriabá women and children, captured by such an expedition, “were divided among the houses of the wealthy citizens here about, to be administered.” In other instances, the bandeiras sold captured Indians “to pay for their fatigue and expenses.”63 This pattern continued into the next century. A traveler reported that “in the constant state of war in which the European settlers and civilized inhabitants live in relation to the savage tribes they are able to manipulate the law to justify their enslavement.”64 Crown officials sometimes worked to stop perversion of the laws and intervened to protect Indians from local Luzo-Brazilians. In November of 1821, for example, Governor Sampião

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addressed the Crown asking to be allowed to free Indians illegally held; what response he received, if any, is unknown. And toward the end of the decade President Lino de Morais rejected proposals for the construction of a new road in the north to be financed by capturing and enslaving Indians, calling it “a guarantee of abuses.”65 But as the war against the Canoeiros spread in the 1830s and 1840s, and with the settlers pressing for an aggressive policy toward indigenous populations, proposals for the capture and distribution of Indians among whites “to be civilized” gained ground.66 These had limited effect, however, chiefly because most nineteenth-century bandeiras failed to find, let alone capture, significant numbers of Indians. Holding indigenous captives was not without danger. In January of 1887 the newspaper O Publicador Goyano reported the death of the prominent Jataí fazendeiro Joaquim Francisco Villela, together with members of his family, at the hands of the Kayapó.67 Three years before he had caught and enslaved an Indian girl, and evidently her relatives had now taken the opportunity to revenge themselves upon him. Similarly, in Os Pioneiros a captured Indian boy cries with frustration because of his “desire to kill” the landowner, Zé Manuel; the fazendeiro solves the problem by having the child shot.68 As was the case in Africa, the indigenous populations of Goiás themselves played key roles in the local slave traffic.69 The garrison commander at the Santa Maria Araguaia presídio, for example, reported in 1867 that groups of Kayapó regularly visited the fort offering children for sale, and he asked what he was to do. The president responded that to buy these was to commit the crime of reducing a free person to slavery, but, he added, reinforcing a giant existing loophole, the practice of “rescuing” children to be “educated” could continue.70 However, in conjunction with new 1845 regulations on Indian relations, the Ministry of the Empire specifically ordered that no one should abuse the “simplicity” of the Indians by buying children from them for labor or resale. Where this occurred, local judges were to intervene to convince the “owners” to give up the children and send them to an aldeia; failing this, the judges were responsible for the well-being of the captive Indians.71 Most such orders had little effect, however, not least because on the frontier those who held the judicial posts were themselves likely to be trafficking in Indians or making use of captured Indian labor. A particularly egregious example of this activity surfaced late in 1857 when a group of Apinayé and Carijó from the aldeia of Boavista attacked a settlement of Gaviões, capturing some hundred children; rather than free the captives, the missionary in charge of Boavista turned these over to local families in the nearby town, “to be civilized.” The scale of this transaction startled even the president and without success he demanded an explanation from the local judges.72 A generation

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later another president lamented that the continued willingness of settlers to buy Indian children stimulated wars among indigenous groups and contributed to the destruction of that population.73 A second source of Indian children “to be civilized” was the aldeias themselves. With the end of the settlement at Mossâmedes imminent, a nearby rancher suggested in 1831, for example, that the remaining children there should be parceled out among Christian families who would “make them useful to the Brazilian nation.” The disintegration of the aldeia and the flight of the remaining Kayapó overtook this scheme, but the practice of removing “orphans and some others of both sexes” from the aldeias for work in Luzo-Brazilian households or in governmentsponsored projects was in other instances permitted.74 Whether the parents gave these children up voluntarily or succumbed to coercion is not clear and this probably varied from situation to situation. However, in the case of the Colégio Isabel, a school set up on the banks of the Rio Araguaia to train interpreters and future Indian go-betweens, force does seems to have played a part in the recruitment of students: on more than one occasion the young Indians fled and had to be returned against their will.75 Overall, it was probably easy, and perhaps common, for the pseudo–family relationship of young captives sent to be “civilized” to degenerate into slavery: in June, 1864 a young captive named Valentín sued for freedom in the civil court at Santa Cruz, arguing that he was by descent Indian and under the law could not be held as a slave. His grandmother, he explained, had been generally known as Rosa Tapuia and was by appearance evidently an Indian, as was his mother Brasilia; therefore, under colonial and national law both must have been held illegally, as he was. The court ordered his freedom.76 Early in the nineteenth century there was relatively little interest in the labor of adult male Indians. They were difficult to capture and harder still to control as slaves, and they were thought to be less robust and capable of work than Africans. This lack of interest was rooted, too, in the situation that with gold mining decayed, agriculture finding few commercial markets, and a considerable number of slaves still in the province, the local economy was not yet suffering noteworthy shortages of workers. The expansion of ranching did require land, however, and so early state policies aimed not so much at recruiting these Indians for workers as ridding the countryside of what was seen as their obstructive presence, killing them or driving them west.77 By the 1840s, however, as the provincial economy rebounded and with black slaves more and more priced out of the reach of most of Goiás’s employers, the possibility of mobilizing indigenous male labor stirred interest: “Imagine the advantages of the province, as well as for humanity in general, if the Indians were civilized and domesticated. A

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tribe of savages converted into profitable and useful workers,” a provincial president enthused.78 With the end of the international slave trade in 1850 and the anxieties provoked by sharp rises in food prices during the following decade, Goiás’s leaders increasingly turned their attention to the possible large-scale incorporation of the “forest population” into the wage work force. A president explained that this was the only way to make up for the declining numbers of slaves “which have fallen to the point that it is very rare that fazendeiros have enough to do the work they need.” The Indians’ chief attraction, of course, and this dates from the colonial period, was the expectation that they would work or could be made to work for less than the existing mixed-blood free poor demanded. A few years later another president brought all the threads together: “In order to fulfill our duty to humanity, as well as to guarantee public order and individual security for members of the civilized population, it is in the interest of the province that in these robust [indigenous] men we find the solution to the labor problem agriculture faces, and for which for a long time there will be no other solution.”79 The provincial regime proposed abandoning the colonial practice of seeking to attract Indians by offering gifts, in part because the budget could not sustain the practice, and to instead integrate them into the market economy by means of acquired needs and wage labor.80 Broadly, the effort failed. Few among the indigenous population showed much interest in working for ranchers or farmers at the wages and under the conditions offered, and Indian men did not make up any significant part of the labor force in these activities before the end of the century. They did work the riverboats, however, and were the acknowledged masters of the traffic, especially the Apinayé and Xavantes from the aldeias near Boavista.81 All manner of non-Indians joined them among the boat crews, including professional caboclo and mulatto river men, escaped slaves, cowboys and mule drivers turned river workers for a voyage or two, the unemployed from the towns, and criminals and military deserters.82 Perhaps it should not surprise, then, that the biggest problem for shippers, or so they unceasingly complained, was the gross “lack of discipline” of these boat crews, “the insolent manner in which they act.”83 The men’s behavior not infrequently disrupted voyages or involved them in brawls with soldiers and National Guards in the towns where they touched. Because of the rigors of the work and the time absent from home, there was a persistent shortage of crew members for the voyage to Pará. Desperate merchants and shippers competed for their labor, sometimes “poaching” men from competitors.84 These men could demand, and receive, all or part of their wages in advance, not illogical given the time they would be away from home but indicative too of their unusual bargaining power.

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Worse, some took the money and disappeared or abandoned boats in midvoyage because of real or imagined slights, “and since they are not responsible for the damages, they go pick their teeth.”85 Employers responded by calling for stricter state regulation of river labor,86 but the demand for workers was too great, the supply too limited and irregular, and the state too weak in these areas to impose extra-economic solutions on work relations. The boatman on the northern rivers was as close to genuinely free labor as could be found in nineteenth-century Goiás, not a category to which local employers, accustomed to slaves and clients, adjusted easily.

Vagrants The “lack of discipline” and “insubordination” of the river workers were, in fact, only examples of a broader problem defined by would-be employers as “vagrancy”: a reluctance among the provincial poor to work for wages and under conditions set for them by their betters.87 From the point of view of the state, vagrancy entailed questions of both labor mobilization and social control, and it had different connotations for rural and urban areas. In the towns, although there were occasional references to a shortage of workers, the real fear was of threats to public order, particularly as slavery began to crumble. Worrisome to the elites and government officials was what they saw as growing numbers of slaves and ex-slaves, the unemployed and the unemployable, congregating in public spaces, begging, harassing passersby, drinking, and engaging in petty crime. The chief of police complained that “all the time perfectly healthy men and women turn up in my office begging.”88 It was offensive enough to see the lower orders not working, but would-be employers and the state worried too about what these might be thinking or planning as they mixed together in public squares and taverns. In the countryside the problem was slightly different. Again, there were complaints of labor shortages, but the problem that raised the most public concern was the willingness of fazendeiros to shelter “evildoers” on their properties, often as part of private armed gangs. Military inspector Cunha Mattos complained of “an incalculable number of these vagrants that move among the fazendas, armed with a musket or shotgun. They kill and steal with impunity and always find protectors and well-born men who intercede for them.” A half-century later the provincial chief of police argued that little had changed: “Crossing any fazenda one encounters criminals that live there under the shadow of a powerful protector.”89 Sometimes this carried over into the towns: one evening in 1847, for example, a shoot-out erupted in the capital between the night patrol and a group of

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guitar-playing loungers who described themselves as retainers of Colonel Antônio Luiz.90 The problems of vagrancy and the reluctance of the poor to work or to behave in an acceptable manner were debated in Goiás and across the Empire and, in turn, inspired a series of what proved to be largely ineffective laws and regulations. In 1827 Goiás’s General Council ordered justices of the peace to keep lists of residents in their districts and made property owners responsible for the activities of any “protected” individuals they harbored.91 At the national level, the imperial government in 1830 passed a general law code that, among other changes, criminalized the vagrant, defined now as “any person not taking an honest and useful occupation that will support them, or not having income sufficient for this, after having been warned by a justice of the peace.”92 Two years later Goiás moved to enforce this law, and authorities called for a “rigorous policing” to keep the population from laziness and vagrancy: “All property owners who allow the unemployed to reside on their properties will be fined. Every individual who does not have property, a trade, or a source of income that gives him a decent living will be required to present proof of employment within three days after notification by the justice of the peace.”93 Beggars henceforth would have to obtain a city license. A June 1835 proposal in the Assembly that would have required anyone accused of vagrancy to prove otherwise did not pass, but demands for controls on vagrants and appeals for stronger laws continued: the town council of São José do Tocantins, for example, in 1869 requested a law that would have made it obligatory either to plant a certain area or work for wages, and a few years later Natividade echoed this and sought an armed garrison to enforce a work requirement.94 The Free Birth Law and the evident decline of slavery accentuated concern about vagrancy. There were growing fears about labor shortages and costs: in October of 1881 the provincial president sent a circular to all police officials reminding them of the dangers of vagrancy and specifically pointing to vagrants as a potential source of agricultural workers to replace slaves.95 With the end of slavery the situation was said to have deteriorated further: “It is of the highest social necessity that we repress the vagrancy that is obvious from the large number that make no effort to find useful employment since the emancipation of the servile element.”96 Towns modified their regulations97 to crack down on this real or imagined plague of libertos and freed ex-slaves in the streets, though given the numbers and the composition of Goiás’s slave population, it is hard to see that this could actually have been much of a problem. Once the Empire fell, Goiás passed yet another vagrancy law. For all of this, however, provincial and state statistics reflect few arrests for vagrancy, suggesting either that it was less common than feared, or that the police in fact gave it little attention, or both.98

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Labor Laws If vagrancy statutes determined what was not work, other laws defined what was. The law of 13 September 1830 in theory regulated labor relations across the Empire for most of the century.99 It focused on formal labor contracts, and determined, among other provisions, that a worker could only terminate such an agreement early by returning any money advanced to him, as well as paying half the amount he would have earned had he fulfilled the arrangements; punishment for breach of contract was imprisonment. The 1830 law seems to have found little use in Goiás, and it is doubtful that most rural inhabitants even knew it existed.100 In 1837 the Provincial Assembly considered passing more comprehensive regulations, intended to flesh out the 1830 law. These would have required that all contracts be legitimized by a justice of the peace, and would have punished with jail anyone who accepted advance payment from more than one employer or who used a false name to evade contractual obligations. Why this failed to become law is not known, but a decade later the Assembly did attempt impose most of its provisions on river workers, to no evident avail.101 By the late 1870s the decay of slavery across the Empire, together with the arrival of increasing numbers of European workers, seemed to require modification of the 1830 law, and in 1879 the Empire issued updated regulations.102 Most significantly, labor contracts now could be renewed without the express permission of the employee, and the new regulations broadened the range of jail penalties for recalcitrant workers. Finally, in the 1890s the state of Goiás wrote a comprehensive labor code that set specific conditions for agricultural and ranch workers, as well as for domestic service, and made strikes illegal.103 Neither the 1830 nor the 1879 laws nor Goiás’s local statutes, however, unlike those in some other Latin American countries in these years, required nonslave workers to contract their labor. Presumably vagrancy laws were to perform this sort of extraeconomic coercion, though on the frontier they failed entirely in such a mission. There was no forced wage labor in Goiás, or, more broadly, in Brazil under the Empire. In the sertão, laws, in any event, played little role in labor relations, because the poor had scant knowledge or understanding of these and because employers resisted state intervention in relations between themselves and their workers, free or slave.

Agregados and Camaradas Much of Goiás’s rural free population lived with their families as agregados on large properties. Such labels were never very precise, but while camarada generally was associated with wage labor, for example on

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the riverboats or accompanying mule trains, agregados more commonly farmed plots obtained from large fazendas, for subsistence and for petty commodity sales. The men did field work and took care of the cattle and horses, while the women usually worked at home, assisted their husbands and fathers in seasonal agricultural tasks, or filled in as servants in the rural or urban residences of the fazendeiros. Agregados also worked occasionally for wages if the opportunity became available, doing odd jobs on the fazenda or a neighbor’s property, and rural men and women came together occasionally in groups for mutual labor, called mutirões, the equivalent to barn raisings or quilting bees in the North American west. The life of the agregado, according to one writer, was a life of “improvisation and multiple activities.”104 But it centered on land, and access to this land depended on the good will of the large holder, who “loaned” or rented it under varying but rarely very onerous conditions. Most agregados relied on family labor, and only a very few owned slaves or employed wage workers. Poorer agregados might actually be little more than day laborers allowed to live on the property and work for their keep, whereas in other cases agregados were relatives of the land holder, such as the agregado genro (brother-inlaw agregado),105 residing on the property perhaps as a first step toward establishing themselves in the area. At other times agregado was simply a euphemism for Indian slavery. Where the term appeared in urban censuses it referred typically to live-in servants or to a relative boarding with a family and helping out. For the agregado who farmed fazenda land, his arrangement with the owner typically was verbal, because one or both were illiterate and because the large holder had no intention of allowing a contract to limit what he could do. Where written rules did exist, they detailed the power imbalance. According to one such set of regulations,106 for example, the agregado head of household had the right to plant annually a plot of land the area of which depended on both the size of his family and his behavior. He did not pay rent, but according to the amount of land involved, and especially if he raised commercial crops, the agregado might be required to give up part of what he grew to the fazendeiro or sell it to him at a fixed price. Each year the agregado was also to clean a specified area of scrub for future agriculture or pasture use, and he was to work as needed at tasks around the fazenda and on the public roads. He could maintain a horse for his own use but was not to raise animals for commercial purposes on fazenda property without the owner’s permission. But the agregado’s first obligation was always “to defend the life and property of the land holder” and prevent outsiders from making unauthorized use of fazenda resources. For his part, the owner could expel the agregado for any real or imagined misbehavior and without compensation, and there was no legal recourse.

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Despite their evident lack of rights, Goiás’s agregados seem rarely to have been squeezed very hard; the owner typically had no immediate need for the land they used and required their labor only for roundups and occasional tasks around the fazenda. Indeed, so slight were the demands made on most agregados that for some outside observers the term was simply another name for vagrant.107 The fazendeiro had many reasons to welcome agregados and courted their support. Not only did they provide a source of cheap labor for periods of peak demand, they made up the main body of his political support or clientele. At least until the literacy reforms of the 1880s owners could mobilize the inhabitants of their properties at election time to vote for a preferred candidate. More importantly, everyday power in the sertão rested on potential or real violence, and each contender for local preeminence needed armed supporters. At the core of this force might be a small number of professional practitioners of violence, the capangas found hanging around the main house or drunk and stirring up trouble in nearby settlements. These men made no pretence of working at agriculture or herding cattle and hired their skills out to the highest bidder. Much more numerous, though, would be the jagunços. These were agregados and other fazenda workers who temporarily took up guns and knives when called upon to fight for their employer, “the only person in the world to whom [they] owed obedience.”108 Why did agregados accept this dependent situation? Why not move on and find a place of their own free from the conditions imposed by the large holder? The traditional explanation has it that their situation was essentially “hereditary,” and that they did not know and could not imagine an alternative.109 Clearly some remained trapped by their fears and character: “Running away would not do; he did not have the guts for that,” realizes the protagonist in a Bernardo Elis story.110 However, given the migrations that occurred in nineteenth-century Goiás and the individual mobility associated with cattle herding and driving animals to market, as well as contacts with passing tropeiros and mascates, any idea that rural dwellers lived in a closed world, ignorant of changes or other possibilities, is absurd. The proposition that debt held workers in place is equally untenable. Debt is a civil contract regulated by the state, which in nineteenth-century Goiás was far too weak to do this effectively. The employer himself might attempt to enforce a debt labor contract, but his ability to do this would have been a function of extralegal power not the debt as such. More likely, a runaway debtor or an agregado who abandoned one property would find refuge and protection on another. Important fazendeiros had competitors and enemies, about whom their employees would have known and who would likely have welcomed the refugee.111

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In fact, on the frontier the status of agregado offered poor families a number of positive advantages. One was access to land, and almost certainly better-quality and better-situated land, and in safer areas, than that available had they attempted to move to the edge of the frontier and squat on state land. More importantly, by linking oneself to a powerful patron, by physically residing on this person’s property and actively cultivating personal ties and those of fictive kinship, the poor man or woman gained a measure of social and political protection, as well as economic recourse, that those living on their own lacked. If justice was in most cases compromised to local power, the small rancher or farmer without protection risked being crushed by or between better-connected neighbors. A powerful patron could help, too, with evading, or at least moderating, state demands for taxes, military service, or jury duty. Because in the context of nineteenth-century rural Brazil the powerful needed the support of the poor, they necessarily granted these a certain measure of respect, publicly acknowledging a “moral equality” similar to that which plantation owners offered poor whites in the antebellum U.S. south. Theirs was a negotiated, and renegotiated, agreement, if not one between equals. Should the agregado wish, it was not difficult to escape his or her immediate situation, but it was almost impossible for most to improve their structural economic and social position. Overall, then, and under existing circumstances, there were probably few better opportunities for a poor man and his family or a poor widow than to attach themselves to a large land holder in the status of agregado. As if to underline this point, several men in August of 1882 wrote to the president regretting that indeed they had been much better off as agregados than in their present “miserable” situation as independent small farmers.112 A special category of agregado was the vaqueiro or lead cowboy. On a small ranch there might be only one, but on a large property there would be several, each supervising a section of the fazenda. The vaqueiro’s duties included “searching out and rounding up cattle, separating and marking the calves, taming animals, and getting together steers when needed for sale.”113 The number of cattle under his responsibility varied widely, depending on the local geography and the quality of the land and animals, on how many cowboys and horses he had available, and on whether there was a danger of Indian attacks. Slaves sometimes served as vaqueiros, but this practice seems to have fallen off after mid-century as the industry expanded and the number of slaves declined; most were free men.114 The standard form of payment for their work was the quarto (one-quarter), sometimes called the system of sorte (luck). When the ranch rounded up cattle for branding, the vaqueiro received one in four of the calves of those animals under his care; as the quality of cattle improved over time, however, the ratio

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sometimes dropped to one in five or one in six. Selection was by lottery to assure fairness.115 This should have allowed the vaqueiro to build up a herd and eventually strike out on his own as an independent rancher, and some did,116 but success of this sort was not common. Few vaqueiros had their own land on which to pasture cattle, and the fazendeiro worried that if he allowed them to use his property they might neglect his cattle in favor of their own.117 The vaqueiro also needed cash to pay for the goods he did not produce himself. As a result, most sold their calves immediately back to their employer. In contrast to the agregado, camaradas generally worked for wages in cash, credit, or kind. Some did day labor around the towns or on the fazendas and others assisted in artisan activities, and another name for river workers was camaradas “on board.” A common employment was with the mule trains. As was the case for the river crews, and for the same reasons, mule drivers generally demanded part or all of their salary at the outset of a trip, laying the ground work for the same sorts of complaints that dogged river transport: “They leave their employers when they feel like it, almost always taking with them their wage advances.”118 And just as on the river, it was not unknown for the mule drivers to abandon cargo or even passengers in mid-journey.119 This violated labor laws and the Civil Code, and in 1835 the Provincial Assembly specifically addressed the problem, ordering justices of the peace to intervene where necessary to force these men to complete their contracts.120 More often, though, it was the tropeiro who handled discipline. For example, in November, 1876 the delegado at Jaraguá was looking into the case of the camarada Antônio Thomas. Apparently Thomas had tried to flee the mule train on which he was working, but his employer pursued and caught him, dragged him back tied to the tail of a mule, and whipped him, resulting in his death. 121 Clearly, for at least some employers camaradas were little different than slaves, except that they entailed less investment and were, therefore, less valuable. A regular traffic in buying and selling the services of camaradas is reported to have persisted at least as late as the 1930s.122

Artisans A few of the towns’ residents found full- or part-time work as artisans, furnishing goods and services to the bureaucrats, soldiers, priests, and merchants who made up the towns’ aristocracy. The 1872 census of Goiás, for example, listed some 400 construction workers,500 metal and 700 wood workers, 350 tailors, and 300 leather workers, as well as 500 shoemakers, both slave and free.123 But travelers and local consumers were almost universal in condemning the quality of the products and the work

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habits of provincial craftsmen.124 Already early in the eighteenth-century mining boom artisans were described as poorly trained and inadequately capitalized, and shortly after independence Cunha Mattos found “the tailors and cobblers are indifferent, of blacksmiths there is only one in the [capital] that merits the name, and in the settlements one finds only a few that work iron poorly, the jewelers are fair, and of masons there is not one in the district worthy of the name.”125 Forty years later a president complained that “one of the biggest obstacles encountered here in the execution of public projects is the scarcity and incompetence of the workers, especially the masons and carpenters who demand high wages but are completely ignorant of their trade.”126 The durability and elegance of some of the colonial and nineteenth-century structures that survive today in Goiás suggest that not all artisans were incompetent, but the supply of qualified craft workers clearly remained limited. Part of the problem was simply the low status awarded mechanical trades in Portuguese society, worsened by the association in nineteenthcentury Brazil of any form of manual labor with slavery. Early in 1848, for example, the town council of Santa Luzia complained that not only did the town have few artisans but no one cared to learn trades; craftsmen were embarrassed to be seen carrying their tools in public.127 The quality of work suffered too because many of those who started to learn an artisan trade failed to complete the training, and, instead, as soon as they knew a bit, took off on their own. Poorly capitalized, generally illiterate, and ignorant of simple mathematics, these employed even more poorly prepared assistants, who repeated the cycle. Where artisans were not available amateurs (curiosos) substituted, but many of these could not make even simple repairs. Ultimately, with domestic production satisfying much of the low end of demand and imports supplying luxury items, the market for artisan production in the province was simply too restricted to support an adequately trained or capitalized group of craftsmen in any but a few fields. The provincial government made several attempts to ameliorate this situation. For example, in 1831 the Provincial Council forbade the contracting of slaves for artisan work,128 but rental slaves were cheaper than free workers, and the law remained a dead letter. Then, in the early 1840s a group on French artisans arrived in the capital on their way to Cuiabá, apparently intending to prospect for gold. Nevertheless, they carried with them their craft tools, and Goiás’s government offered the men contracts on public works if they would remain and practice their trades, and train orphans.129 Three agreed but two of these quickly disappeared from the records. However, the blacksmith José Victor Esselin completed several projects for the province over the next decade, and in the 1860s brought his brother, also a metalworker, from Rio de Janeiro. By the 1880s Esselin,

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still described as an “able mechanic,” was also a provincial deputy, suggesting that on the frontier at least an artisan background, and foreign origin, did not necessarily bar entrance into the local elite.130

Women’s Work What of women’s work? Nineteenth-century Goiás reserved almost all positions of public power or prestige or economic opportunity for men. By contrast, women were largely restricted by the dominant value system to the domestic sphere; the almost Moorish seclusion of women in nineteenth-century rural Brazil and their isolation from strangers were notorious and exceptions rare.131 On a day-to-day basis, however, all but the most wealthy of necessity were firmly involved in the family enterprise of survival and expected to work; a good prospect for marriage showed heavy calluses on her hands. On some frontiers scarcity gave women a bargaining power and a de facto freedom not typical of the more settled parts of these societies, but this was not the case in nineteenth-century Goiás. Among the poor the numbers of men and women were fairly balanced, while among the elites women suffered a disadvantage, as young men departed for the coast to study and did not return or came back married. For poor women in rural areas work began at 4:00 am, when they rose to clean the rice and grind the coffee, and ended at 11:00 pm with the washing and mending of clothing; during the day they took care of the younger children, the yard animals, and the garden, as well as preparing all the meals, and assisted with the farming and stock raising as needed. This was hard, grinding work, cooking over open flames and carrying heavy loads of water and firewood. In between they spun and wove cotton and made handicraft items of straw, vines, and animal hair and leather: “My mom did it all: straw hats, combs to weave cloth, and even the buttons for our clothing. Weaving, she wove until the end. I remember some clothing: she planted the cotton, picked it, cleaned the seeds and carded it, spun the thread, dyed this with indigo she had prepared, wove the cloth, and sewed the garment.”132 Half the female slaves and 20 percent of the free women noted in the 1872 census occupied the category of “agricultural workers,” and over half of the latter were single. Among free workers many of these were the daughters and wives of agregados and renters, but there was also widows or single women who farmed on their own or with the help of children. These turn up in tax lists: for example, during 1842 in the municipality of Pilar Anna Pereira Cabral, Anna Pereira do Lago, and Anna Maria Leite each paid dízimos on the production of corn, beans, rice, manioc, sugar, and cotton.133 Similarly, in some areas men must have been absent

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for extended periods while engaged in, for example, river navigation or driving cattle to market, leaving women on their own to run the fazendas. And among the more than 27,000 women listed in 1872 as having “no profession” some were children, but many others worked as needed in the family’s agricultural or stock-raising enterprises. Nevertheless, no matter how vital rural women’s work outside the home was to the family it remained always “help.” A rancher, for example, explained of his wife that “she helps me in everything. She can rope a calf and cure it by herself and track cattle better than a peon.” And pointing to the role of women in the reproduction of the labor force, he went on “God help me, I hope that she gets pregnant every year so that we will have a world of children.”134 In the towns poverty forced some women to break the rules to survive, not the least “because women’s work in this city is poorly paid.”135 The more fortunate ran small taverns, often operating out of their homes.136 But these were said to be foci of crime and disturbances: “The customers, especially the poorer ones, motivated by the alcohol sold in these establishments, got into fights with each other and ended up in prison, men and women alike.”137 A few women obtained an education and found employment as teachers in state’s girls’ primary schools or as private tutors, and in the 1880s the newspapers’ typesetters were said to be women. A profession reserved for them was “midwife,” though, again, most of this was the work of whomever was available at the time and not of specialists. The largest employment groups among free women were “domestic servants” and “cloth workers”; but the last category must be considered carefully, for many for those who listed themselves as “seamstress” or “working with cloth” actually did this chiefly for domestic or family use. Almost all of the wives of soldiers sent to the presidio at São Leopoldo, for example, gave their occupations as “seamstress,” though there could have been little paying work for them on the distant Araguaya.138 And laundresses at Meiaponte took the lead in opposing the Abade mine because it dirtied the Almas river, making their work that much more difficult.139 Elites, and foreigners,140 typically presumed that all poor women, and particularly those seen in the streets, were vagrants and prostitutes. Some were, of course, but prostitution was not illegal and, in any event, it almost never came up in police or municipal records. “Disorderly conduct” was and did, however, and often served as a catchall put to the service of state misogyny. Poor women, but not men, who worked in public places had to obtain “certificates of good conduct” and risked jail if they were thought to have violated the strict conditions of these.141

Conclusions The various difficulties facing development of the region [were] used to account for the backwardness of the area, and then backwardness [was] given, tautologically, to account for the problems. —Peter Riviere, The Forgotten Frontier: Ranchers of North Brazil (1972)

The “spine” of the nation state as it developed during the nineteenth century was the separation of public from private resources and the depersonalized exercise of state functions according to established norms: “a new legal order within which the public sphere is subject for the first time to a set of norms entirely different from those obtaining in the private sphere.”1 The state was to separate itself from the simple reflection of class or factional interests to represent those of the nation as a whole; it was to develop institutional independence, or “relative autonomy.” Generally, the Brazilian Empire failed to make this separation. Instead, the state continued to delegate authority to local elites, or, more properly, it continued to negotiate with such groups, which on their own assumed the right to parochial power. As one result, the manifestations of this state in the interior were contradictory. If what Goiás’s settler population, rich and poor alike, wished for was a state sufficiently strong to protect them from Indians and criminals but otherwise too weak to intervene in their lives, what they got was a state not strong enough for the first but too powerful, for their tastes, as regards the second. Both the strength and the weakness of the provincial regime lay in its poverty. Low levels of economic activity, especially in more easily taxed commercial areas, made it difficult to capture revenue. Without revenue the state could not develop the infrastructure that would have helped stimulate economic growth, nor could it deploy an adequate coercive apparatus to enforce laws or obtain additional revenues. This was not without advantages. For example, the state extracted sufficient monies to function but not so much as to crush the economy or to provoke violent resistance. Inefficiency, smuggling, and corruption mitigated the fiscal burden of rich and poor alike. At the same time, the Empire over the course of the century introduced substantial funds into Goiás, resources drawn from outside the

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province and invested with little likelihood of short-term return.2 No systems of forced wage labor or extra-economic coercion burdened the free population, and patronage helped protect the poor from such government impositions as military recruiting and jury duty. Broadly, the hand of the Empire rested lightly on the population of the sertão, and such demands as it made manifested themselves chiefly through local, established relations. To the population of the interior the state did not appear, and indeed was not, an intruder but part of a traditional, established moral and social order, accepted, if not always obeyed, as custom. This “transactional” state functioned well enough for the purposes at hand, at least by the lights of those with the power to determine such things. Local elites entered into a bargain with the Empire that promised them national support for their local preeminence, in return for which they agreed to advance, or at least tolerate, the national project, a pact that informed the function of the Brazilian state well into the twentieth century. This was a compromise sought desperately, and largely unsuccessfully, by many nineteenth-century Spanish American regimes but one at which the Brazilian Empire succeeded particularly well, and nowhere more so than on the frontier. Such arrangements there kept the peace and delivered a modest range of services to growing numbers of the population at a minimum cost, and they reinforced existing class hierarchies while providing a modicum of deference to central authority. The alternative was collapse and the disintegration of the Empire. Events in the 1890s at Canudos, for example, throw the imperial system into sharp relief: unlike the Republic, the Empire generally handled popular outbreaks, if not with justice, at least without the bloody panic that gripped the new government. Apart from the indigenous population, no group mounted a serious challenge to public authority in nineteenth-century Goiás, and none seriously threatened state power. Put another way, the state broadly succeeded in its control and defensive function. How, and why? Goiás’s small and shrinking number of Afro-Brazilian slaves posed at most a limited danger, and that declined over the course of the century in direct contrast to other Brazilian provinces threatened with real or imagined “Haitianization” by growing populations of captives. A few of Goiás’s slaves escaped and may have maintained themselves in small and isolated quilombos, and others among the captives engaged in acts of individual resistance, but open rebellion offered little but flight into the wilderness and starvation or death into the hands of hostile Indians. Local elites generally kept criminal violence to levels they found useful, or at least acceptable; where it was not, they combined with the state to repress it. There remained the Indian threat, but this likely sharpened national identity. The need to unite to face real or potential attacks from the “forest hordes,” despite complaints about

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regime failures, probably strengthened rather than weakened popular allegiance to the state. As regards interpersonal violence among the settler population, so long as this remained at manageable levels and continued to be directed at righting individual wrongs and maintaining the moral order, it too reinforced the state. Moral violence supported the patriarchal family, the patriarchal family supported the state, and the state supported the patriarchal family. In the 1960s the British social anthropologist Peter Riviere studied what he labeled the “forgotten frontier” of Roraima, in far northern Brazil. In many points what he found there echoed the experiences of Goiás a century before: ranches tended to be small or medium-sized, most labor was either family or paid by sorte, towns were unimportant, and access to market was difficult and expensive.3 One of the experiences that he argued set the region apart from other areas of Brazil was the persistence of frontier conditions there over an extended period of time, but this was characteristic too of Goiás’s history. The provincial economy of Goiás shifted during a century and a half from one based on mining to one rooted in subsistence agriculture and ranching. Apart, however, from a few decades in the mid-eighteenth century when gold exports flourished, each of these economies remained marginal in the larger, national context. Goiás changed but remained a frontier. Of course, the local ramifications of mining as opposed to agriculture and ranching were different: mining tended to concentrate populations whereas agriculture and ranching “dispersed the residents into the sort of errant life many of them lead,”4 greatly complicating policing efforts and tax collection. Rather than being a “moving line” frontier or one that closed, Goiás relived the frontier experience in different forms at different times but in roughly the same space, an experience shared in Brazil perhaps only with Mato Grosso.5 This reminds us that the “frontier” is a process or a condition, a changeable construct of what people can think conjugated by their material possibilities. A “successful” frontier destroys itself, whereas Goiás repeated the experience for over a century. Observing the province in the nineteenth century, it is useful to return to idea of a congeries of frontiers and to imagine several of these at work simultaneously, overlapping and interacting. The historical experience of individuals and groups commonly involved participation in several frontiers at once. Most obvious was that which separated and linked the settlers and the indigenous populations, a more or less standard New World pastoral frontier of expansion and violence. But without abandoning their interest in occupying territory, Luzo-Brazilians in Goiás during the nineteenth century shifted their concerns from a focus on displacement and/ or extermination to an increasing interest in mobilizing Indians for wage labor. Overall, they found such ambitions frustrated by both declining

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indigenous numbers and the lack of interest of this population in available wage labor possibilities. Almost as conflict-laden as those of the settlers with the Indians were the relations of Goiás’s elites with the coast. Fully aware of the horror and contempt in which residents of the more developed parts of the Empire held the sertão and its inhabitants, local elites struggled with the sense of inferiority most such frontier groups suffered. They sought to mask the insecurities this provoked by imitating patterns of thought and consumption imported from more “civilized” areas. Of course, the mass of the sertão’s population neither knew nor cared what those on the littoral thought. Another enduring frontier was that which set the north of the province against the south. Initially the north dominated the mining economy, and then it pioneered cattle exports, but the region fell behind the south over the course of the century. In many ways it was more of a frontier in 1850 than it had been in 1750, or at least comparatively more isolated.6 Exacerbating a sense of abandonment during the first half of the century were fading settlements and increasingly bold Indian attacks, together with provincial administrations that inhabitants of the north felt cared little for their problems. A pronounced division also separated the countryside, and the small towns, from the capital. The few advanced services such as health care and education that the province boasted concentrated themselves in the city of Goiás. The many small settlements scattered about the sertão remained almost incidental to the dominant socio-economic formation. Fazendeiros and agregados were as likely to do their business with mascates and passing boiadeiros as to visit the towns, and in the north the annual fair at Moquém drained off trade. In a very real sense, then, and contrary to what might be imagined, over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Goiás went from being an urban to a rural frontier. Finally, the province continued to manifest the fragmented or “Swiss cheese” frontiers remarked upon earlier. Given the weakness of state institutions and their limited presence, a predominance of subsistence farming and extensive ranching, a sparse population with scant opportunity or reason for exchange, and a commercial economy largely oriented toward markets outside the province, there was little to integrate Goiás’s, hamlets, farms, fazendas, and mining camps among themselves. Each constructed its own frontier, configuring and reconfiguring relationships in the face of changing circumstances. Each frontier was unique. Under these circumstances, a sense of belonging to a more distant Brazil may have been stronger than that of being part of the province. Local residents and visitors and officials arriving from the outside castigated Goiás’s farmers and ranchers for their “backward,” wasteful, and

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destructive methods. Much of this was a discourse born of inappropriate racist-culturalist assumptions. In fact, slash-and-burn agriculture and extensive ranching made best use of those resources plentiful in Goiás and saved on those in short supply. Under existing circumstances not only did the settlers have few options but the ill effects of the practices common in the province were more theoretical than real or immediate. Fire, for example, if not an ecologically sound practice, made excellent economic sense under existing conditions, at least for the individual. But therein lay the problem. What is rational for the individual may be noxious for the society and economy writ large, classical economics notwithstanding. The system of economic exploitation that developed in the nineteenth century was entirely organic in the sense that it grew naturally out of existing local circumstances in response to broader possibilities, and was eminently rational and well suited to available conditions. Nevertheless, it reinforced a tendency general in Brazil to see agriculture as essentially an extractive industry rather than one that could be made sustainable or renewable. As a result, what was in other societies a transitory, frontier stage of technological development in Brazil persisted, and persists in some areas today, with pernicious effects. For its inhabitants and the state to prosper, Goiás needed a commodity in demand nationally or internationally that overcame the problem of transport costs. The best available proved to be cattle, and secondarily horses. But the province operated at the fringes of the larger economy, and under local conditions herds expanded slowly, from perhaps 30–50,000 at the turn of the century to 300–600,000 at mid-century to less than 3 million by the 1920s. Ranchers suffered competition from Rio Grande do Sul and the La Plata region, and from nearby Mato Grosso, and this worsened in the latter part of the century. Efforts to convince the Empire to increase import tariffs to protect the domestic cattle industry ran up against the political imperative of cheap meat for the urban areas. Together with transport difficulties and Goiás’s need to sell through intermediaries, this competition limited possible profits; ironically, when the long-awaited railroad finally arrived in the state, cattle buyers attempted to beat down the prices they paid ranchers by arguing that the animals’ horns were too wide to fit through the boxcar doors. Too, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were developing their own cattle industries, and ranchers there had interest in Goiás’s animals only so far as these could be obtained very cheaply. By late in the century even Mato Grosso’s producers had direct access to the São Paulo coffee frontier by following the southern trail through Porto Quinze, and river communications allowed development in that province of a viable dried meat industry decades before the railroad offered this to Goiás. Exogenous factors combined to relegate Goiás to a marginal position in

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the national economy and forced local ranchers to keep costs, prices, and profits low. Ultimately, cattle ranching as it developed in nineteenth-century Goiás could not be a stable system. Over time, as populations of humans and animals grow, irreversible damage to the environment threatens, promising the destruction of the industry or forcing a shift to different forms of exploitation. But for most of the province this was not yet an evident problem even by the end of the century and, had it been, there was no practical alternative at the time. Modernization of ranching only became possible after 1900 with the availability of reasonably priced fence wire and access to railroad transport that allowed, and made worthwhile, improved pasture and the controlled cross-breeding of cattle. These same changes laid the basis for Goiás’s emergence in the late twentieth century as a largescale agricultural and cattle exporter. But in the years of the Empire Goiás could discover nothing to produce that was not available elsewhere, and at competitive or better prices. It had no leverage in the national economy or, as a result, in national politics. Access to market was dependant on animals transporting themselves, which precluded capturing additional value through processing; indeed, killing a steer and exporting the hide lowered the unit value. Goiás’s ranchers well understood their marginal situation and the limited, at least in the short run, possibilities for changing it. Survival required minimum costs and maximum flexibility, in order to be able to respond to unexpected market opportunities, opportunities about which producers had erratic information and over which they had no control. But precisely because Goiás’s stock-raising industry operated in a precapitalist mode it could survive on returns that a more advanced economy could not. Ranching functioned with sometimes shockingly primitive techniques and highly variable output but with few fixed costs. Land and cattle were essentially free goods and labor remained relatively cheap, if not always as docile or available as employers might wish. Before the end of the century ranches rarely had mortgages. Operating outside the framework of capitalist accumulation gave the industry an enormous capacity to absorb market swings. In all, it is hard to imagine a comparable commercial activity that would have functioned as effectively at the place and time, and none developed to replace it. As for the small agriculturalists inhabiting the fringes of the fazendas and the interstices of the pastoral economy, most managed at best irregular and unpredictable surpluses, and few had access to reliable markets for these. But here too, because they worked without borrowed capital and, as a result, did not have to make the average rate of profit, and because they did not calculate the cost of family labor, Goiás’s small-scale farmers could sell their products if necessary at or below actual cost. This militated

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against efforts to develop more highly capitalized food production or, more broadly, to attempt to modernize agriculture. At the same time, the inability of the province to advance beyond rudimentary iron and steel production limited the availability and raised the cost of hand tools such as axes and hoes and made difficult the repair of more complex tools and machinery brought from the coast. Failure to develop basic industry in the province had other ramifications as well. A good example was the manufacture of gunpowder. Already by the late colonial period the government of Goiás was lamenting repeated failures to develop the local fabrication of gunpowder, despite the area’s abundance of raw materials. The captaincy alone, the governor argued, could supply the entire colony, but the industry lacked “intelligent direction.” Throughout the nineteenth century miners at Nova Roma, São Felix, and Cavalcante dug saltpeter and sold it, chiefly at the Moquém fair, but gunpowder remained a product for home manufacture, and much of that of low quality; for example, Spix at one point encountered a child badly burned in a home gunpowder manufacturing accident. Settlers died because they lacked gunpowder or because that which they made misfired.7 The logic of the province’s labor situation was more difficult to decipher. Overall, the free population remained small and dispersed over wide areas and as such was hard to mobilize and control. Still, the requirements of an extensive cattle economy were not great and should have been easily met. But low profits limited wage possibilities, and not every cowboy could receive a part of the herd for his work. As a result, the rates of pay available were not such as to readily attract free labor from its “leisure preference.” The alternative to this situation in some other areas of Latin America was state-enforced extra-economic coercion. But Goiás’s state was too weak and its population too mobile for these to be effective. Also, for much of the century large land holders needed the support of the free poor as their political clientele, limiting the coercive pressure that could be brought to bear upon them to supply labor. Subsistence agriculture, even on borrowed land, gave the small agriculturalist a certain resilience. If he fell out with one fazendeiro there were others. Thus, and not withstanding the limited labor requirements of extensive cattle production, landholders in nineteenth-century Goiás had to struggle to find the workers they needed under conditions they deemed tolerable. Brazil’s solution to labor shortages for much of its history had been black slavery, but the decline of mining largely closed this off to Goiás. European immigrants in significant numbers were equally unavailable. Interest, instead, more and more focused on the indigenous population as a potential source of workers, a possibility long considered but only intermittently pursued. This was quite the opposite of what was occur-

conclusions

213

ring in many of the other parts of Brazil, where the “Indian question” by mid-century had become “a problem of land . . . because the Indians less and less [were] necessary for labor.”8 In Goiás the focus earlier in the century had also been on “disinfesting” the countryside of bugres to allow the spread of cattle, but by the 1860s and 1870s the hope instead was to induce in the indigenous populations new “civilized needs” that could be satisfied only by wage work. Such hopes remained largely frustrated. Ultimately, then, large land holders had only limited control over their agregados and clients, less over wage laborers, and almost none over potential indigenous workers. Along with labor mobilization, a central intent of the 1850/54 land law had been to convert rural property into a capitalist commodity that responded to market forces and might be available too to substitute for the declining black slave population as collateral for loans. This effort failed generally in Brazil and specifically in Goiás. Apart from a few export production areas near the coast, land in Brazil, and not just in Goiás, was almost never worth the cost of measuring and marking it. Because land remained unmeasured and unmarked, holders could not title or easily commercialize it, and, as a result, land could not serve readily as a basis for credit. Because, too, private holders refused to clarify their titles, the government was unable to effectively tax their properties or determine what public lands might be available for sale. The main economic activities in nineteenth-century Goiás, however, did not require, or even benefit from, the titling or commodification of land. Slash-and-burn agriculture needed mobility, and the demands of extensive stock raising also worked against fixed boundaries. Not only, for example, did the absence of regularized properties serve the interests of large ranchers by allowing the easy abandonment of used-up land and providing room for future expansion, it projected their power over wide areas of the countryside, facilitating the mobilization of labor and political control. Imprecision served their interest, and the workings of a law structured on the coast did not. Nineteenth-century Goiás is an excellent demonstration that land holding in a particular area develops out of the interaction of ideology with local environmental possibilities, and that, as a result, laws may have different effects when applied in and to different parts of a territory. But Goiás’s historical experiences were by no means unique within nineteenth-century Brazil. Rather, they represented a limit case of conditions found across wide areas of the sertão and even the littoral. If Goiás’s agriculture was backward, so was that of other provinces: of Maranhão, for example, the president explained “the present system of cultivation, in addition to destroying the most beautiful forests, does not allow us to take advantage of the real fertility of the soil,” and in Paraíba agriculture “was

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mistreated by . . . the vicious traditions inherited from our ancestors.” 9 This was true even for the reputedly more advanced export areas: “The methods our cultivators use,” reported the president of São Paulo, “in tilling the soil and preparing agricultural products are the same as those of the first, the original agriculturalists of the province; they do not know more modern techniques or use the types of equipment so advantageously employed in other countries.”10 All cursed the inadequacy of roads and the limitations these forced on the economy: “We recognize that without good roads much production cannot get to market or arrives there weighed down with expenses,” complained the president of Alagoas.11 As this suggests, poor communications plagued even those provinces with apparently ready access to the sea; roads still were needed to get products to and from the coast. Other provinces shared, too, the problems of crime and impunity and most agreed on the causes: the president of Minas Gerais, for example, found that the problem of crime lay in “the large size of the province, the dispersion of the population, the lack of secure jails, the weakness or indifference of the public authorities, the fear of judges and witnesses of the hatred of criminals and their protectors, [and] the difficulty in finding competent people for public offices, [that] worked to guarantee impunity for most criminals.”12 Here was a recitation any president of Goiás would have recognized. And attacks by bandits and Indians were not unique to the sertão: in 1878, for example, the president of Paraná warned that “Indians, together with a few renegade whites, continue their assaults and have committed various crimes on rural properties and insulted the authorities.”13 Police were ineffective: “The small local detachments . . . serve little purpose except to ruin discipline”; and missionary work was no more useful: “Not insignificant sums have been spent by the province, I am forced to say, without result.”14 Yet Goiás, with the least per capita revenues and production, the most bothersome Indian attacks, the poorest transportation and greatest degree of isolation, and the most evident failure to foster industry and export production persisted and, in its modest way, prospered.

reference matter

Glossary

agregado

agricultural worker, usually residing on a large holding

aldeia village alqueire unit of volume, approximately 13.8 liters; also, unit of land measurement of varying size arraial hamlet arroba unit of weight, approximately 15 kilos or 33 pounds baiano someone from the province or state of Bahia bandeira; bandeirante pant in a bandeira

an expedition or attack into the interior; a partici-

benzedor one who gives blessings, a curer boi

steer

boiadeiro bugre

cattle drover

“beast”: an Indian

caboclo Indian-white mixed blood câmara

town council

camarada capanga

wages worker hired thug

carro de boi; carreteiro catequese

oxcart; carter

missionary work

cerrado

grasslands of central Brazil

charque

dried or jerked meat

cigano

gypsy

coletoria; coletor

internal provincial tax collection point; tax collector

comarca

judicial district

correria

raid, especially Indians

curandeiro folk curer of diseases curraleiro

mixed-breed steer

delegado; subdelegado devoluta

marshal; deputy

state-owned land

218

g l o s sa ry

dízimo “tenth”: taxes on cattle and food production engenho mill, generally a sugar mill faculdade school of higher education faiscador

artisan gold miner

fazenda; fazendeiro freguesia

large property; owner of large property

parish

geralista, generalista someone from the province or state of Minas Gerais goiano someone from the province or state of Goiás imposto territorial juiz de direito league

land tax

law judge; judge of comarca

measure of distance of approximately 6 kilometers

liberto a freed slave llanos grassy plains, especially in southern Colombia and Venezuela loja general store lote

section or part of a mule train

liceu

secondary school

mal das cadeiras mal triste; tristeza

hindquarter disease of horses Texas tick fever

mascate; mascatagem mata

peddler; the work of being a peddler

forest

matrícula

registry or list (of slaves)

mineiro someone from the province or state of Minas Gerais oitava

1

/8 ounce; a measurement for gold dust or diamonds

pardo dark-skinned pé duro mixed-blood steer pedestres

lightly armed garrison troops for frontier forts

porto an established point for river crossing posse; posseiro illegal possession of land, squatting; a squatter pouso rest stop or shed along travel routes presídio

fort

provisão instruction quilombo runaway-slave community quinto “fifth”: a tax on gold production

g l o s sa ry

rapadura

219

raw, caked sugar

recebedoria; recebedor tor

point for collection of “export” taxes; tax collec-

registro point of inspection for commercial traffic entering or leaving the province reglamento relatório

regulation or rule

report

remeiro

member of riverboat crew

rezador

one who cures or resolves problems by praying

roça; roceiro romaría

subsistence agricultural plot; subsistence agriculturalist

religious pilgrimage

sertão; sertanejo sesmaria

the “interior”; one who lives in the interior

royal land grant, typically one by three leagues

sítio “site” or “place”; small agricultural or ranching property suplente tigre

substitute

“tiger”: any large cat

tropa; tropeiro

mule train; supervisor of mule train or mule driver

vago vagrant vão valley vaqueiro vintém

cowboy; lead cowboy or foreman 1

/20 ounce: a measure of gold and diamonds

Notes

introduction 1. Correio Official, 19 May 1880. See also the annual report of the Presidente de Goiás, Relatório,1881-1 (henceforth Relatório-[year]); for 1875, Relatório-1875, 1. 2. Among a vast literature, particularly useful here in thinking about state and nation have been Skocpol, “Current Research,” in Evans et. al., Bringing the State Back In; North, Structure and Change, Chap. 3; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, Chap. 1; and Joseph and Nugent, “Popular Culture and State Formation,” and Sayer, “Remarks on ‘Hegemony’,” in Joseph and Nugent, State Formation. On Brazil see Barman, Forging a Nation; Carvalho, Teatro das Sombras; Mattos, Saquarema; Uricoechea, Patrimonial Foundations; Topik, “Hollow State”; Graham, Patronage and Politics; and Mattoso, Bahia. 3. Bursztyn, Alianças. On local power, see Maria Isaura Pereira de Querioz’s classic O Mandonismo Local na Vida Política Brasileira. 4. Carvalho, Teatro das Sombras, 11, 163. 5. On conflicts between class interests and liberal principles see Linda Lewin, Surprise Heirs, vol. 2. 6. Bursztyn, Alianças, 29. 7. Uricoechea, Patrimonial Foundations, 120. The golden age of the coroneis came after the Empire, under the Old Republic. 8. Topik, “Hollow State.” 9. Audrin, Sertanejos, 168; Sociedade Goiana de Cultura (SGC), “Decretos, Ofícios, Provisões da Mesa de Consciência e Ordem e Outros Papéis, 1822–53,” 7. 10. D’Alincourt, Memoria, 96. 11. Arquivo Nacional–Rio de Janeiro (AN), Ijj9, 536, 8 Nov. 1842 and 24 Feb. 1844; see also Palacín, Quatro Tempos, 53. 12. Matutina, 11 Oct. 1830. The Emperor’s abdication was met with equal enthusiasm: Matutina, 22 Nov. 1831. 13. On this see Kraay, “Definindo Nação,” 33–63. 14. Relatório-1863-3, 4. (In most years the provincial presidents produced only one relatório; in cases of multiple reports, they are numbered “1,” “2,” “3,” etc.) More broadly, see Prado, “Brasil.” 15. Saint-Hilaire, Viagem, 32, 117; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 118. In the last decade of the Empire the term “decadent” was still being applied to towns in the province: Publicador, 13 Sept. 1885 (Jaraguá) and 5 Feb. 1887 (Conceição). 16. See Chaul, Caminhos, 16–17; Rabelo, “Excessos,” 60–61. 17. On the “false wealth” of gold, see Souza, Desclassificados, 32–34. See also Arquivo Histórico do Estado de Goiás (AHEG), Documentação Diversa (Doc. Div.), vol. 8, “Correspondência do Governo e Autoridades Fora da Província,

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notes to introduction

1808–1809,” 30 Dec. 1808. The AHEG staff recently has renumbered some of the material in “Documentação Diversa”; they have a cross-reference guide. 18. Bertran, Formação, 68. Compare Moraes, “Hospital,” 133. 19. Gomes e Teixeira, Geografia. Nineteenth-century Goiás included all of present day Goiás, the Federal District, and the state of Tocantins, as well as the Triângulo Mineiro until 1816 and the area around Carolina (Maranhão) until the 1850s. 20. On the ecology of the cerrado, see Oliveira and Marquis, The Cerrados of Brazil. 21. For example, see Publicador, 11 Sept. 1886; Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching,” 28–29. In the twentieth century, and especially after the construction of Brasília, Goiás has become a major export food producer but this is the result of improved transportation stimulated by the shift of Brazil’s capital and of intense investments in irrigation and soil improvement. A farmer-rancher at Ipameri, in the southern part of the state, explained in 1994 that “in Goiás you make the soil,” with fertilizer and chemical additives. 22. D’Alincourt, Memória, 107n; Informação Goyana, 15 May 1920; Bertran, Formação, 90; Faissol, O Mato Grosso Goiano. 23. AHEG, Municípios, Caipônia (Rio Bonito), Câmara Municipal, 15 May 1883. 24. Vão was a name given locally to a river valley: Cruls, Relatório da Comissão, 166. On the floods and fevers see Mello Franco, Viagens, 153 and Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-2, 130, 133. For general descriptions of the Vão do Paranâ see Informação Goyana, May 1923; Ataídes, “Flores.” 25. Gardner, Viagem, 144. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 122–23. 26. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 73; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-2, 9–11. AHEG, “Registro de Correspondência, 1823–1832,” 26 Nov. 1823 and 27 Jan. 1824. 27. See, for example, the photos of ruined buildings and towns in Bertran, ed., Notícia-1, 131 135, 162, 174, 179. 28. AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Câmara, 15 and 16 Feb. 1848. 29. AHEG, Municípios, Taguatinga, Câmara, 8 Jan. 1874. For the history of separatism see Cavalcanti, Tocantins. 30. Relatório-1879-3, 28. See also Elis, Veranico, 103 and 104. 31. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 50–51; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 134– 36; Pohl, Viagem, 140; Mello Franco, Viagens, 26; Paternostro, Viagem, 335–36; Cruls, Relatório da Comissão, 158; Wallé, États de Goyaz, 13–14. 32. Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 150–54; Castelnau, Expedição, 217; AHEG, Municípios, Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), Câmara, 1 July 1867. 33. See the descriptions in Cunha Mattos, Itinerário, and in Silva e Souza, “Memória,” and the drawings in Ferrez, ed., Brasil. 34. On complaints from various travelers about the unavailability of food see Doles and Nunes, “Viajantes,” 103–4, 108 and 110. 35. Cunha Mattos, for example, mentions prostitution in the towns: Itinerário-1, 140.

notes to introduction

223

36. Contemporary estimates for the nineteenth century population of Goiás include: Year 1804 1808 1819 1823 1824 1832 1838

Total 50,365 55,422 63,168 61,000 62,518 68,497 97,692

Year 1848 1856 1859 1861 1872 1890

Total 110,000 121,992 129,953 133,565 160,395 (census) 227,572 (census)

Tiballi, “Expansão,” 42; Biblioteca Nacional–Rio de Janeiro (BN), I–11, 4, 2; AN, Cod. 808, vol. 1; Correio Official, 8 July 1837, 4 Aug. 1838 and 28 July 1852; Brasil, Recenseamento . . . 1872; Funes, Goiás 1800–1850, 106–12; Relatório-1837, 23–24, 1859-1, 46 and 1862, 125. Compare the estimates in Brasil. Conselho Nacional de Geografia, Estatísticas Históricas, 31. In “População Goiana,” 4–8, Botelho suggests an average population growth rate for the province of 1.75 percent a year, as compared to 1.95 percent for Brazil as a whole. 37. Karasch, “Periphery of the Periphery,” 145–47. 38. BN, I–11, 4, 2; Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 77; Brasil, Recenseamento . . . 1872. 39. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1861–1873,” 12 Jan. 1862. 40. On Indian names see da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios, 526–27 and Rocha, “Política Indigenista.” 41. For the history of the early bandeiras see Palacín, Goiás, Chaps. 1 and 2, and Alencastre, Anais, Chap. 1. On the history of one indigenous group’s relations with the invading Luzo-Brazilians, see Giraldin, Cayapó; and on nineteenth century state policy see Karasch, “Catequese e Cativeiro,” and Rocha, O Estado. 42. Amado, Frontiers; Slatta, Comparing Cowboys; Russell-Wood, “Colonial Brazil”; Burns, “Brazil: Frontier”; Lombardi, “Brazilian History”; Hennessy, Frontier; Baretta and Markoff, “Civilization and Barbarism”; Guy and Sheridan, Contested Ground; and Webre and Rausch, Where Cultures Meet. 43. Billington, Turner. On the “New Western History,” see Slatta, Comparing Cowboys, Chap. 10. 44. Langfur, Forbidden Lands; Frank, “Brazilian Far West”; Bell, Campanha Gaúcha; Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching”; Karasch, see bibliography. 45. Nonnenmacher, Aldeamentos Kaingang; and Tomazi, Norte de Paraná. 46. For estimates of the population during the eighteenth century, see Palacín, Goiás, 33–34 and 83. 47. Diamonds quickly became a state monopoly: Salles, Economia, 93–99. 48. See the maps in Silva, “Sesmarias.” 49. Hennessy, Frontier, 17; Russell-Wood, “Frontiers,” 29. An obvious parallel would be the mining frontier of northern Mexico: Gerhard, North Frontier of New Spain. 50. There are no figures available for Goiás’s actual eighteenth-century gold

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production, but state income from the quinto serves as a rough indicator: Salles, Economia, 187–89. Although there were few new discoveries after mid-century, the quinto held up reasonably well until the late 1760s, when it began a steady decline into the next century. 51. For a graph comparing the product of the colonial quinto of Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso, see Lockhart and Schwartz, Early Latin America, 376. 52. Leonardi, Entre Árvores, 310. 53. Brasil, Ministério da Justiça, Relatório-1840, 19. This characterization extends for several pages and gives a good idea of what those on the coast thought of the sertão. 54. Hemming, Red Gold, 156. 55. Abreu, Chapters. 56. Hennessy, Frontier, 26. 57. For example, see Dean, “Frontier.” 58. Silva, Terras Devolutas, Chap. 5. 59. Prof. Mary Karasch has recently reminded us of the usefulness of this terminology: “Periphery of the Periphery.” 60. Relatório-1875, 4. 61. Castelnau, Regiões Centrais, 47. 62. Slatta, Latin American Frontiers, 18. Slatta takes this characterization from Rausch, Tropical Plains Frontier, Chap. 9. 63. On the “oscillation” of frontiers, see Langer, “Eastern Andean Frontier.” 64. Relatório-1839, 24. 65. For frontiers of “inclusion” versus “exclusion” see Webre and Rausch, Where Cultures Meet, “Introduction.” 66. Relatório-1867-3, 9–10. Unfortunately they did not leave captivity narratives. 67. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 35, “Correspondência da Secretaria dos Negócios do Reino, 1820–1824,” 14 Nov. 1821; Melatti, “Índios e Cridores,” 35–36. 68. See BN, I-11, 4, 2 (1825 population count). 69. Lombardi, “Frontier,” 439–40; Katzman, “Brazilian Frontier.” 70. Schmink and Wood, Contested Frontiers; Foweraker, Struggle for Land. 71. Publicador, 17 and 31 July, 7 and 28 Aug. 1886. 72. For an introduction to the culture of manliness in the nineteenth-century sertão, see Carvalho, Homens Livres. 73. Only rarely did wills and inventories reveal substantial amounts of other forms of accumulated wealth, for example, gold jewelry. Merchants and their widows did commonly die owing or being owed large amounts. See, for example, the death inventory of Justina Luiza Ferreira, 1881: Cartório de Orfães, Pirinópolis. 74. Compare, for example, Bauer, Chilean Society, and Bazant, “Peones.” 75. Moraes, Bulhões, 190. 76. On cattle frontiers see Jordan, Ranching Frontiers, Chap. 1. 77. On “mission frontiers” see, for example, Kessell, Friars, Soldiers, and Reformers, and Saeger, Chaco Mission Frontier.

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chapter 1. state structure 1. Cronologia dos Governantes. In Minas Gerais, closer to the coast, presidents averaged only six and a half months in office: Iglésias, Política Econômica, 41. 2. Flory, Judge and Jury, 40–43. On recruitment to bureaucratic offices, see Pang and Seckinger, “Mandarins”; and Graham, Patronage and Politics. Concerning a shortage of suitable candidates, see Iglésias, Política Econômica, 46–47. For the training of the young presidents/judges-to-be, see Kirkendall, Class Mates. 3. About negotiations, see Dolhnikoff, “Elites Regionai.” The president who quit was Dr. Francisco Mariani, 1853–54: Relatório-1854-1, 12. 4. Brasil, Súmula, 83–92; Borges, Pacificador do Norte. Generally for the Independence period in Goiás see Palacín, Quatro Tempos. 5. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 99, “Registro de Editais, Bandos e Proclamações Expedidas pela Secretaria do Governo, 1827–1872 [sic],” Bando, 21 July 1831; vol. 109, “Correspondência da Presidência para a Junta da Fazenda, Câmaras e Autoridades Civis, 1830–32,” various letters; Matutina, 16 June and 28 July 1831; Brasil, Súmula, 101–2; Machado, “Administração Provincial,” Chap. II:4. Among many crimes of which the mineiro Silvério José Alves de Souza Rangel was accused in the 1860s was that of having murdered a judge across the border in Goiás three decades before: Bieber Freitas, “Marginal Elites,” 348. At least in part President Lino de Moraes’s “crime” was to have supported the idea of moving the provincial capital to the better-sited Ágoa Quente or Traíras: BN, I-28–31. 26; Matutina, 18 Oct. 1831. 6. Palacín, Quatro Tempos, 59. 7. AHEG, Gabinete 59, “1838–1845–Registro de Ofícios de [sic] Presidência de [sic]Província para os Ministérios do Império, Marinha e Estrangeiros,” 15 and 27 May 1840 and 31 July 1843; Doc. Div., vol. 184, “Justiça, 1843–1850,” 21 Sept. 1842 and vol. 162, “Ofícios Dirigidos à Secretaria da Justiça, 1839–1847,” 2 Oct. 1843. AN, Ijj9, 498, Ministério do Império, 1840–1851, 15 and 27 May 1840, and 536, Ministério do Reino e Império—Goiás—Ofícios de Diversas Autoridades, Câmara, Goiás, 8 Nov. 1842; Relatório-1839, 5–6, 1840, 14 and 1859-1, 4; Correio Official, 16 May, 30 May and 6 June 1840; See also Gardner, Viagem, 170–71. Francisco Sabino Alves, leader of the Sabinada, was exiled to Goiás, but in 1842 he began to circulate a [manuscript?] “newspaper,” O Zumbi, said to be full of subversive ideas, prompting the government to send him further west to Mato Grosso: Pina Filho, Imprensa, 46–47. 8. Bieber, Power, Patronage. 9. Relatório-1878, 6; Palacín, Chaul, and Barbosa, História Política, 126. 10. Moraes, Bulhões, 33; Tribuna Livre, 10 Dec. 1881; Mello Franco, Viagens, 54. 11. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Secretaria da Justiça, 1847– 1853,” 11 July 1848; Relatório-1848, 6. 12. Relatório-1853-1, 15, 1854-4, 4–5; 1857-1, 3, 1861-1, 3, 1862, 3 and 1866, 1–2; Governador, Mensagem-1898, 6; AHEG, Municípios, Conceição, 25 Aug. 1872 and Pedro Afonso, 12 Aug. 1878. On the absence of political parties, see AN, Ijj9, 500, Ministério do Império—Ofícios—Goiás, 25 Feb. 1863, and AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 393, “Correspondência da Província às Autoridades

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Diversas, 1862–1869,” Ministério de Justiça, 6 Aug. 1863; Mello Franco, Viagens, 144–45. 13. On the Bulhões and the origins of political parties, see Moraes, Bulhões, esp. 37–38. 14. 9 Aug. 1879. 15. This conflict generated a huge amount of newspaper reportage, suggesting its novelty: Publicador, 23 Jan., 30 Jan, 7 Feb., 12 June, 20 June, 31 July, 7 Aug., 14 Aug. 1886, and 4 June, 11 June, 18 June, and 26 June 1887. See also AHEG, Documentação Avulso ((Doc. Av.), box 360, “Polícia,” draft report, 27 Feb. 1886; compare Relatório-1886, 4–6. For a summary of events, see Bertran, Niquelândia, Chap. VIII. 16. Chaul, ed., Coronelismo; Campos, Coronelismo; and Macedo, Abilio Wolney. 17. Cronologia dos Governantes. 18. Relatório-1863-3, 3; AHEG, Doc. Av., “Assembléia Legislativa” in various boxes. On the inactivity of the Assembly: Moraes, Bulhões, 46–47. 19. For the duties of delegados, subdelegados, and block inspectors, see Rabelo, “Excessos,” 76–77. 20. Relatório-1851, 21, 1861-1, 7 and 1867-1, 8–9; AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 20 Nov. 1874 and Piracanjuba (Pouso Alto), Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 10 May 1879. Generally, on the problem of finding people to fill the office, see Relatório-1859-1, 26. 21. AHEG, Doc. Div., box 429, “Registro de Correspondência do Governo com os Juizes de Direito, 1866–1872,” Presidente–Juiz de Direito, Boavista, 13 Feb. 1869; Publicador, 31 Oct. 1885. 22. AHEG, Municípios, Natividade, 6 Oct. 1883; Doc. Av., box 295, Ministério dos Negócios do Império, 27 Oct. 1880. 23. Uricoechea, Patrimonial Foundations, 163. 24. Elis, Veranico, 116. 25. AHEG, Municípios, Piracanjuba (Pouso Alto), Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 11 March 1853. 26. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 190, “Polícia,” various, e.g., 30 March 1868; box 139, “Requerimentos,” e.g., 20 May 1861. 27. AHEG, Doc Av., box 180, “Polícia,” Subdelegado, Rio Bonito–Chefe de Polícia, 3 Aug. 1867; Municípios, Itumbiara (Santa Ríta do Paranaíba), Subdelegado–Chefe de Polícia, 19 April and 10 May 1892. See also Tribuna Livre, 28 June 1879. 28. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 603, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província ao Ministério de Justiça, 1876–1880,” 11 Nov. 1878. 29. Relatório-1875, 3. 30. Matutina, 27 Dec. 1831 and 2 June 1832; Correio Official, 27 Dec. 1837 and 19 Dec. 1838; Relatório-1839, 21. Kirkendall, Class Mates, 37. 31. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” Presidente–Ministério da Justiça, 29 Feb. 1848. 32. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 466, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secre-

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taria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1870–1873,” 23 Dec. 1870. The state’s attorneys were even less likely to be trained in law: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 603, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça Ministério de Justiça, 1876–1880,” 26 Aug. 1876; Relatório-1851, 21. 33. Relatório-1839, 21; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Correspondencia do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 12 June 1851. 34. Relatório-1836, 7, 1839, 22–23, and 1840, 10. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Correspondencia do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 11 Nov. 1849; Doc. Av., box 248, Juiz de Direito, Comarca do Rio Corumbá–Ministério da Justiça, 23 Aug. 1875; Municípios, Ipameri, Delegado– Chefe de Polícia, 21 Aug. 1884. 35. On the duties and responsibilities of judges, see AHEG, Doc. Av., box 196, “Ministério da Justiça,” confidential circular, 11 Oct. 1870. For socialization, see Kirkendall, Class Mates, and Pang and Seckinger, “Mandarins.” Applicants generally preferred a judgeship to a presidency: Graham, Patronage and Politics, 225. 36. Mello Franco, Viagens, 95, reported the suicide of a young judge whose patronage connections had failed him. 37. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 816, “Polícia, 1885,” Presidente–Juiz de Direito, Rio das Almas, 25 Dec. 1885; Tribuna Livre, 10 May 1879; Compare Bieber, “Postmodern Ethnographer.” Regularly appointed judges also involved themselves in politics: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 196, Presidente, circular, 11 Oct. 1870, and AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 262, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1853–1856,” 29 July and 1 Aug. 1853, regarding the removal of the juiz de direito at Porto Imperial as “turbulent.” 38. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1858–1862,” 10 May 1859. Most Relatórios have multiple comments of this sort. 39. Mello Franco narrates his “escape” from Palma with a license to “reestablish his health,” perhaps the most common reason given by law judges when asking to be allowed to leave their posts: Mello Franco, Viagens, 153. 40. Before this, appeals had gone to Rio de Janeiro. On the origins of the Relação see Artiaga, História de Goiás-2, 80–83, and Relatório-1874, 7–8; on shifting a law judge for interim work on the court: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 528, “Ofícios do Governo aos Juizes de Direito, 1873–1875,” Juiz de Direito, Goiás, 7 May 1874, and vol. 661, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província aos Juizes de Direito, 1879–1882,” Juiz de Direito, Coxim, 19 July 1879. 41. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1858–1862,” various; vol. 429, “Registro de Correspondência do Governo com os Juizes de Direito, 1866–1872,” Juiz de Direito, Corumbá, 11 Dec. 1868; vol. 466, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1870–1873,” 5 July 1872; Publicador, 4 June 1887; Relatório-1850-1, 5 and 1867-1, 6. For a description of a law judge holding court, see Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 261–62. 42. Relatório-1880, 12. 43. Flory raises but does not pursue this problem: Flory, Judge and Jury, 69. Goiás’s presidents complained constantly of the ignorance of the law among the

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substitute judges: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 162, “Ofícios Dirigidos à Secretaria da Justiça,” 31 May 1844 and 3 Aug. 1844, among dozens more. 44. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1858–1862,” 16 May 1859. 45. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 196, circular, 11 Oct. 1870. 46. Uricoechea, Patrimonial Foundations, 81. 47. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 297, Presidente–Bernardo Joaquim da Silva Guimarães, 25 Nov. 1861, and various associated letters. Guimarães was a municipal judge but in this case was serving as a substitute law judge. Regarding the concept of “jubilee” see Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 290–99. 48. Correio Official, 8 July 1837. Generally, on problems with juries, see Flory, Judge and Jury. 49. Correio Official, 8 July 1837. Little changed under the Republic: Governador, Mensagem-1893, unpaginated, and Audrin, Sertanejos, 117. On violence and honor, see Holanda, Fronteiras, 120–23 and Franco, Homens Livres, 22–29. 50. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 117, Juiz de Direito, Santa Cruz–Presidente, 28 Sept. 1858. 51. Relatório-1851, 22. 52. AHEG, Restaurar, “1809, Livro de Registro de Ofícios,” Fernando Delgado Freire de Castilho–Conde de Linhares, 27 March 1810 and 11 May 1811. 53. Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 149, 153. 54. Matutina, 25 Dec. 1832. On the early years of the Guard, see Castro, Milícia Cidadã. 55. The basic unit of currency during the Empire was the real, plural réis. One thousand réis was milréis = 1$000; one thousand milréis = a conto, written 1:000$000 or 1:000 milréis. 56. In the 1840s the officer corps in the city of Goiás included 41 “businessmen,” 29 “public employees,” 26 “farmers,” 3 artisans, and 6 men who were said to live by “odd jobs”: AHEG, Municípios, Goiás, “Relação dos Oficiais da Guarda Nacional,” undated, but evidently early 1840s. 57. Compare, for example, Bieber, Power, Patronage, 97. 58. Relatório-1837, 32–34. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 162, “Ofícios Dirigidos à Secretaria da Justiça, 1839–1847,” 14 April 1842. 59. Relatório-1846, anexo 4, and 1850-1, 13. 60. Gardner, Viagem, 170–71. 61. Relatório-1854-4, 15, 1857-1, 11–13, and 1863-1, 20–23. 62. Relatório-1848, 37–38. See also AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1858–1862,” 9 March 1859. 63. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 186, Subdelegado, Santa Cruz–Chefe de Polícia, 9 Nov. 1868. 64. AHEG, Municípios, Paraná (Palma), Collector–Provincial Treasury, 12 March 1864. Also, Relatório-1858-1, 8. 65. Because most small towns lacked adequate jails, judges sent prisoners convicted of serious crimes to serve their sentences in the capital, considered to have the only secure facility in the province.

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66. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 27 Sept. 1851; vol. 248, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial para as Autoridades Judiciais e Policiais, 1851– 1858,” 9 March 1852 and 8 March 1853; Relatório-1852, 6; Correio Official, 31 July 1852. 67. Matutina, 27 March 1832 and 28 Dec. 1833; Relatório-1835, 11–12; Moraes, “Estratégias,” 120. 68. Relatório-1847, 22; O Tocantins, 23 Feb. 1856. 69. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 486, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1870–1873,” 25 Feb. 1873. 70. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 294, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1856–1858,” 12 Mar., 1858. 71. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1858–1862,” 10 Oct. 1859; Correio Official, 13, 20, and 24 Nov. and 3 Dec. 1858; Relatório-1858-1, anexo 8, 1859-1, 43–45, and 1859-4, 36, 1866. In this period, the normal day wage for agricultural labor was five hundred réis. 72. Correio Official, 1 Aug. 1874; Relatório-1875, 12. 73. AHEG, Municípios, Iporá (Rio Claro), 1885, “Companhia Policial.” 74. Correio Official, 1 Aug. 1874 and 4 June 1879, 1–2; Relatório-1879-1, 5; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 442, “Secção Militar, 1881”; Doc. Av., box 347, Comandante, Polícia de Goiás–Presidente, 10 June 1885. 75. AHEG, Municípios, Catalão, 24 March 1893. 76. Relatório-1876, 39, 1888-1, 13, and 1888-3, 18. 77. Relatório-1843, 4, 1846, 6, 1859-1, 41, and 1877, 16. 78. It was not popular anywhere in Brazil: Graham, Patronage and Politics, 29–32; Beattie, Tribute of Blood. 79. Bertran, História, 245. See França, Pioneiros, 146–48 for a description of hiding young men from the recruiters at the news of the outbreak of the war. See also Relatório-1867-1, 17. Generally on the war and Goiás, see Martins, Goiás na Guerra do Paraguai. 80. Mello Franco, Viagens, 136. See Audrin, Sertanejos, 174–75, for the forced recruitment of those without powerful patrons, and Relatório-1867-5, 14, on impressing vagrants; for recruitment of a murderer, see Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 241. 81. Relatório-1851, 12–13. 82. See the correspondence in AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 244, “Livro 2o. para a Polícia, 1851–1856.” For examples of jails said to be too “weak” to be used to hold recruits, see AHEG, Municípios, Natividade, Subdelegado–Chefe de Polícia, 19 Nov. 1870, and Doc. Av., box 197, “Relatório,” Chefe de Polícia, 8 July and 15 July 1870. Regarding the return of “irons” used to secure a recruit: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 334, “Correspondência da Presidência para as Autoridades Judiciais, 1858–1860,” Juiz de Direito, Maranhão, 7 May 1858. 83. AHEG, Municípios, Rio Verde, Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 1 Feb. 1876 and 10 Sept. 1878; Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 21 May 1884, and Luziânia (Santa Luzia), 1o. Delegado Suplente–Chefe de Polícia, 31

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Oct. 1892; Doc. Div., vol. 816, “Polícia, 1885,” Chefe de Polícia various, 3 Feb. 1885; Relatório-1877, 17, 1879-1, 1, and 1881-4, 4. 84. Relatório-1859-4, 33. 85. Relatório-1862, 79; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 262, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1853–1856,” 20 July 1854. 86. Relatório-1859-1, 42. 87. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 1 Feb. 1850; Relatório-1881-3, 71; Simões de Paula, “Santa Leopoldina,” 273–74. 88. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 1 Feb. 1850. 89. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 262, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1853–1856,” 11 Dec. 1855, and Relatório-1856, 4–5. See also AHEG, Municípios, Paraná (Palma), Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 9 Dec. 1876, and Goiás, Juiz de Direito, São José do Tocantins–Vice-Presidente, 15 and 25 Nov. 1885; Publicador, 29 Jan. 1887; Relatório-1889, 4–5. 90. Relatório-1839, 12. 91. Gomes, “Itinerário,” 507. On popular religion, see Audrin, Sertanejos, Part 2, Chaps. 2 and 3. Compare: Mattoso, Bahia, Chaps. 19 and 20. 92. Relatório-1872, 17. 93. Relatório-1842, 15; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Secretaria da Justiça, 1847–1853,” Presidente–Ministério de Justiça, 1 Sept. and 8 Nov. 1850; Publicador, 13 June 1855. Apparently the first local religious cult to establish a popular following was that of “Santa Dica” in the 1920s: Vasconcellos, Santa Dica. 94. Alencastre, Anais, 88, 111–12 and 163. See also “Subsídios,” 80, and Saint-Hilaire, Nascentes, 118–19. 95. Shortages: Relatório-1867-1, 61; SGC, “Ofícios, Correspondentes com o Governo Geral e Principal Portarias, Circulares, Provisões, etc., 1860,” Obispo– Ministério do Império, 7 Sept. 1876. New parishes: Relatório-1851, anexo 5; Tribuna Livre, 18 Feb. 1882; AHEG, Municípios, Goiás, “1889 Relatório Eclesiástico,” 29 Oct. 1889. 96. Relatório-1839, 11. See also 1850-1, 15. On the training of the clergy, see Bretas, Instrução, 134, 186–87. 97. Relatório-1861-1, 8–9, 1863-1, 8–9, 1864-1, 4, 1872, 17–18, 1878, 11, and 1880, 18; AN, Ijj9, 500; SGC, “Ofícios Correspondentes com a Governo Geral e Principal Portarias, Circulares, Provisões, 1860,” Obispo–Ministério do Império, 7 Sept. 1876. 98. Relatório-1854-4, 41. 99. Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de Goiás (IHGG), Documentos, Pasta 002, Documento 52, “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangeiros e Marinha, 1829– 1831,” 1 June 1829; França, Pioneiros, 192. 100. Matutina, 9 July 1831; Rabelo, “Excessos,” 147; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 293, Obispo–Presidente, 19 March 1880. 101. AHEG, Municípios, Cavalcante, José Maria Viera–Subdelegado, Morrinhos, 13 March 1872; Doc. Av., vol. 287, Subdelegado, Palma–Chefe de Polícia,

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30 Sept. 1879. Most famous of Goiás’s priest-coronéis was Padre João de Souza Lima: Palacín, Coronelismo. 102. SGC, “Ofícios Correspondentes com o Governo Geral e Principal, Portarias, Circulares, Provisões,” Obispo–Procurador, Imperatriz (MA), 26 Nov. 1875. 103. Almeida, Goyáz, 39. Compare Mattoso, Bahia, 309–11. 104. Relatório-1853-3, 8. On the “triple life”—vigário, landowner, and head of family—of a priest: França, Pioneiros, 192. 105. SGC, “Rol dos Culpados, 1886–1887,” 23 Aug. 1887 and 14 Nov. 1887. 106. Gardner, Viagem, 158; Relatório-1862, 6. See also Rabelo, “Excessos,” 112, 192–93. 107. SGC, “Ofícios Correspondentes com o Governo Geral e Principal Portarias, Circulares, Provisões,” pastoral letter, 24 April 1863. 108. Pohl, Viagem, 113–14, 202–4, 272–73, 297–98; Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 24–26, 47; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 240–42; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 227–28; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 234–36; and Paternostro, Viagem, 279– 80. At mid-century the church tried to reduce the number of such festivals, with unknown results: Correio Official, 25 May 1853. 109. On romarías in Goiás see Audrin, Sertanejos, 128–34. 110. Tribuna Livre, 6 and 13 Nov. 1880; Bertran, Niquelândia, 89–96; AHEG, Municípios, Natividade, Câmara, 28 Feb. 1883. 111. Relatório 1835, 7, 1846, 12, 1857-3, 15, and 1862, 52–57. See also Gardner, Viagem, 168. 112. Relatório-1869, 24. 113. Relatório-1859-1, 34. 114. Relatório-1850-1, 19; Bretas, Instrução, 241–42 on cost of living. See various Relatórios for lists of schools and salaries: for example, Relatório-1852, anexo 7. 115. Relatório-1871, anexo. 116. Moraes, Bulhões, 96; Relatório-1881-2, 68, 140–41. 117. Relatório-1879-3, 16. 118. For example: Relatório-1845, 7. 119. Relatório-1847, 16–17, 1858-3, 7, and 1873, 19. On the history of the Liceu, see Bretas, Instrução, 316–38. 120. Relatório-1872, 17–18; Bretas, Instrução, 368–75; Rabelo, “Excessos,” 133–35. 121. On public health problems in the province, see Castello Branco, Saúde e Doenças, and Moraes, “Estratégias.” 122. Epidemics of whooping cough seem to have been an almost annual affair and to have attacked particularly children: Relatório-1856, 11. After 1830 Goiás became a destination for many individuals with leprosy and other skin aliments, who sought relief in the thermal baths of Caldas Novas: Moraes, “Estratégias,” 67–70. Syphilis was said to be among the most widespread diseases in the province, which certainly contributed to other illnesses and to mental retardation: Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 67–68; Gardner, Viagem, 158; AHEG, Doc. Div., box 308, “Correspondência, Presidência-Ministério do Império, 1857–1860,” 21 Jan. 1859; and Cruls, Relatório, 268–71. The 1890 world influenza pandemic

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impacted Goiás but received little notice: Leal, Terras Goyanas, 155–56. On malaria: Rabelo, “Excessos,” 39–40, Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 98, and Pohl, Viagem, 124. On liver problems as the chief cause of hospital deaths, see Relatório1859-1, 23. On dirt eating: Spix and Martius, Viagem, 87, and Mello Franco, Viagens,34. On goiters: Pohl, Viagem, 118, Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 136, 220, 264, Gardner, Viagem, 158, Wells, Three Thousand Miles-1, 100, and Informação Goyana, 15 Aug. 1918. See the photographs in Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature. 123. Leal, Terras Goyanas, 68; Mello Franco, Viagens, 129–30. 124. Relatório-1874, 28; Alencastre, Anais, 342; AN Ijj9 500, 21 Sept. 1863. President Mello Franco, in an extensive discussion of disease in the province in the 1870s. does not mention smallpox: Viagens, 36–41; not until 1905 did the state again report the disease in the capital: Governador, Mensagem-1905, 10–11. 125. AHEG, Restaurar, “Livro de Registros de Ofícios–1809,” Gov. Minas Gerais–Capt. Gen. Delgado, 9 Dec. 1811; Matutina, 9 Aug. 1831; Relatório-1852, 13. See also Karasch, “Doenças,” 25–26. 126. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Provedoria–Coletor, Pilar, 28 March 1847; Pohl, Viagem, 210. See also Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 23; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 41, 123, and Itinerário-1, 190–91, 212; and Mello Franco, Viagens, 21, 136. For plans to drain pockets of “putrid water” around the capital, see Relatório-1867-1, 57, and AHEG, Doc. Av., box 247, report, “Delegacia do Corpo de Saúde do Exército em Goiás,” 1 May 1875. 127. Ex-President Leite Moraes took quinine when he descended the Rio Araguaia at the end of his term in the early 1880s: Moraes, Apontamentos, 154. On the price of quinine see Gardner, Viagem, 169, BN, I-31, 18, 24, and Taunay, Cartas, 96. 128. IHGG, Documentos, Pasta 002, Documento 52 “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangeiros e Marinha, 1829–1831,” Pres. Miguel Lino de Moraes–Ilmo. Sr. Marques de Caravellas, 26 Aug. 1830; Bretas, Instrução, 159–61; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 111, Assembléia Legislativa–Imperador, 18 Sept. 1856, and box 117, Ministério do Império–Presidente, 20 Aug. 1857. In the 1830s the province subsidized the medical studies of Francisco Antônio de Azevedo in Rio de Janeiro and he returned to Goiás but did not practice medicine: Relatório-1845, 9. During the Empire three Goiás students enrolled at the medical school in Rio de Janeiro, but if they finished or where they practiced is not known: Soares, “Médicos e Mezineiros,” 416. The 1872 census listed fifteen “doctors” in the province but the definition must have been very broad; by contrast, in 1882 there were said to be only three doctors in the capital, all over sixty: Tribuna Livre, 18 Feb. 1882. See Publicador, 21 March 1885, for a doctor practicing in Catalão. 129. Paternostro, Viagem, 230. 130. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 111, Assembléia Legislativa–Imperador, 18 Sept. 1856; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 67. 131. Mello Franco, Viagem, 145. 132. Leal, Terras Goyanas, 44–45. For the activities of a fake “doctor” in Jataí, see Publicador, 2 April 1887. A cure for a toothache was to write three

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times on the ground: “Ar a mate, ar a mate, ar a mate” and pray three “Padres” and three “Aves” to Santa Apolônia: Teixeira, Folclore Goiano, 328. 133. On the sale of poisonous “medicines” see Publicador, 13 Sept. 1885, and Leal, Terras Goyanas, 85. Most literate nineteenth-century Brazilian families had access to Chernoviz’s Formulário ou Guia Médico. 134. Relatório-1835, 9–10; Correio Official, 27 Oct. 1880; Governador, Mensagem-1891, anexos 2 and 3. 135. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 787, “Câmaras Municipais, 1884–1889,” Goiás, 13 April 1886; Municípios, Paraná (Palma), Câmara, n.d. (late 1840s); Correio Official, 25 Nov. 1837. 136. Relatório-1842, 9. 137. Relatório-1845, 9. See also 1855, 25–26. Goiás was hardly alone in this: see, for example, Reis, Death Is a Festival, 224–35. 138. Relatório-1855, 26, 1856, 10, and 1859-1, 78. Moraes, “Hospital,” 148–49. 139. Relatório-1874, 26–27, and 1875, 25. chapter 2. state power 1. Relatório-1839, 24. 2. On the national budget, see Bethell, ed., Brazil: Empire and Republic, 90; Carvalho, Teatro das Sombras, 173; Brasil, Brasil. Conselho Nacional de Geografia, Estatísticas Históricas, 616. For Goiás, see Brasil, Ministério da Fazenda, Relatório-1879-2, Table N. 4; Tribuna Livre, 17 Dec. 1881, and Table 2.1 in this chapter. On per capita revenue collections: Martins, “Growing in Silence,” 271 n. 32; Minas Gerais was the second lowest. By contrast, during the eighteenth century Goiás returned far more to the state than it cost: Karasch, “Periphery of the Periphery,” 152. Compare Bahia: Mattoso, Bahia, Chap. 14. 3. Relatório-1888-1, 18. 4. AHEG, Doc. Div., box 442, “Relatórios, 1868–1882,” Finanças, 1881. For many examples of the state’s inability to find competent persons or to successfully rent tax collection points, see AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 266, “Correspondência com o Governo, 1853–1859.” 5. AHEG, Municípios, Arraias, Coletor–Diretor da Tesouraria, 7 Oct. 1844, and Piracanjuba (Pouso Alto), Coletor–Diretor do Secretariado de Finanças, 24 June 1899. See also Santa Cruz, Coletor-Interim Diretor Tesouraria, 3 March 1846. In April 1882 the collector at Boavista wrote that someone had offered a local army corporal ten thousand réis to kill him, so that they could steal the tax money: AHEG, Municípios, Tocantinópolis (Boavista), Coletor–Inspetor, Tesouraria Provincial, 20 April 1882. 6. Relatório-1857-2, 26 and 1861-–3, 12; AHEG, Municípios, Cavalcante, Câmara, report, 1886, and Taguatinga, Administrador, Mesa de Rendas, 30 March 1898. At one point the President suggested the province needed a law requiring individuals to serve: Relatório-1835, 24–25. 7. Relatório-1846, 23. 8. Pohl, Viagem, 276; Relatório-1846, 23, and 1853-3, 8; Matutina, 28 Dec. 1833.

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9. This was, of course, not unique to Goiás. Compare, for example, Iglésias, Política Econômica, 173–76. 10. For example, AHEG, Municípios, São Domingos, Juiz Municipal–Interim Juiz de Direito, 19 Jan. 1886, and Jaraguá, edital, 23 Sept. 1887; Doc. Div., box 340, “Correspondência do Governo com o Ministério de Justiça,” 21 Dec. 1859. 11. AHEG, Municípios, Pedro Afonso, Coletor-various, 22 Dec. 1862–28 Sept. 1864. 12. Relatório-1853-3, 10, and 1879-3, 49; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 132, “Relatório da Direitoria das Rendas Provínciais . . . 1863.” 13. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” circular, 27 Sept. 1849; Doc. Av., box 146, Paulo Marcos de Arruda–Diretor Geral da Administração da Fazenda, 12 Nov. 1863, and Relatório-1852, 26–27. See also AHEG, Doc. Av., box 136, “Do Sers. Officiais d’esta Diretoria em Comissão,” various letters. 14. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 134, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província para Diversos, 1835–1842,” 18 Aug. 1837; Tribuna Livre, 3 May 1879. 15. Relatório-1846, 27, 1851, 65 and 1853-3, 14; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 168, “Correspondência da Secretaria da Presidência da Província para a Secretaria da Fazenda, 1840–1848,” 15 Nov. 1842; vol. 214, “Correspondência do Governo de Goiás para o Ministério da Fazenda, 1848–1860,” 20 Oct. 1849. 16. Relatório-1850-1, 51, and 1854-3, 68; Governador, Mensagem-1896, 22. 17. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 34, printed chart. 18. Relatório-1853-3, 23. 19. Relatório-1853-3, “Fazenda,” 10. 20. Relatório-1859-2, 59–60. 21. Topik, “The State’s Contribution,” 215–17. 22. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 17, provisão, 14 June 1825; box 24, Secretaria do Governo–Secretário da Assembléia Legislativa, 28 July 1838; Doc. Div., vol. 83, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província para a Secretaria de Estado dos Negócios da Fazenda, 1824–1833,” 23 March and 26 July 1825; vol. 134, “Correspondência da Província para Diversos, 1835–1842,” Assembléia Legislativa, 18 Aug. 1837; Gabinete 48, “1820–1836, Livro de Correspondência da Presidência da Província de Goiás para Autoridades de Fora,” 30 Sept. 1831 and 2 May 1832; Matutina, 8 June 1830. 23. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 162, “Ofícios Dirigidos à Secretaria da Justiça, 1839–1847,” 2 June 1845; vol. 191, “Correspondência com o Ministério de Negócios do Império, 1845–1846,” 30 July 1846. 24. BN, I-27, 32, 27, “Relatório de Miguel Lino de Moraes,” 2 Dec. 1827; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 134, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província para Diversos, 1835–1842,” Assembléia Legislativa, 18 Aug. 1837; vol. 532, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1873–1877,” 9 June 1876 and 13 Sept. 1878; Doc. Av., box 24, Secretaria do Governo–Secretaria da Assembléia Legislativa, 28 July 1838. Subsidies continued under the Old Republic (Governador, Mensagem-1893, 4, and 1896, 21), as did the uncertainties (Moraes, Bulhões, 150–52). 25. AHEG, Municípios, Silvânia (Bonfim), budget, 1876. For a municipal tax

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law, see Correio Official, 19 Sept. 1874. In 1875 the city of Goiás collected taxes on: (1) weights and measures; (2) cattle killed for consumption; (3) pigs killed for consumption; (4) construction; (5) taverns; (6) sale of tobacco; (7) sale of alcohol; (8) (illegible); (9) traveling merchants; (10) merchants from other provinces; (11) those who sold food in the street; (12) municipal land granted for construction; (13) lotteries; (14) those dealing in costume jewelry; (15) jewelers; as well as various fines: Correio Official, 25 Aug. 1875. 26. For examples of municipal budgets and expenses, see AHEG, Doc. Av., boxes 55, 75, and 80, as well as various in AHEG, Municípios. 27. See AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), 12 Jan. 1882, for a good discussion of financial needs, including the jail, and resources. Also, Relatório-1854-1, 19, and 1881-1, 129–30. 28. Relatório-1853-2, 10. 29. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 179, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial às Autoridades Policiais, 1842–1851,” Chefe de Policia, 19 Aug. 1846; Leite Moraes, Apontamentos, 189; Audrin, Sertanejos, 13–14, 27. 30. For example: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 274, Chefe de Polícia–Presidente, 14 April 1879; Municípios, Natividade, 14 July 1886. 31. Relatório-1867-1, 4. 32. “Subsídios,” 78–79; Karasch, “Quilombos do Ouro”; Palacín, Goiás, 93. 33. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas Apresentadas ao Conselho Geral, 1829–1838,” 27 July 1835. For a rare reference to a possible quilombo, see AHEG, Municípios, Paraná (Palma), report (incomplete, undated but from late 1840s); see also rumors in Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 159–60. Matutina, 8 Aug. 1832, voiced fears that escaped slaves would link up with Indians. 34. Presidente de Mato Grosso, Relatório-Mato Grosso-1853, 28, 1872, 18, and 1880, 7. 35. Notices: Matutina, 28 Dec. 1830, 22 March and 14 June 1831, and 28 April 1832; Correio Official, 26 Jan. and 13 July 1878; Tribuna Livre, 26 April and 22 Nov. 1879; Relatório-1862, 7–8. More generally, Wells, Three Thousand Miles-1, 40. 36. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 337, “Correspondência da Presidência com Autoridades Policiais, 1858–1860,” Chefe de Policia, 24 Jan. 1859. For a similar case, see Relatório-1869, 5. 37. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 8, “Correspondência do Governo e Autoridades Fora da Província, 1808–1809,” Ministro e Secretario de Estado dos Negócios Estrangeiras e da Guerra, 30 Dec. 1808; vol. 36, “Correspondência dos Negócios do Reino, 1820–1824,” 8 April 1820. 38. AHEG, recebedorias, Santa Ríta do Paranaíba (Doc. Div., vol. 380) and Rio Grande/Araguaia (Doc. Div., vol. 299); Doc. Div., vol. 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850, 28 April 1847. 39. For example, Relatório-1854-1, 5–6. Compare Bieber, “Slavery and Social Life.” 40. Arquivo do Museu das Bandeiras (AMB), Goiás, slave Matrículas. 41. This is not to say there were no quilombos. As late as the early 1990s a

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previously unknown (to the state) settlement of the descendants of escaped slaves was reported in the Goiás press: Ministério de Educação, Kalunga. 42. See, for example, AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 229, “Arrolamento dos Habitantes da Freguesia da Vila de Corumbá, 1850–1851” and vol. 235, “Recenseamento da Freguesia do Bonfim, 1851.” Generally the largest employers of slaves were sugar mills but in Goiás even those were tiny in the nineteenth century when compared to operations on the coast: AHEG, Municípios, Santa Cruz, “Relação dos Engenhos na Coletoria da Vila de Santa Cruz,” 7 Oct. 1841, and Silvânia (Bonfim), 17 Oct. 1844. 43. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 190, Subdelegado, Crixás–Chefe de Polícia, 1 Jan. 1869; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 8. For an eighteenth-century struggle between a quilombo and Indians, see Salles, Economia, 290. 44. 1 April 1838. For other examples, see the yearly crime reports in the Relatórios. The emperor not uncommonly commuted death sentences for both free and slave prisoners to gales perpétuas (in chains for life): AHEG, Doc. Av., box 237, Ministério de Justiça–Presidente, 4 April 1874. 45. Relatório-1856, anexo; Tribuna Livre, 21 May 1881. 46. On injuring themselves: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 257, Delegado Cavalcante– Chefe de Polícia, 4 Jan. 1876. For examples of a slave killing another prisoner to avoid being returned to his master, see: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Secretaria da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 10 Jan. 1850, and Relatório-1851, 13. Notices of slave suicides turn up occasionally: for example, Relatório-1862, 33–34, and 1877, 7. 47. For example: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 117, Chefe de Polícia–Presidente, 10 Jan. 1858. 48. Relatório-1869, “Relatório da Secretaria da Polícia da Província de Goyáz, 1869,” 3. This list of causes, in one variation or another, turns up in almost every discussion of provincial crime: e.g., AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 442, “Relatórios, 1868–1882.” 49. Relatório-1881-3, 38–46. The report includes other crimes but these are either repetitive of the examples given here or include insufficient data. 50. Relatório-1876, anexo. 51. Relatório-1851, 7. 52. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 117, Delegado, Santa Cruz–Chefe de Policia, 28 Sept. 1857; Relatório-1857-1, 5. 53. For a study of justice in nineteenth-century Goiás, see Nascimento, “Justiça.” See also Gomes, “Itinerário,” 506. 54. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Secretaria da Justiça, 1847–1853,” Presidente–Ministério de Justiça, 11 Oct. 1849; Municípios, Natividade, Subdelegado– Chefe de Polícia, 24 March 1871, and Ipameri, Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 19 March 1883. Relatório-1839, 22. 55. AHEG, Municípios, Catalão, Delegado–Chefe de Policia, 11 Dec. 1870, 1 Aug., 31 Oct. 1872, and 7 June 1890. 56. Correio Official, 7 Feb. 1838. For a similar case involving smuggling see AHEG, Doc. Av., box 186, Subdelegado, Santa Rita do Paranaíba–Chefe de Polícia, 1 Oct. 1868; Doc. Div., vol. 248, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial para as Autoridades Judiciais e Policiais, 1851–1858,” Juiz de Direito, Porto

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Imperial, 28 Feb. 1854; Doc. Av., box 190, “Polícia,” Subdelegado, Santa Maria Taguatinga–Chefe de Polícia, 30 June 1869; Província de Goyáz, 2 July 1870. 57. Província de Goyáz, 2 July 1870. 58. AHEG, Doc Av., box 139, “Polícia,” 18 July 1861. On the fate of local people caught up in elite struggles, see Audrin, Sertanejos, Part 2, Chap. 10. 59. Relatório-1881-3, 17. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 393, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província às Autoridades Diversas, 1862–1869,” Ministério de Justiça, 11 Oct. 1862; Doc. Av., box 295, various, 21 Aug.–6 Dec. 1880. 60. AHEG, Municípios, Natividade, 6 May, 25 Aug., 6 and 8 Oct., and 3 Nov. 1883. 61. Relatório-1881-2, 18. On the well-known “Revolt of Boavista” during the 1890s see AHEG, Municípios, Tocantinópolis (Boavista), various boxes, and Palacín, Coronelismo. 62. Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 224; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 123; Saint-Hilaire, Nascentes, 130; Relatório-1836,9; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 285, Presidente–Chefe de Polícia, 12 Feb. 1879. For a description of a reputed professional cattle thief, see Gardner, Viagem, 145. Compare Relatórios from Mato Grosso, e.g., 1863-1, 9 and 1868, 5. For a jailbreak involving four cattle and horse thieves: AHEG, Municípios, Paraná, Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 5 Aug. 1877; and another from the Conceição jail: Relatório-1881-3, 42. 63. On the rarity of theft, see Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 47; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 101; Nascimento, “Justiça,” 64. More generally, Holanda, Fronteiras, 87, and Abreu, Chapters, 121–22. For an unusual example of armed robbery see AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 334, “Correspondência da Presidência para as Autoridades Judiciais, 1858–60,” Juiz de Direito, Comarca Paranaíba, 27 Jan. and 11 May 1858. 64. “A Enxada,” in Veranico. 65. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 334, “Correspondência da Presidência para as Autoridades Judiciais, 1858–1860,” Juiz de Direito, Rio Paranaíba, 27 Jan. and 11 May 1858; Doc. Av., box 238, “Auto de Corpo de Delito,” 9 Nov. 1874; box 327, several instances, e.g., 12 Oct. 1883. 66. AHEG, no number, “1823–1825, Originais dos Comandantes dos Registros e Presídios da Província,” Comandante, Registro Taguatinga–Cunha Mattos, 2 April 1824; Doc. Av., box 370, Coletor, Santa Maria Taguatinga–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 21 Jan. 1888; Relatório-1839, 6; O Commércio, 24 April 1880. 67. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 124, “Livro 1o. Correspondência dos Juizes de Direito e Municipais, 1833–1847,” Interim Juiz de Direito, Catalão–Presidente, 17 Oct. 1839; Relatório-1839, 7 n. 10. See also Part 1 of Palacín, Chaul, and Barbosa, História Política. 68. Memórias Goianas-8, 9. For descriptions of Col. Roque and his circle, see Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 137–40; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 209. On some of his political activities see Relatório-1858-1, 4–5. 69. Arquivo Público Mineiro (APM), SP/PP 1/33 box 175, Câmara Paracatú– Presidente, Minas Gerais, 31 Jan. 1848. For a summary of border disputes see Artiaga, História de Goiás-2, 53–63, and Governador, Mensagem-1903, 5–30. On the damages such indeterminacies caused, see, for example, AHEG, Doc. Av., box

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89, Ministério de Negócios do Império–Presidente, 7 Aug. 1852; box 274, Chefe de Polícia–Presidente, 14 April 1879. 70. In the 1850s the câmara of Paracatú, Minas Gerais, unsuccessfully promoted the idea of a new province of “São Francisco” made up of parts of Goiás and Minas Gerais: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 246, “Presidência–Ministério de Negócios do Império, 1851–1857,” 1 Feb. 1856. 71. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 97. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-1, 379–83, provides a lengthy description of his encounter with a band of gypsies. See also Pohl, Viagem, 119, and Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 212. 72. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 179, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial às Autoridades Policiais, 1842–1846,” Joaquim Ignácio Ramalho, 6 Nov. 1846; Matutina, 22 Jan. 1831. 73. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 661, “Correspondência da Província aos Juizes de Direito, 1879–1882,” Juiz de Direito, Comaraca Formosa, 14 July 1879, 8 March and 18 March 1880. Correio Official, 23 April 1879 (same story in Tribuna Livre, 26 April 1869); Relatório-1879-1, 7. 74. Publicador, 17 and 31 Dec. 1887; Correio Official, 3 March and 18 April 1888; Relatório-1888-1, anexo 3. 75. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 54, 100; D’Alincourt, Memória, 96n.; Pohl, Viagem, 114; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 26, “Registro dos Ofícios Dirigidos às Autoridades Civis da Capitania, 1820,” Juiz de Fora, 13 Oct. 1820. 76. Flory, Judge and Jury, 86–87. On counterfeiting in Bahia see also Mattoso, Bahia, 512–13. 77. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 83, “Correspondência da Presidência para a Secretaria de Estado de Negócios da Fazenda, 1824–1833,” 30 June, 21 July, and 28 Nov. 1828, and 21 May 1831; Matutina, 23 Nov. 1830 and 30 July 1831; Relatório-1838, 34. 78. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 63, Secretaria de Polícia–Vice Presidente, 26 Aug. 1846; Doc. Div., vol. 179, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial às Autoridades Policiais, 1842–1851,” Chefe de Polícia, 24 July 1850; vol. 202, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” Presidente–Ministério de Justiça, 20 Sept. and 1 Aug. 1850; and vol. 466, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1870–1873,” 13 Aug. 1870. Publicador, 13 June 1885, versus Leal, Terras Goyanas, 179–80. 79. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 211, “Correspondência para as Câmaras Municipais, 1848–1853,” Câmara, Carolina, 14 Nov. 1850; vol. 816, “Polícia, 1885,” Presidente–Chefe de Polícia, 2 March 1885; Relatório-1854-1, 5–6, and 1881-3, 41. 80. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 130, “Correspondência e Portarias Dirigidas às Câmaras Municipais e Juizes de Órfãos, 1835–1837,” Câmara, Palma, 8 May 1837; vol. 139, “Correspondência da Província às Autoridades de Fora, Presidente, Maranhão, 1836–1845,” 22 Nov. 1839; Doc. Av., box 184, Vigário, Santa Rita do Paranaíba-? (reservado), 12 Jan. 1868; Relatório-1839, 6. For a useful introduction to the state of “bandit studies” in Latin America, see Joseph, “Latin American Bandits” and comments. 81. Tribuna Livre, 3 April 1880; O Commércio, 24 April 1880. AHEG, Municípios, Conceição, Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 7 June 1884; Doc. Div., vol. 816,

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“Polícia, 1885,” Presidente–Chefe de Polícia, 2 March 1885; Publicador, 7 March and 23 Aug. 1885. 82. “O Índio Afonso,” in Guimarães, Quatro Romances. 83. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 702, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1881–1884,” 14 March 1883; AHEG, Série 1800, “1883–Secretaria de Polícia do Estado,” report, 29 May 1883; Municípios, Ipameri, Chefe de Polícia, 6 Oct. 1890; Tribuna Livre, 17 March and 12 May 1883; Correio Official, 25 July 1885; Publicador, 2 Aug. 1885; Informação Goyana, 15 Nov. 1919. 84. Matutina, 25 Dec. 1830. See also Matutina, 12 June and 25 Sept. 1833. 85. For a summary of settler-Canoeiro relations up to 1830: IHGG, Documentos, Pasta 002/Doc. 52, “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangeiros e Marinha, 1829– 1831,” 28 Dec. 1830. For an attack on a fort, see Matutina, 23 March 1833, and on the kidnapping of children, see Matutina, 8 March 1831. For the ransoming of “Christians”: Relatório-1837, 19 and 1851, 43. 86. On the Xavantes and Xerentes, see Karasch, “Inter-Ethnic Conflict,” and for details of an attack, Matutina, 12 March 1831. 87. Giraldin, Cayapó, 46–49; Correio Official, 11 May 1881. For a similar case, see Relatório-1861-2, 4. 88. Publicador, various, 1885–87, but especially 1 Oct. 1887. There is much correspondence about attacks in archival materials but less mention in the Relatórios than had been the case before 1860. 89. Only rarely did the Indians mount comparatively large scale assaults or did various groups cooperate for such at attack. Typically these were against one of the presídios: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 702, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial com o Ministério da Justiça, 1881–1884,” 2 Nov. 1883; Correio Official, 7 May 1889; Alencastre, Anais, 331–36. 90. On Canoeiro, for example, spying out victims before attacking, see Mello Franco, Viagens, 120, 125–26. 91. Relatório-1859-1, 57. 92. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 114. 93. Matutina, 12 June 1830 and 8 March 1831; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 20–21. 94. Publicador, 17 July 1886; Leite Moraes, Apontamentos, 189. 95. Matutina, 3 Sept. 1831. AHEG, Municípios, Natividade, Câmara, 16 Feb. 1848. See also Relatório-1850-1, 7–8. 96. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capitania e Diversos, 1804–1809,” Vigário Geral da Repartição do Norte, 8 Nov. 1805; vol. 207, “Correspondência do Governo com Diversos, 1848,” Diretor Geral dos Índios, 6 Sept. 1849; Doc. Av., box 187, Câmara–São José do Tocantins, 22 Feb. 1869; Municípios, Arraias, 1 April 1855; Traíras, Coletor–Superintendente da Tesouraria, 21 Sept. 1842; Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), Coletor, Palma (sic)–Superintendente da Tesouraria, 17 Jan. 1847; Relatório-1839, 24, and 18591, 54–57; Matutina, 8 March 1831; Tribuna Livre, 30 June 1883. 97. AHEG, Restaurar, “1879–1883 Livro de Editais, Termos,” Presidente– Ministro da Agricultura, 21 Feb. 1881; Publicador, 17 and 31 July, 7 and 28 Aug. 1886. For attacks on farmers in their fields, see Relatório-1854-3, 20.

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98. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capitania a Diversos, 1804–1809,” Vigário Geral da Repartição do Norte, 8 Nov. 1805; Doc. Av., box 41, Ministério de Negócios do Império–Presidente, 3 July 1844; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 230–31, 235–36; Matutina, 6 Jan. and 12 March 1831. 99. AHEG, Municípios, Traíras, Coletor–Diretor da Tesouraria, 23 April and 21 Sept. 1842. 100. AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Coletor–Diretor da Tesouraria, 30 Sept. 1838 and Traíras, Coletor–Diretor da Tesouraria, 21 Sept. 1842; Doc. Av., box 91, Santa Luzia, Coletor–Diretor da Tesouraria, 13 Sept. 1853. 101. AHEG, Doc Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério de Negócios do Império, 1857–60,” 21 Feb. 1858; Correio Official, 12 Feb. 1859. 102. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 294, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial com o Ministério da Justiça, 1856–1858,” 4 Nov. 1857; Relatório-1847, 13. 103. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Registro de Correspondência do Governo com o Ministério da Justiça, 1858–1862,” 21 Feb. 1859. 104. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas Apresentadas ao Conselho Geral, 1829–1838,” 27 July 1835; vol. 132, “Registro de Ofícios e Ordens Expedidos pelo Governo Provincial a Diversos, 1835–1835,” includes extensive correspondence regarding the organization of the expeditions, plans for the attacks, etc. Relatório-1837, 16–20, and 1838, 13–14. 105. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério do Império, 1857–1860,” 20 Nov. 1858; Relatório-1859-1, 56; Tribuna Livre, 31 July and 20 Aug. 1880. 106. Good summaries of Crown policy are available in Karasch, “Catequese e Cativeiro,” and Rocha, “Política Indigenista” and Os Índios. 107. Relatório-1859-4, 62. 108. Chaim, Aldeamentos Indígenas; Hemming, Amazon Frontier, Chap. 1; “Subsídios” contains extensive correspondence on the formation and failure of colonial aldeias. 109. Relatório-1859-1, 50. 110. Pohl, Viagem, 180–83 and 237. See also Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 65; “Subsídios,” 279. 111. Karasch, “Inter-Ethnic Conflict,” 130–31; Bretas, Instrução, 69, 114. All of the prominent travelers visited Mossâmedes and commented on its decayed condition: Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 62–72; Pohl, Viagem, 151–55; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 41–42, 89–90 and Itinerário-1, 136–38. 112. IHGG, Documentos, Pasta 002, Doc. 52, “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangerios e Marinha, 1829–1831,” 24 Jan. 1831; AHEG, Gabinete 48, “1820– 1836, Livro de Correspondência da Presidência da Província de Goiás para Autoridades de Fora,” Comandante, Rio Grande, 5 Jan. 1832; Matutina, 9 Feb. and 12 Dec. 1832. See also Giraldin, Cayapó, 98–100, 121–22. 113. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 246, “Correspondência, Presidente–Ministério de Negócios do Império, 1851–1857,” 9 Feb. 1855; vol. 645, “Correspondência da

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Província Relativa à Catequese dos Índios,” Presidente–Diretor Geral dos Índios, 19 March 1879; Restaurar, “1879–1883 Livro de Editais, Termos, etc.,” Presidente– Ministério de Agricultura, 3 Nov. 1879. 114. Relatórios give extensive coverage to these activities. 115. Relatório-1846, 20. More generally, da Cunha, ed., Legislação, 105, 185–86. On the problems garrisons caused, see AHEG, Doc. Av., box 248, Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente, 13 March 1875. 116. See, for example, Rocha, “Política Indigenista,” 90–91. 117. Couto de Magalhães, Araguaia, 126–31. See also Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 219. 118. Relatório-1856, 15. Indians on more than one occasion carried their complaints to court: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 429, “Registro de Correspondência do Governo com os Juizes de Direito, 1866–1872,” Juiz de Direito, Boavista, 30 Sept. 1871; Doc. Av., box 266, Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente de Goiás, 2 July 1871. 119. Relatório-1855, 29–34. 120. Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório-1885, 45. See also AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 750, “Ministério da Agricultura, 1883–1885,” 10 March 1884. 121. Bretas, Instrução, 383–91. See Relatório-1881-1, 66 for a chart of the students and the indigenous groups represented. 122. IHGG, Documentos, Pasta 002, Doc 52, “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangeiros e Marinha, 1829–1831,” 25 Aug. 1829. 123. Publicador, 30 Oct. 1886. 124. Relatório-1891, 8. When the president of Mato Grosso wanted to make the point that aldeias did not work, he cited the experience of Goiás: RelatórioMato Grosso-1837, 19. 125. For the regulations organizing a presídio, see Relatório-1854-3, anexo. 126. On rationing systems, see Jones, “Comparative Raiding Economies.” For budgets for Indian relations, see Relatório-1880, 36–44. By the 1880s emphasis had shifted to labor mobilization: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 304, Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente, 17 Aug. 1881. 127. Relatório-1861-2, 23–27. See also Alencastre, Anais, 331–36; Relatório1880, 32–44. 128. On the use of National Guardsmen to man presídios, see AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 135, “Resoluções da Presidência da Província, 1833–1846,” 14 April 1841; Relatório-1841, 10, and 1873, 33. 129. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 347, Presidente–Inspetor da Tesouraria, Goiás, 6 March 1885; Relatório-1853-1, 11; Matutina, 30 July 1831; Simões de Paula, “Santa Leopoldina,” 41–47; Relatório-1881-2, 71. 130. Criminals: AHEG, Doc. Div, vol. 202, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 31 Oct. 1849, and vol. 340, “1858–1862,” 20 Aug. 1859; vol. 395, “Juiz Municipal, 1862–1873,” various letters remitting prisoners to the presídios. Deserters: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 20 Aug. 1851; Municípios, Itumbiara (Santa Rita do Paranaíba), Recebedor–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 13 Feb. 1871, and Porto Nacional (Porto

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Imperial), Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 10 Nov. 1876; Tribuna Livre, 3 May 1879. This had a long tradition: Souza, Desclassificados, 77–79. 131. Simões de Paula, “Santa Leopoldina,” 58. 132. Matutina, 6 Jan. 1831. On the ineffectiveness of patrols: Relatório-18591, 54. 133. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 211, “Correspondência da Presidência para as Câmaras Municipais, 1848–1853,” São José do Tocantins, 27 Aug. 1850. 134. Pina Filho, Imprensa, 42; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 702, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial com o Ministério de Justiça,” 2 Nov. 1883. Correio Official, 7 May 1889. chapter 3. industry, commerce, and communications 1. “Subsídios: Reflexões . . . 1804,” 286; Publicador, 7 March 1885; Governador, Mensagem-1900, 11. 2. Publicador, 7 March 1885. An 1862 estimate suggested, with suspect precision, 755 sugar mills and 227 distilleries, 93 tile works, 319 tanneries, and 19 sawmills, as well as small iron foundries at Formosa and Cavalcante: Relatório1862, 113–19. A few years later another president added to this list a few lime kilns and one or two workshops that made heavy furniture: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1861–1873,” 30 Dec. 1869. 3. Relatório-Mato Grosso-1887, unpaginated. On railroads, see Borges, Despertar dos Dormentes. 4. Relatório-1862, 113; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 95. For a picture of woman at a spinning wheel, see Baiocchi, Negros de Cedro, 116. 5. França, Pioneiros, 109. 6. Relatório-1862, 113–19 includes estimated output by municipality. 7. Holanda, Frontiers, 239–44; Martins, “Growing in Silence,” 283–301; Iglésias, Política Econômica, 106–8; Libby, Transformação, Chap. 4. Later in the century a textile mill developed across the border from Goiás in Montes Claros, northwestern Minas Gerais: Bieber Freitas, “Marginal Elites,” 104–8. 8. AMB, Vol. 406, Cartas Régias, 25 July and 24 Oct. 1818. 9. AMB, vol. 406, Aviso Régio, 4 June 1819; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 24, “Provisões do Rei D. João Dirigidas ao Governador de Goiás, 1818–1820,” 12 June 1819. 10. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 22, “Registro de Atos do Governo de Goiás, 1818–1820,” Fernando Delgado Freire de Castilho–Sargento Mor Joaquim Alves de Oliveira, 3 Oct. 1819, and João José de Couto Guimarães, 4 Oct. 1819; AN, Ijj9 535, Ministério do Reino e Império, Goiás—Ofícios de Diversas Autoridades, Joaquim Alves de Oliveira–Fernando Delgado, 6 Oct. 1819. 11. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 20, “Correspondência com a Corte, 1817– 1820,” 11 Oct. 1819; vol. 22, “Registro de Atos do Governo de Goiás, 1818–1820,” Fernando Delgado Freire de Castilho–Capitão João de Couto Guimarães, 10 June 1820; AMB, vol. 406, Antônio Pedro de Mancastro, 19 Jan. 1820. 12. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 36, “Correspondência da Secretaria dos Negócios do Reino, 1820–1824,” 4 Jan. 1821; AMB, Pac. 352:10 Fábrica de Tecelagem.

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13. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 83, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província para a Secretaria do Estado dos Negócios da Fazenda, 1824–1833,” 26 July 1825; BN, I-32, 13, 12, Fábrica de Fiação em Goiás, 27 June and 22 Oct. 1827. 14. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 83, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província para a Secretaria de Estado dos Negócios da Fazenda, 1824–1833,” 1 Aug. 1828; BN, I-32, 13, 12, Fábrica de Fiação, 7 May 1838; D’Alincourt, Memória, 90–91; Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 99–100, and Nascentes, 136; Castello Branco, Arraial, 54; Matutina, 1 Feb. 1832. 15. Karasch, “Slave Women,” 88–89, and “Catequese,” 404; BN, I-32, 13, 12, 27 March 1828. 16. This was Julio’s second escape from the factory: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 107, “Correspondência, 1828–1835,” José Rodriguez Jardim–Diretor, aldeia de São José, 9 and 13 Feb. 1832. 17. BN, I-32, 13, 13, 7 May 1838; AHEG, Gabinete 59, “1838–1845, Registro de Ofícios da Presidência da Província para os Ministérios do Império, Marinha e Estrangeiros,” 3 March 1839; Doc. Av., box 34, petition, 26 July 1844; Couto de Magalhães, Viagem, 50. 18. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 256, Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente, 28 Sept. 1876; Correio Official, 8 Aug. 1885; Goyáz, 26 Sept. and 3 Oct. 1890; Governador, Mensagem-1891, 15. 19. “Subsídios,” 84, 129, 147–51. 20. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 25–26, 43, 81; Spix and Martius, Viagem-2, 111; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-2, 99. On small-scale mining, see Costa, “Meiaponte,” Chap. 1. 21. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 8, “Correspondência do Governo e Autoridades Fora da Província, 1808–1809,” Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas–Ministro Assistente ao Despacho do Real Erário, Feb. 1809; vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capitania a Diversos, 1804–1809,” Captão General–Superintendência, n.d. (March 1809), and additional correspondence in this volume; AHEG, Gabinete 44, “1804–1814, Editais do Governo do Ilmo. D Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas e do Ilmo. Fernando Delgado de Castilho,” 23 March 1809. 22. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capitania a Diversos, 1804–1809,” Joaquim Leite do Amaral Coutinho, 15 April 1809. 23. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 8, “Correspondência do Governo e Autoridades Fora da Província, 1808–1809,” Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas–Ministro e Secretário de Estado dos Negócios Estrangeiros e da Guerra, 31 July 1809. 24. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 17, “Contabilidade da Sociedade de Mineração de S. Francisco de Anicuns, 1816, “Partilhados”; vol. 21, “Livro de Ofícios (3o.), 1818,” Capt. General–Sociedade de Anicuns, 5 July 1814; vol. 36, “Correspondência da Secretaria dos Negócios do Reino, 1820–1824,” 28 Nov. 1820. 25. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 36, “Correspondência da Secretaria dos Negócios do Reino, 1820–1824,” 30 June 1821. Copies of the statutes for the revised society are available in Baiocchi, Negros de Cedro, 156–68. 26. Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-2, 123. 27. Correio Official, 2 June 1875; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 29; Mello

244

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Franco, Viagens, 49–52; Leite Moraes, Apontamentos, 96. For rumors of efforts to reopen Anicuns: Publicador, 18 Sept. 1886. 28. Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 82–83, and Itinerário-1, 248; Silva e Souza, “Memória,” 148, 170, and 173, but compare 179 and 191. 29. BN, I-28–31, 26; Matutina, 11 Jan. 1831. 30. Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 22; see also Regiões Centrais-1, 214–15; Gardner, Viagem, 162–63. On alluvial gold mining as a poor man’s activity, see Slater, Entangled Edens, Chap. 5. 31. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 187, Câmara, São José do Tocantins, 22 Feb. 1869; Relatório-1855, 110; Publicador, 28 Nov. 1885. 32. Relatório-1862, 103–4. His successor tried to obtain information from the town councils on mining, without success: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 137, draft report, 1861 (sic—actual date 1863). 33. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 246, Presidente–Ministério do Negócios do Império, 11 Feb. 1857. On mining techniques, see Relatório-1862, 102. For a colonial example of a “society” formed by ex-slaves and free black miners, see Karasch, “Periphery of the Periphery,” 164. 34. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 90, ?–Thesouraria da Fazenda, 31 Dec. 1852; Relatório-1861-2, 34 and 1862, 102. Abade: AHEG, Municípios, Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 18 May 1884, and attached documents; Doc. Div., vol. 787, “Câmaras Municipais, 1884–1889,” various letters regarding the dispute resulting from the Abade mine; Relatório-1886, 22; Publicador, 28 March and 5 April 1886, 5 April, 28 May, and 27 Aug. 1887; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 93–94, 146–47. For a comprehensive treatment of the Abade enterprise and its effects see Informação Goyana, April 1931, and Costa, “Meiaponte.” 35. Bertran, “Desastres Ambientais.” Compare Dean, Broadax, 99, and Pádua, “‘Cultura Esgotada.’“ 36. Von Eschwege, Pluto Brasiliensis-2, 87–145. 37. “Subsídios,” 63. 38. Pohl, Viagem, 123, 136, 161–64; Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 81–83. 39. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 39, “Registro Geral, 1820–1824,” Junta Provisória do Governo–Escrivão Deputado da Junta da Fazenda Nacional, 10 June 1822; Gabinete 48, “1820–1836, Livro de Correspondência da Presidência da Província de Goiás para Autoridades de Fora,” Caetano Maria Lopes Gama–Visconde de Barbacena, 27 June 1826; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 118–24. 40. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 151, “Esclarecimentos pedidos por Sua Exa. o Senhor Presidente da Província em os Servissos Minerais do Distrito do Rio Claro desde a anno 1860 até o de 1862.” See also Relatório-1863-1, 52–53. 41. Fevers: AHEG, Municípios, Iporá (Rio Claro), Comissão Censitária da Paróchia do Rio Claro, 25 Aug. 1873. Indian attacks: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1861–1873,” 25 May 1861; Relatório-1862, 45. Workers employed by a society formed at Cuiabá in these years to mine the gravel of the Rio Claro–Pilões abandoned the area after only a few weeks: Couto de Magalhães, Viagem, 167–68. 42. Paternostro, Viagem, 305–7. At the end of the century came a major dia-

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mond rush at Rio das Garças/Baliza: Informação Goiana, Nov. 1921, Aug. 1923, and Dec. 1933. 43. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 244, “Livro 2o. para a Polícia, 1851– 1856,” 16 July 1853; vol. 262, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1853–1856,” 5 July 1853; Relatório-1854-2, 3–4 and 1855, 111. In 1875 the national government issued new regulations for diamond mining: Correio Official, 1 Dec. 1875. 44. On early iron foundries in Brazil see Holanda, Fronteiras, 157–67; von Eschwege, Pluto Brasiliensis-2, 201–5; Dean, Broadax, 197–99. 45. IHGG, Documentos, Pasta 002, Doc. 52, “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangeiros e Marinha, 1829–1831,” President Lino de Moraes-Ill. Sr. José Clemente Pereira, 23 April 1829; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 85, “Correspondência com a Corte, 1824–1837,” 27 Aug. 1830; vol. 111, “Livro de Registro de Ofícios e Ordens Expedidos pelo Governo Provincial, 1830–1832,” President Lino de Moraes–Joaquim Alvares (sic) de Oliveira, 22 March 1831 (copies to approx. 75 others); BN, I-28–31, 26 “Ofício de Miguel Lino de Moraes . . . 1830”; Matutina, 17 June 1830. 46. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 266, “Correspondência da Fazenda Provincial com o Governo, 1853–1859,” 5 March 1856; Relatório-1856, 13, and 1857-1, 16–17; Informação Goyana, May–June 1932, 79–80. 47. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério de Agricultura, 1861–73,” 6 Jan. 1862; Relatório-1859-1, 85–86; Publicador, 15 May 1886. It was still functioning in 1893 when its owner Angelo Chaves announced that for health reasons he was leaving the state and selling the foundry: Goyáz, 10 March 1893. 48. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 156, “Proposta de Establecimento de uma Fábrica de Ferro e Aço,” 17 Aug. 1864; Tribuna Livre, 26 July 1879. 49. Publicador, 27 Nov. 1886 and 15 Oct. 1887; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 60. 50. In addition to Formosa, in the 1870s small forges operated at São José do Tocantins (AHEG, Municípios, Niquelândia (São José do Tocantins), Câmara, report, 17 Feb. 1874); at Santa Leopoldina (AHEG, Doc. Av., box 194, Presidente– Inspetor da Tesouraria, 11 March 1870); and at Arêas, nine kilometers from the capital (AHEG, Doc. Av., box 211, report, n.d. [circa 1875]); Publicador, 25 July 1885. 51. Publicador, 5 Feb. 1887; Audrin, Sertanejos, 73; Simões de Paula, “Santa Leopoldina,” 180; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 136. 52. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 101. 53. Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 83, 92, 97, 101. 54. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 110, Subdelegado, Campinas–Chefe de Polícia, 7 Nov. 1855. 55. AHEG, Municípios, Paraná, Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 4 Feb. 1837. 56. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 139, “Termo de Declarações,” 8 Oct. 1861. 57. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 168, “Correspondência da Secretaria da Presidência da Província para a Secretaria da Fazenda, 1840–1848,” 15 June 1851. 58. Audrin, Sertanejos, 66; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 83; Callefi, “Consumo,” 118–19.

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59. AHEG, Gabinete, 59, “1838–1845 Registro de Ofícios da Presidência da Província para os Ministérios do Império, Marinha, e Estrangeiros,” 63v–64. 60. Cartório da Família, Goiás, box 1835–1885, “Ação de Ana Souza Rédova contra Damiana Maria da Conceição,” 10 July 1835. 61. Publicador, 5 April 1887. 62. Wallé, États de Goyaz, 14; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 140–41. 63. Costa, “Meiaponte,” 61–63. 64. But compare Summerfield, “Transport Improvements.” 65. See various calculations in Doles, Communicações Fluviais, 83–86; AN, Ijj9 535, Ministério do Reino e Império—Goiás, J. Teotônio Segurado, n.d. (circa 1810); Relatório-1863-1, 11; Correio Official, 9 July 1864. 66. Correio Official, 27 May 1880. 67. Rabelo, “Excessos,” Chap. 4, examines the modernization of female ornamentation and high society parties in late nineteenth-century Goiás. 68. 21 Dec. 1867. 69. Correio Official, 16 March, 30 March, 4 and 6 April 1878; Publicador, 7 March 1885. See Callefi, “Consumo,” for a study of consumption in these years, including lists of items advertised by decades for the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. 70. Paternostro, Viagem, 201–3. 71. Nogueira, Mestre Carreiro, 18 and 55–56. See Carvalho Ramos, Tropas e Boiadas, 73–74. 72. For general treatments, see Gumiero, “Tropeiros,” and Goulart, Tropas. 73. Franco, Homens Livres, 60–67. 74. For example: Saint-Hilaire, Nascentes, 136, and Goiás, 42, 45, 95, 120; Gardner, Viagem, 183–84. 75. Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 112–15. 76. For a description of a pouso, see Mello Franco, Viagens, 56. D’Alincourt, Memória, 49, includes a drawing. Callefi, “Consumo,” 121–22, reports the results of an archeological dig of a pouso. 77. Publicador, 23 May 1885. 78. Mattos, Saquarema, 59. 79. AHEG, Municípios, Caipônia (Rio Bonito), Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 9 Aug. 1879; Tribuna Livre, 29 May 1880. 80. Relatório-1870-1, 9–10. 81. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-1, 54; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 182. See also the description in Guimarães, Ermitão, 256. 82. Nogueira, Mestre Carreiro. 83. Publicador, 23 Oct. 1886. 84. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 483, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província com as Câmaras Municipais, 1873–1874,” Goiás, 1 March 1872; Municípios, Itumbiara (Santa Rita do Paranaíba), Recebedor–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 9 April 1871; Publicador, 13 June 1885; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 192–93. Late in the colonial period public authorities had attempted to limit the use of carts and the damage they caused by deliberately building bridges too narrow for them to cross: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 26, “Registro de Ofícios Dirigidos à Autoridades

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Civis da Capitania, 1820,” Manoel Ignácio de Sampião–Juiz Ordinário de Santa Cruz, 29 March 1821. 85. Publicador, 13 June 1885; Informação Goyana, 2 Sept. 1921. Carts finally were banned from public roads in the 1930s: Nogueira, Mestre Carreiro, 66–70. 86. Matutina, 10 March 1831; Relatório-1850-2, 4. 87. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 48, 75, 86–87, 95–96; Pohl, Viagem, 147, 157–59, 165; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 45. Compare Iglésias, Política Econômica, 154–61. 88. Relatório-1837, 24, 1853-2, 15, and Governador, Mensagem-1891, 9; Publicador, 23 Oct. 1886. 89. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-1, 56. 90. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 442, “Relatórios, 1868–1882,” “Obras Públicas, 1877.” 91. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 528, “Ofícios do Governo aos Juizes de Direito, 1873–75,” Pres.-Juiz de Direito, Rio Maranhão, 24 Oct. 1874; vol. 557, “Correspondência com as Câmaras Municipais da Província, 1874–76,” Meiaponte, 25 June 1875; Doc. Av., box 225, “Relatório sobre as Obras Públicas, 1876”; Municípios, Luziânia (Santa Luzia), report, 5 Feb. 1883. 92. Mello Franco, Viagens, 70. Of course, sometimes the problems resulted from the imprudent demands of the passengers: Relatório-1858-2, anexo, “Relatório de Tesouraria.” 93. Relatório-1858-3, anexo; Mello Franco, Viagens, 69–71; Informação Goyana, March 1921. 94. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Secretaria da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 11 July 1851; vol. 294, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial com o Ministério da Justiça, 1856–1858,” 31 March 1858. 95. Relatório-1837, 24. 96. Relatório-1853-1, 7. 97. Relatório-1854-1, 19. 98. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 246, “Correspondência com o Ministério do Império, 1851–1857,” 11 May 1852 and 1 March 1853; vol. 532, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1873–1877,” 9 June 1876; Doc. Av., box 247, report, Obras Públicas, 1 May 1875. 99. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 205, report, Obras Públicas, 1871. 100. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 20, “Correspondência com a Corte, 1817–20,” 20 Dec. 1817; Doc. Av., box 10, aviso, ? Dec. 1820; Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas Apresentadas ao Concelho Geral, 1829–1838,” 20 Dec. 1831; Matutina, 26 May 1832; Pohl, Viagem, 137; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 108–10. 101. Relatório-1862, 99–100. See also AHEG, Doc. Div., box 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério de Agricultura, 1861–1873,” 7 Oct. 1861. 102. Relatório-1863-2, 40–44. Apparently a push north from São Paulo was under consideration at this time: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 150, “Instruções . . . Tenente do Corpo de Engenheiros José Antônio Rodrigues na Viagem de Exploração pelos rios Tietê, Paraná, Paranaíba, Rio Verde, dos Bois e Anicuns . . . , 1 June

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1863”; Correio Official, 1, 22, and 29 Aug. and 3 Oct. 1874, 7 and 11 Aug. 1875, and 23 Aug. 1884; Tribuna Livre, 22 March 1879. 103. Relatório-1859-1, 62. 104. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capitania a Diversos, 1804–1809,” Sociedade Mercantil de Trahiras, 23 Jan. 1806, Cap. General Grão Pará, 26 April and 12 May 1807, and Cap. General Grão Pará, 2 Jan. 1808. Generally, food prices were higher in Belém than in Goiás: Funes, Goiás 1800–1850, 40. 105. ; AHEG, Gabinete 44, “1804–1814, Editais do Governo do Ilmo. D. Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas e do Ilmo. Dr. Fernando Delgado de Castilho,” 4 March 1812; AN, Ijj9 535, Ministério do Reino e Império—Goiás—Ofícios de Diversas Autoridades, Joaquim Teotônio Segurado, 24 May 1811 and attached documents; Pohl, Viagem, 137. 106. Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 334. For pictures of various rivercraft, see Informação Goyana, Feb. 1923, as well as the drawings by William Burchell in Ferrez, Brasil. 107. Audrin, Sertanejos, 100. 108. Publicador, 5 April 1887. 109. Relatório-1857-1, 16; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 33–34. 110. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 203–5; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 322–26; Publicador, 19 Feb. 1887. Relatório dos Estudos da Comissão Exploradora dos Rios Tocantins e Araguaya . . . 1875 (reproduced in Rocha, “Política Indigenista”), includes a detailed description of rapids, unpaginated. 111. Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 322. 112. Província de Goyáz, 2 July 1870. See also Tribuna Livre, 2 July 1882, and Publicador, 22 Oct. 1887. 113. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério dos Negócios do Império, 1857–1860,” 31 July 1858; Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), “1886 Papéis Relativos ao Contrato . . . para a Distruição de Duas Pedras”; Relatório-1881-2, 95; Governador, Mensagem-1896, 18–19. 114. AHEG, Municípios, Natividade, “Informação Sobre alguns Pontos da Navegação para o Pará,” Rufino Teotônio Segurado, 28 Dec. 1849; Relatório1850-1, 29–31. 115. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério do Império, 1857–1860,” 31 July 1857. 116. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 146, Recebedor, Boavista–Diretor das Rendas Provinciais, 30 April 1863. See also box 156, Presidente–Diretor Geral das Rendas Provinciais, 15 July 1864. 117. AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Câmara, 12 Jan. 1882. 118. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 234, Câmara, Porto Imperial–Assembléia Legislativa, 22 June 1874. See also Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Hipólito A. da Silva, n.d. 119. Relatório-1858-1, anexo 9, and 1863-1, anexo. 120. Relatório-1874, 28; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 231. 121. AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), 13 Jan. 1869; Mello Franco, Viagens, 150. Newspapers continue to report sizable numbers of

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boats but no details: Publicador, 9 Oct. 1886; Informação Goyana, Oct. 1921. 122. See Linhares, História do Abastecimento, 52–58, contra Funes, Goiás 1800–1850, 45–46. 123. For an example of a president chiding the inhabitants of the province for such unrealistic hopes, see Relatório-1854-3, 27. 124. The Araguaia was not without rapids: Taunay, Goyáz, 25–28. On opening the Rio Vermelho: Relatório-1850-1, 32–33. 125. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 63, “Relatório sobre a Navegação do Araguaia, Viagem do Dr. Rufino [Segurado]”; Relatório-1847, 10–12, 1849, 17–20, and 1854-1, 32; Correio Official, 25 April 1849. 126. Relatório-1864-1, 9–10; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1861–1873,” 6 July 1864 and 7 Oct. 1872. 127. Relatório-1869, 30–33. 128. Relatório-1879-1, anexo, “Relatório da Empresa de Navegação”; Tribuna Livre, 31 Jan. 1880; Publicador, 15 Jan. 1887 and 23 June 1888. chapter 4. agriculture and food supply 1. On the “internal economy,” McCreery, “Smuggling and the ‘Internal Economy,’“ 333 n. 1. 2. Cunha Mattos, Chorographia-1, 75. 3. Sales, Economia, 63. 4. D’Alincourt, Memória, 110. See also Saint-Hilaire, Nascentes, 161. 5. Bertran, ed., Notícia-1, 75. 6. Alencastre, Anais, 233. 7. Salles, Economia, 255, 280–81. Silva e Souza’s “Memória” provides numbers, but not sizes or production, for farms versus ranches for many towns: see the summary in Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 43. 8. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 8, “Secretaria do Estado dos Negócios de Estrangeiros e da Guerra,” 30 Dec. 1808. For a summary of agricultural and stock production circa 1804 see BN, I-9, 4, 21, Doc. 164. 9. Enthusiasm for agriculture did not increase greatly with time: Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório-1888-1, 6. 10. Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 211. Compare similar problems in rural Minas Gerais: Martins. “Growing in Silence,” 266–67. 11. Elis, Veranico, 39. 12. Audrin, Sertanejos, 55–56; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-1, 315, and Three Thousand Miles-2, 50–51, 241–42. 13. Elis, Veranico, 39. 14. AHEG, Doc Av., box 9, “Relação dos Habitantes Situados na Freguesia de NS de Rosário, Meiaponte, 1 June 1818.” This agriculture parallels, for example, that described by Mattos de Castro, Sul da História, and Barickman’s Bahian Counterpoint. 15. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 229, “Arrolamento dos Habitantes da Freguesia da Villa de Corumbá, 1850–1851.” 16. See, for example, the militia lists in AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 68, “Correspondência do Comandante de Armas” (Raymundo José Da Cunha Mattos). Generally, see Cândido, Parceiros, 117–25.

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17. Relatório-Ceará-1872, 42. 18. Matutina, 15 June 1830. 19. Nogueira, Pires do Rio, 27. 20. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 226, Pres. Cícero D’Assis, 24 Jan. 1874. More generally: Lobo, História Político-Administrativa, 76–80. 21. AHEG, Municípios, Crixás, “Informação Circunstanciada do Julgado de Arrayal da Crixás . . . 1829.” See also Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 76; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 187; Audrin, Sertanejos, 45–47 for how little these techniques changed over the course of the century. 22. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 124. 23. Spix and Martius, Viagem-1, 106. 24. For a description of the use of fire to clear cattle pasture, see, for example, Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse, 37. See also Gardner, Viagem, 182; Taunay, Cartas, 106; Carvalho Ramos, Tropas e Boiadas, 129. 25. Pohl, Viagem, 288. 26. Matutina, 15 June 1830. 27. Carvalho Ramos, Tropas e Boiadas, 128. 28. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 124. Complaints about the effects of fires were still common in the early twentieth century: Informação Goyana, 15 Dec. 1917 and 10 May 1922. 29. Matutina, 15 June 1830; Paternostro, Viagem, 203. 30. For proposals to encourage the use of the plow, see AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas Apresentadas ao Conselho Geral, 1829– 1838,” 16 Dec. 1829 and 14 Jan. 1833; Matutina, 28 Dec. 1833. 31. AHEG, Municípios, Luziânia (Santa Luzia), 31 Jan. 1848. 32. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 187, Câmara, Meiaponte, 11 May 1869. 33. D’Alincourt, Memória, 90–91; Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 128–29; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 218–19; Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 99. 34. Spix and Martius, Viagem-2, 85. 35. Near Conceição farmers planted vegetables on elevated platforms with the legs in buckets of water to avoid these: Pohl, Viagem, 224. 36. Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 193. See also Gardner, Viagem, 179; AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Coletor–Provedor, 25 Nov. 1838. 37. Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 76; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 102; Audrin, Sertanejos, 25; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 28, Collector Jaraguá–Provedor de Fazenda, 14 Sept. 1839. 38. Matutina, 9 Sept, 1830. The head of a poisonous snake or the ears of an armadillo would have counted for twenty birds and a rattlesnake rattle for four birds. 39. Matutina, 14 Aug. 1830. 40. AHEG, Municípios, Catalão, town regulations, 3 Oct. 1841. See also Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), town regulations, 21 June 1847. 41. AHEG, Doc Av., box 202, “Polícia,” 5 July 1871; Doc. Div., vol. 702, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial com o Ministério da Justiça, 1881– 1884,” 14 March 1883; Tribuna Livre, 17 March 1883.

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42. See the story “Ladrões de Gado,” in Brito, Terras Bárbaras, for the fate of small farmers driven to theft by the repeated destruction of their crops by cattle. 43. Matutina, 19 March 1831; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 136, “Juizes de Paz, 1835–1852,” circular, 20 Feb. 1839; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 67; Relatório1845, 10. Saint-Hilaire describes the mountains around the town of Goiás alive with fire: Goiás, 61–62 and 92. 44. Mello Franco, Viagens, 109–10; Ataídes, “Flores,” 69–72. 45. Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 78. 46. Alencastre, Anais, 93. 47. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 45 has counts for a number of towns for 1846. See also Municípios, Pilar and Silvânia (Bonfim), lançamentos, 1841 and 1842, Cavalcante, 1842 and 1843, Traíras, 1843, etc. 48. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capitania a Diversos,” Junta da Fazenda, 27 Oct. 1807. Regarding abuses of these exemptions, see Doc. Div., vol. 22, “Registro dos Atos do Governo de Goiás, 1818–1820,” Fernando Delgado Freire de Castilho–Dr. Joaquim Theotônio Segurado, 27 Jan. 1820. 49. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 191, “Correspondência da Presidência com a Secretaria dos Negócios do Império, 1845–1848,” n.d. (follows 15 Feb. 1847); vol. 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Provedor–Coletor, Pilar, 28 March 1847; Relatório-1838, 32–33, and 1852, 31. 50. Relatório-1853-3, 21; Matutina, 5 Oct. 1830; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 200, “Correspondência da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,”Provedor–Collector Conceição, 17 Aug. 1847. 51. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 16, circular, April 1821. A copy is available in Funes, Goiás 1800–1850, Appendix III. 52. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 39, “Registro Geral, 1820–1824,” 10 June 1822; Doc. Av., box. 16, report, Secretário do Governo de Goiás, 28 Sept. 1824. 53. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 16, portaria, Secretaria da Fazenda, 18 Dec. 1824; box 17, provisão, 14 June 1825. 54. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 73, “Registro de Correspondência, 1823–1832,” Raimundo João José da Cunha Mattos–Escrivão, Deputado da Junta da Fazenda, 19 June 1824. 55. AHEG, Doc Av., box 17, Ministério de Estado dos Negócios da Fazenda, 5 June 1829; box 18, Vereador Pedro Gomez Machado, 26 Nov. 1829. 56. 28 Jan., 2 and 13 April, 10 June, 7 and 25 Sept., 5 Oct. 1830, 7, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, and 27 May, 31 Aug. 1831, 16 June 1832. 57. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 17, “Opiniões dos Seres. Conselheiros sobre Dízimos . . . 19 April 1831.” 58. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Provedor–Coletor, 29 May 28 Aug. and 13 Nov. 1848; Municípios, Iporá (Rio Claro), 2 June 1847 and 14 June 1848. 59. Matutina, 19 June 1831. 60. AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Coletor–Provedor da Fazenda, 30 Sept. 1838 and 31 Jan. 1839; Jaraguá, 23 Oct. 1838. 61. Matutina, 6 Oct. 1831.

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62. AHEG, Municípios, Traíras, Coletor–Provedor de Fazenda, 21 Sept. 1842. 63. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 28, Coletor, Carolina–Provedor de Fazenda, 10 Oct. 1839 (two letters); Municípios, Catalão, Coletor–Provedor de Fazenda, 7 July and 28 Oct. 1839; Relatório-1850-2, 11–12. Minas Gerais abolished dízimos in 1839: Iglésias, Política Econômica, 76. 64. Relatório-1838, 34; AHEG, Municípios, Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), Coletor–Provedor de Fazenda, 1 July 1838. 65. AHEG, Doc, Av., various current accounts, various. When the province shifted to new taxes in the middle of the 1850s, the authorities did not abandon attempting to collect past-due dízimos: AHEG, Municípios Iporá (Rio Claro), Coletor–Provedor de Fazenda, 9 Sept. 1891. 66. Relatório 1854-3, 73. 67. BN, I-28, 32, 27, “Relatório de Miguel Lino de Moraes . . . 2 Dec. 1827”; AHEG, Municípios, Paraná, Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 4 Feb. 1837. 68. Relatório-1859-1, 59–60; O Tocantins, 22 Oct. 1857. 69. AHEG, Doc Av., box 144, “Quadro Demonstrativo do Rendimento dos Cinco por cento sobre Gêneros de Lavoura . . . 1859 e 1860,” 31 Dec. 1861. 70. AHEG, Municípios, Silvânia (Bonfim), 6 March 1869 and Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), 23 Feb. 1869; Correio Official, 7 Aug. 1869; Relatório, 1869, 40 and 1870-1, 23. See Municípios, Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), 27 Feb. 1871 for the supposedly detrimental effects of the market on food supply. 71. Tribuna Livre, 24 May 1879. 72. Matutina, 2 and 6 April 1830; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 135, “Resoluções da Presidência da Província, 1835–1846,” 3 April 1837; Doc. Av., box 24, Assembléia Legislativa, 22 Aug. 1838. Almost a century later: Governador, Mensagem1920, 75. 73. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 337, “Correspondência da Presidência com Autoridades Policiais, 1858–1860,” Subdelegado, Goiás, 27 July 1859. In other provinces producers sometimes preferred to sell to speculators, even at lower prices, to avoid delays and the bureaucracy of the market: Souza, “Poder Público,” 157. 74. AHEG, Doc. Av., vol. 303, “Leis e Resoluções da Assembléia Legislativa, 1857,” Resolução N. 11 de 24 Ago., 1859; Relatório-1859-2, 75–77, 1859-3, 82–83, 1861-2, 7–8, 1862, 68–69, 1863-2, 46–47, and 1865-1, 7. 75. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 188, “Regulamento do Mercado do Capital,” 11 Oct. 1869. 76. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 337, “Correspondência da Província com Autoridades Policiais, 1858–1860,” Chief of Police, 6 Nov. and 18 Dec. 1858 and 19 Dec. 1859. See also Relatório-1859-3, 77, and 1875, 42–43. 77. 15 May and 4 Sept. 1886, and 12 Jan. 1889. 78. For a more positive description of the market, see AHEG, Doc. Av., box 434, “Diretoria de Instrução, Indústria, Terras e Obras Públicas, 1893.” See also Anzai, “Vida Cotidiana,” 59–60, on the “pleasures of the market.” 79. Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 28; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 137, draft report, 1861 (sic—1863). Conditions were no better at the Rio de Janeiro slaughterhouse: Linhares, História, 206. 80. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 483, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província

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com as Câmaras Municipais, 1873–1874,” Goiás, 5 Aug. 1873; Tribuna Livre, 19 March 1881. 81. Relatório-1867-1, 34–35. 82. Leite Moraes, Apontamentos, 108; Tribuna Livre, 12 March 1881. 83. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 434, “Diretoria de Instrução, Indústria, Terras e Obras Públicas, 1893”; Relatório-1881-2, 83, and 1883-2, 13–14. On questions about the finances, see Tribuna Livre, 24 Dec. 1881. 84. On agriculture at Natividade, see AHEG, Municípios, Natividade, 15 Jan. 1874. 85. Quoted in Funes, Goiás 1800–1850, 70. 86. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1858–1862,” 15 July 1859. For Brazil more generally, see Soares, Notas Estatísticas. 87. Among many such explanations, see AHEG, Doc. Av., box 117, Chefe de Polícia–Presidente, 10 Jan. 1858, and Delegado, Bonfim–Chefe de Polícia, 30 Jan. 1858; box 118, Delegado, Goiás (?)–Chefe de Polícia, 19 Dec. 1857; box 124, Delegado, Jaraguá–Chefe de Polícia, n.d. (1858), and Antônio José de Castro– Chefe de Polícia, 14 Jan. 1858; Doc. Av., box 187, report, Câmara, 11 May 1869; Relatório-1858-1, 34–35. 88. This was a long-standing problem: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 17, “Opinões dos Seres. Concelheiros . . . Dízimos, 19 Abril, 1831.” Newspapers in the 1860s and 1870s intermittently published weekly prices. 89. Soares, Notas Estatísticas, Chap. 21; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 117, Chefe de Polícia–Presidente, 10 Jan. 1858; box 124, Delegado, Jaraguá–Chefe de Polícia, undated (1858). 90. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério dos Negócios do Império, 1857–1860,” 10 April 1858. 91. Goiás’s newspapers are full of accounts of carts and mule trains loaded with food headed for Mato Grosso: e.g., Correio Official, 3 March 1866. A regular feature of the newspaper during the war was “Fornecimento de Víveres.” See also Relatório-1865-1, 3, and 1866, 14–18, and most subsequent Relatórios to the end of the decade. 92. This was not a problem limited to Rio Verde: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1863–1871,” 7 Oct. 1861. 93. Rabelo, “Excessos,” 173–74. Compare Mattoso, Bahia, 576–77. 94. Relatório-1850-1, 15 and 1859-1, 34. 95. AHEG, Restaurar 1812–1860, “1812–1815 Ofícios do Governo (fragmentos),” Fernando Delgado Freire de Castilho–Marquez de Aguilar, 20 Sept. 1814; Doc. Av., box 187, report, Câmara, Meiaponte, 11 May 1869; Municípios, Traíras, Coletor–Provedor de Fazenda, 27 May 1838; Relatório-1867-1, 31–33, and 1875, 42; Correio Official, 18 July 1874, 13 Feb. and 1 Sept. 1875. 96. This was not a new trend: Matutina, 14 May 1831. 97. See, for example, prices reported in AHEG, Doc. Av., box 448, for 1894; box 434 has a similar sequence of prices but for thirty-six weeks only. Earlier sets from the 1870s are available for thirty to forty weeks: e.g., Municípios, Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), July 1873.

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98. AHEG, Doc. Av, box 187, report, Câmara, Meiaponte, 11 May 1869. 99. Salles, Economia, 258. 100. Pohl, Viagem, 110–11, 190, 278–79, 286. 101. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 118, Delegado, Goiás–Chefe de Polícia, 19 Dec. 1857. 102. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 110; Salles, “Trabalhador Escravo,” 622; Gomes, “Itinerário,” 507. Death inventories recorded distilling equipment but valued it at simply the weight of the metal. 103. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 229, “Arrolamento dos Habitantes da Freguesia da Vila de Corumbá, 1850–1851”; Doc Av., box 205, “Requerimentos.” 104. Relatório-Mato Grosso-1880, 41, 1884, 34, and 1887, unpaginated; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 420, projeto n. 22, 28 July 1892. 105. Governador, Mensagem-1905, 56–62. 106. Soares, Notas Estatísticas, 48–49, 265; Lobo, História Político-Administrativa, 13, 32–33, 45–46; Brown, “Internal Commerce,” 475–76. See comments by Tollenare, Notas Dominicais, 90–91. 107. Transport costs to the coast for producers along the Rio São Francisco, already several hundred kilometers closer to the ports than most of Goiás, ate up half of the sale price of cotton: Leff, Underdevelopment, 16. 108. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 8, “Correspondência do Governo e Autoridades Fora da Província, 1808–1809,” Ministro e Secretário de Estado dos Negócios dos Estrangeiros e da Guerra, 20 June 1808; Pohl, Viagem, 228–29. 109. D’Alincourt, Memória, 90–91. See Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 38 on the good quality of Meiaponte cotton. 110. Salles, Economia, 272. And there was the question, too, of how much of “Bahia’s” cotton exports, for example, actually came from Goiás: Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, 23–26. 111. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 138, circular, Ministério de Agricultura, 7 Aug. 1861. 112. Correio Official, 10 Sept. 1870; Tribuna Livre, 27 Aug. 1881. 113. Governador, Mensagem-1917, p. 17. 114. Gardner, Viagem, 158. 115. Lobo, História Político-Administrativa, 78; Soares, Notas Estatísticas, 66, 71, 239; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 88; Relatório-1914, 38; Tribuna Livre, 25 Jan. 1879 and 2 July 1882; Publicador, 1 Jan. 1887. 116. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 299, “Conta Corrente com o Administrador do Porto Rio Grande Alto Araguaia”; vol. 588, “Conta Corrente com a Recebedoria do Porto do Rio Grande, 1875–1890.” Municípios, Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), O Encarregado da Liquidação–Inspetor da Tesouraria, 27 Feb. 1871. 117. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1861–73,” 6 April and 31 July 1863; Tribuna Livre, 27 Aug. 1881. 118. Correio Official, 11 April 1874; Publicador, 24 April 1886; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 88. 119. BN, I-31, 18, 23, 24: Pouso Alto (Piricanjuba) and Morrinhos described tobacco cultivation/preparation as the most important local industry; Wallé, États de Goyaz, 6; Informação Goyana, 15 April 1919. 120. Tribuna Livre, 25 Jan. 1879 and 2 July 1882; Publicador, 24 April 1886.

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chapter 5. stock raising 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 Expansão, 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-1835, 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, Mensagem1899, 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.

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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, 407–11, 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,

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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

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notes to chapter 5

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.

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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,

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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–

notes to chapter 5

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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.

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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. chapter 6. land 1. Mattos de Castro, Sul da História; Naro, “Customary Rightholders”; Dean, “Latifundia”; Mattos, Saquarema, Part III, Chap. 2. 2. Relatório-1854-3, 39. Interestingly, this was true in some of the export agricultural areas too: Mattos de Castro, Sul da História, 134. 3. On the colonial background for this see Motta, Nas Fronteiras, 37–38. 4. On the general history of sesmarias in Portugal and in Brazil see Lima, Pequena História Territorial, Chap. II; Silva, Terras Devolutas, Chaps. 1–3; Bittencourt, “Fundamentos da Estructura,” esp. n. 3. On sesmarias in Goiás see Silva, “Sesmarias.” 5. The area involved might, in fact, be larger still, as recipients typically counted only good land as part of their grants, not useless hills or waste: Bertran, História, 90; Teixeira da Silva, “Pecuária,” in Szmrecsányi, ed., História Econômica, 145. 6. Silva, “Sesmarias,” 183. 7. Salles, Economia, 252–53; tax officials received a percentage of what they collected: Palacín, Goiás, 88. 8. Silva e Souza, “Memória,” 143–44, 165. On sesmarias in one area of Goiás, see Bertran, História, Chap. X. 9. Motta, Nas Fronteiras, 36–37. 10. Bertran, História, 86 (quoting “Subsídios”). According to Silva, “Sesmarias,” there were no grants confirmed before 1754 (343), and only 9 confirmed in all (268). See Palacín, Goiás, 87–88, for the uproar in 1756 when Crown officials demanded proof of titles; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 21, “Livro de Ofícios, 1818,” Ten. José Rodrigues Jardim, 2 Dec. 1816.

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11. Silva, Terras Devolutas, 66–67. 12. Silva, Terras Devolutas, 73. 13. Dolhnikoff, “Projeto Nacional.” See also Aguiar, “Terras de Goiás,” 88–89. 14. Motta, Nas Fronteiras, 127–29. 15. Basile, “Reforma Agrária Cidadã.” 16. Lobo, História Político-Administrativa, 30–31; Bethell, ed., Brazil . . . 1822–1930, 132. 17. Dean, “Latifundia,” 611. 18. Naro, “Customary Rightholders”; Dean, Rio Claro, Chap. 1. 19. Motta discusses this in “Terra, Nação e Tradições.” 20. The most thorough treatment of the debates leading up to the passing of what would become the Land Law of 1850 is in Silva, Terras Devolutas, Chaps. 5–7, but see also Carvalho, Teatro de Sombras, Chap. 3, and Mattos, Saquarema, 239–40 nn. 104 and 105. 21. Da Costa, “Land Policies,” in Brazilian Empire. See also Frank, “Brazilian Far West,” 57–60. 22. Mattos, Saquarema, 247. 23. Alencar, Estrutura Fundiária, Appendix I; Silva, Terras Devolutas, Chap. 8. 24. Alencar, Estrutura Fundiária, Appendix 2; Silva, Terras Devolutas, Chap. 9. 25. It is not clear that Dean understood this: Dean, Rio Claro, 15. 26. Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório-1868, 74; Lobo, História Político-Administrativa, 120–25; Carvalho, Teatro das Sombras, 102; Dean, “Latifundia,” 625. 27. Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório-1870-1, 16. An 1873 law allowed those who had squatted on land illegally after 1854 to buy it, but few did: Aguiar, “Terras de Goiás,” 147. 28. Lobo, História Político-Administrativa, 75; Silva, Terras Devolutas, 147– 48; Dean, Rio Claro, 11. 29. Motta in Nas Fronteiras suggests that 40 percent of the holders may have failed to register (168). In Goiás, with some four thousand registrations, the authorities reported 290 fines for not registering on time: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 139, “Tesouraria: Quadro Nominal de Terras desta Província Multadas por Não Terem Apresentado nos Prazos Marcados.” 30. Guimarães, “O ‘Grilo’ em Goiás.” Compare Saboya, “A Lei de Terras . . . Mato Grosso,” 129–33. 31. Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório-1878, 36–37; Carvalho, Teatro das Sombras, 97–98. 32. AHEG, Doc, Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Regístro Apresentadas ao Conselho Geral, 1829–1838,” 5 July 1837; for an earlier version, see 6 June 1835. See also vol. 126, “Correspondência com Juizes de Paz, 1835–1853,” Campinas, 9 June 1836, and Anicuns, 9 July 1836; Relatório-1835, 13. 33. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 135, “Resoluções da Presidência da Província, 1835–1846,” 15 Feb. 1838. For Mato Grosso’s perspective on this area see Wilcox, “Cattle Ranching,” 153–54. 34. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 109, Ministério dos Negócios do Império, circular, 13 Jan. 1855.

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35. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 258, “Correspondência com Juizes de Paz, 1852– 1862,” circular, 1 Aug. 1856 (applicable throughout Brazil). 36. Motta, Nas Fronteiras, 163–64. 37. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 258, “Correspondência com Juizes de Paz, 1852– 1862,” circular, 27 Oct. 1859. 38. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 129. 39. On land and immigration, see Silva, Terras Devolutas, Chap. 10. 40. A frustrating number of men, for example, continued to survive by panning for diamonds: Bertran, Formação Econômica, 66; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 79–82. 41. AHEG, Doc. Div., Vol. 308, “Correspondência do Presidente com o Ministério dos Negócios do Império,” 27 July 1858; Municípios, Iporá (Rio Claro), Vigário, Rio Claro–Presidente, 20 Dec. 1858; Correio Official, 28 July 1852. 42. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 246, “Correspondência do Presidente com o Ministério dos Negócios do Império, 1851–57,” 11 Jan. 1856; Doc. Av., box 127, Coletor, Santa Cruz–Presidente, 27 Dec. 1858. For devoluta reported by other communities, see Doc. Av., box 129; Municípios, Natividade, Subdelegado–Presidente, 1 Oct. 1858; Taguatinga, Vigário–Presidente, 3 Nov. 1858 (Responding to a presidential circular of 27 July 1858). Generally, see Franco, Homens Livres, 131. 43. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 237, circular, Ministério da Agricultura, 19 March 1874; Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente, 14 Jan. 1875; Presidente–Ministério da Agricultura, 6 Feb. 1875. 44. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 224, Taguatinga, 18 Jan. 1873. 45. Silva, Terras Devolutas, 193–205; Motta, Nas Fronteiras, 163–65. 46. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério do Império, 1857–1860,” 27 July 1858 and 24 Dec. 1859. 47. Relatório-1859-3, 50–52; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 618, “Correspondência com o Ministério de Agricultura, 1877–1879,” 22 Feb. 1878; AMB, #1715, Coletor Goiás–Inspetor da Tesouraria da Fazenda, 10 Oct. 1888. 48. Relatório-1859-3, 52. Registrations, Goiás, 1858–1860 Municipality Properties Registered Capital 73 Ourofino 115 Barra 45 Mossâmedes 72 Curralinho 204 S. Luzia 333 Rio Claro 59 Anicuns 200 Rio Bonito 62 Rio Verde 91 Jaraguá 290 Meiaponte 234 Cavalcante 167 Arraias 200

notes to chapter 6 Chapéu Flores S. Domingos Palma S. Miguel/Almas Taguatinga Chapada Corumbá Bonfim Campinas Pouso Alto Conceição Morrinhos S. Rita Paranaíba Ipameri Catalão Formosa Pilar Crixás Amaro Leite S. José Tocantins Traíras Natividade P. Imperial Carmo Boavista S. Felix Duro

265

63 275 147 152 44 — 38 275 411 206 74 181 227 76 245 697 185 136 38 34 111 103 117 50 60 239 64 17

List compiled from various sources. For lists that vary slightly from this see AHEG, Doc. Div., (no number), “Repartição, 1858” (in fact this has registrations through 1860); Governador, Mensagem-1905, 119–20. See also Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório-1862, 63. 49. A “vast industry” of falsification of land documents rested, and rests, on the 1850/54 law: Martins, Cativeiro da Terra, 27–29. 50. Saint-Hilaire (Goiás, 37) described it as among the first places in the province to be cultivated. 51. Regarding land held pro indiviso see Silva, “Conflito de Terras.” For a similar situation in Rio Grande do Sul, see Chasteen, “Background,” 752–53. 52. Aguiar, “Terras de Goiás”; Silva, “Terra ‘Sem Lei.’“ 53. Mattos de Castro in Sul da História argues “in the zones of most recent occupation ‘purchase’ seems to have been the most common form of appropriation”(132)—but purchase from whom? 54. Recent research suggests that even in export areas land markets developed more slowly than might be imagined: Mattos de Castro, Sul da História, 116, 123–24. 55. Estrutura Fundiária, 172–73.

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56. AMB, #1715, Coletor, Goiás–Inspetor de Fazenda, 10 Oct. 1888. 57. Rosa, Bulhões aos Caiados. 58. AHEG, Doc. Div., box 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1861–1873,” 30 Nov. 1864. 59. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 304, Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente, 17 Jan. 1881. As late as 1905 the cost of measuring land in the majority of cases was more than the purchase price from the state: Governador, Mensagem-1905, 91–93. 60. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 247, Obras Públicas, 1 May 1875. More broadly, see da Cunha, ed., Legislação Indigenista, 292, 295. 61. AMB, #1715, Ofício, Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente, 10 May 1875, and Inspetor da Tesouraria da Fazenda–Presidente, 30 July 1888; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 532, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1873–1877,” 20 April 1876; Restaurar, “1879–1883, Livros de Editais, Termos, etc.,” Presidente–Ministério da Agricultura, 30 Jan. 1880; Doc. Av., box 266, Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente, 27 Jan. and 23 Feb. 1877. 62. 26 July 1879. On Aug. 16 the Tribuna Livre reported that there were now some fifty mortgages dating from 1866–77 registered, though whether any of these were for agricultural property is unknown. 63. “Family” = five persons. 64. See, for example, Baiocchi, Negros de Cedro, Chap. 5. 65. Silva, “Conflito de Terras”; Teixeira da Silva, “Pecuária, Agricultura,” in Szmrecsányi, ed., História Econômica, 129–32. 66. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério dos Negocios do Império,” 27 July 1858. 67. Ataídes, “Flores”; Palacín, História, 20; Registro–Catalão, no. 443; Alencar, Estrutura Fundiária, 55; França, Pioneiros, 97–98, 236; AHEG, Municípios, Rio Verde, Obispo–Governador, 10 Dec. 1891, and Intendência Municipal, Rio Verde–Governador, 16 Jan. 1892; Correio Official, 7 Oct. 1874; Paternostro, Viagem, 207, BN, I-31, 18, 22, n.d. (circa 1881). 68. Ataídes, “Flores,” 63–66. 69. Correio Official, 22 Feb. and 11 May 1840; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério de Negócios do Império,” 20 April 1858. Includes a copy of the 1736 Crown grant of land. 70. Correio Official, 22 Feb and 11 April 1840, and 17 Jan. 1874; Governador, Mensagem-1917, 18 and 1918, 25–27. 71. Correio Official, 28 Dec. 1853; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 32, Commissão de Fazenda Municipal–Assembléia Legislativa, 19 June 1841. Law 514 of 28 Oct. 1848 allowed concessions of land to municipalities but seems to have been little used: Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório-1869, 32. 72. AHEG, Doc. Div., box 308, “Correspondência da Presidência Provincial com o Ministério de Negócios do Império, 1857–1860,” 9 March and 20 Dec. 1858. 73. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 237, circular, Ministério dos Negócios da Agricultura, 20 March 1874; Doc. Div., vol. 532, “Correspondência da Presidência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1873–1877,” 10 May 1874.

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74. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 432, draft message, 15 April 1896. But towns did have land and were renting it: AHEG, Municípios, Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), “Termos de Contratos e Arrematação de Terras da Intendência Municipal, 1896” (to 1920). 75. Alencar, Estrutura Fundiária, 128–32 and 134–48. More generally: Silva, Terras Devolutas, Chap. 13. 76. An innovation and a reversal of the colonial laws that granted indivisibility only to large, especially sugar, properties. 77. Unlike the 1850/54 law, this made no specific provision for land for indigenous communities or aldeias. 78. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 432, draft message, 15 April 1896. 79. Goiás. Coleção das Leis do Estado de Goiás-1897, 9–23; Alencar, Estrutura Fundiária, 149–59. 80. Governador, Mensagem-1902, 39–40, and 1905, 12–13. 81. Carvalho, Teatro das Sombras, 86–93; Silva, Terras Devolutas, 144–45; Linhares, História, 178–79. 82. Correio Official, 17 May 1879; Goiás. Coleção das Leis da Província de Goiás-1879, 68–72. 83. Urban properties paid a separate tax called the dízimo urbano equal to 10 percent of the rental value of the property: Tribuna Livre, 12 July 1879. 84. AHEG, Municípios, Santa Cruz, Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria da Fazenda Provincial, 19 Sept. 1879; Cavalcante, Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria da Fazenda, 9 July 1879. See also Piracanjuba (Pouso Alto), Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria da Fazenda Provincial, 12 Dec. 1879. 85. Tribuna Livre, 13 Feb., 15 Feb., 22 Feb., 12 July 1879. 86. O Commércio, 27 March 1880; Tax rolls: AHEG, Municípios Caipônia (Rio Bonito), Catalão, Cavalcante, and Silvânia (Bonfim); Tribuna Livre, 7 Feb. 1880. 87. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 420, various drafts and discussion of the proposed law; Goyáz, 21 Oct. 1892. 88. AHEG, Municípios, Paraná (Palma), Câmara, Palma–Presidente, 7 April 1896; Morrinhos, Coletor–Inspetor da Tesouraria da Fazenda, 15 Oct. 1897; Doc. Av., box 501, “Requerimentos,” and dozens of lists of overdue tax payments reported by the municipalities. 89. Comparing the tax digests with the 1850s registries, Aguiar, “Terras de Goiás,” finds many more persons declaring but with a total of less than half the area registered in the 1850s, and lays this to exaggerated earlier claims, which is probably true. She does not consider, however, that, unlike the 1850s registries, the purpose of the 1890s counts was collection of a tax based on area, giving the owners a strong incentive to understate the size of their holdings. On fragmentation, compare Mattos de Castro, Sul de História, 173–74, and Chasteen, “Background.” 90. 9 Oct. 1886. 91. By comparison, Bell, Campanha Gaúcha, 39, describes a typical, middlerange ranch in Rio Grande do Sul during these years as approximately 11,000 ha,

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with 1,110 cattle; Chandler, The Feitosas, 129–30, found that a 1,000-ha ranch in the sertão of Ceará supported 50–150 cattle. 92. For oral histories of rural life in turn-of-the-century Goiás see Anzai, “Vida Cotidiana.” 93. Ex-president Couto de Magalhães confirmed this: Viagem, 32. 94. Relatório-1837, 6–7; Funes, Goiás 1800–1850, 98–99; Silva, “Terra ‘Sem Lei,’“ 140. 95. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 26, “Registro de Ofícios Dirigidos às Autoridades Civis da Capitania, 1820” (sic), José Rodriguez Jardim, 12 May 1823; vol. 136, “Juizes de Paz, 1835–1852,” Juiz Municipal, Jaraguá, 28 Sept. 1838; vol. 149, “Câmaras e Juizes,” Jaraguá, 25 May 1839; Cartório da Família, Santa Cruz, “Autos de Embargo,” e.g., Francisca Maria do Espírito Santo v. José Joaquim Pais, 1868. 96. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 137, draft report, Obras Públicas, 1861. 97. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 118, Delegado, Arraias–Chefe de Polícia, 6 June 1857; box 124, “Relatório da Secretaria de Polícia, 1858”; Relatório-1857-1, anexo. 98. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 68, “Correspondência—Cunha Mattos,” n.d., list of men available for military service in the 1820s in Duro: Acoroá: 49; Aricobas: 6; Caiapó: 6; “others”: 6. For a description of Duro in the 1840s: Gardner, Viagem, 148–50. 99. Correio Official, 25 Nov. 1837; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 262, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1853–1856,” 27 Oct. 1854; Doc. Div., vol. 429, “Registro de Correspondência do Governo com os Juizes de Direito, 1866–1872,” Juiz de Direito, Palma, 8 Oct. 1867. 100. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 262, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1853–1856,” 27 Oct. 1854; Municípios, Dianópolis (Duro), Subdelegado–Chefe de Polícia, 17 March and 3 June 1874. 101. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 645, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província Relativa à Catequese dos Índios, 1878–1885,” Diretor Geral dos Índios, 19 March 1879; Restaurar, “1879–1883—Livro de Editais,” Presidente–Ministério da Agricultura, 3 Nov. 1879. 102. On the history of Piabanhas see Santos and Damasceno, “Aldeamento Teresa Cristina.” 103. Correio Official, 6 Oct. 1858; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 395, “Juiz Municipal, 1862–1873,” Juiz Municipal Suplente, Porto Imperial, 5 Oct. 1872; vol. 429, “Registro de Correspondência do Governo com os Juizes de Direito, 1866–1872,” Juiz de Paz, Porto Imperial, 19 Oct. 1867; vol. 528, “Ofícios do Governo aos Juizes de Direito, 1873–1875,” Juiz de Direito, Porto Imperial, 5 March 1874. Relatório-1874, 37. 104. Karasch, “Inter-Ethnic Conflict.” In recent communications Prof. Karasch suggests that she is no longer so certain of this argument, but it probably remains a valid generalization. 105. Chasteen, “Background,” 755–56.

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chapter 7. work 1. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 23. See also p. 110. On socio-economic differentiation in the sertão, see Franco, Homens Livres, Chap. 3. 2. AHEG, Municípios, Cavalcante, Coletor–Provedor da Fazenda, 1 July 1855; “Situação da Província de Goiás,” (1860s), cited in Moraes, Bulhões, 28; Publicador, 4 Sept. 1886; Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse; Leal, Terras Goyanas, 47, 87. 3. For a short survey of the debate on the “national worker” see Greenfield, “The Great Drought.” 4. “Subsídios,” 282; Mello Franco, Viagens, 114; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 228. On the disincentives to work, see Cândido, Parceiros, 85–86. 5. Pohl, Viagem, 112. 6. For example: França, Pioneiros, 141–42. 7. Leff, “Economic Development in Brazil,” 44. 8. Compare Naro, “Customary Rightholders,” 510; Audrin, Sertanejos, 50. 9. Pohl, Viagem, 269. 10. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 54–55 n. 19. See also Gardner, Viagem, 157, 178. 11. See Table 2.5. Compare this, for example, with a growing slave population in neighboring Minas Gerais: Bergad, Slavery . . . Minas Gerais, 91. 12. “Subsídios,” 78, 149. 13. Funes, Goiás 1800–1850, 119–20. 14. “Subsídios,” 151. For a similar scheme: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 8, “Correspondência do Governo e Autoridades Fora da Província, 1808–1809,” Ministro Assistente do Despacho–Presidente do Real Erário, 30 Dec. 1808; vol. 36, “Correspondência da Secretaria dos Negócios do Reino, 1820–1824,” Câmara, Crixás–Gov. Manuel Ignácio de Sampião, 8 April 1820. 15. Relatório-1859-3, 67. 16. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol., 200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Provedor–Coletor, Goiás, 28 April 1847; Moraes, “Hospital,” 156–57; Relatório-1852,23. 17. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 332, printed form, 5 Dec. 1885, and box 347, printed form, 9 Dec. 1885. 18. Compare this, for example, with sales and exports from Pernambuco: Eisenberg, Sugar Industry, 156. 19. AHEG, Série 1800, nos. 57,60, 69, 74; Doc. Av., box 380, “Conta Corrente com a Recebedoria de Santa Rita do Paranaíba, 1861–1870”; Doc. Div., vol. 299, “Contas Correntes com o Administrador do Porto Rio Grande, Alto Araguaia . . . 1856–1875.” 20. AHEG, Municípios, Catalão, Recebedor–Inspetor Tesouraria, 7 Feb. 1879; Itumbiara (Santa Rita do Paranaíba), Recebedor–Inspetor do Tesouraria da Fazenda, 13 March 1872, 1 Oct. 1878; Silvânia (Bonfim), Coletor, 3 Sept. 1866. 21. Bieber, “Slavery and Social Life.” 22. AHEG, Doc Av., box 180, “Polícia,” Auto de Perguntas, 20 Sept. 1867; box 117, “Polícia,” Delegado, Santa Luzia–Chefe de Polícia, 7 Dec. 1857; box 238, “Polícia,” Delegado, Uberaba–Chefe de Polícia, 7 Jan. 1874. 23. See, for example, AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 124, “Livro 1o. Correspondência

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dos Juizes de Direito e Municipais, 1833–1847,” Juiz Municipal, Pilar, 1 Oct. 1838. 24. According to the 1872 census only in Ceará, Amazonas, Paraíba, and Rio Grande do Norte did the slaves form a lower percentage of the population. 25. Gardner, Viagem, 163. For similar activities at Bonfim, see Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 104. 26. Pohl, Viagem, 162. 27. “Subsídios,” 74; Salles, Economia, 242–46. 28. BN, I-11, 4, 2. 29. See the sources for Table 2.5. 30. AMB, matrículas: 708, 709, 715, 717, 722, 724, 728, 730, 731, 732, 780, 783, 794. 31. Cartório de Notas, Goiás; Leite, “Tecendo a Liberdade,” 62; Moraes, Bulhões, 68–75. For petitions from slaves asking for the state to complete their purchase price, see AHEG, Doc. Av., box 325, various; for a slave making a claim for freedom as the result of a will, see AHEG, Doc. Av., box 186, 4 March 1868. 32. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 332, printed form, 5 Dec. 1884, and box 347, printed form, 9 Dec.1885. 33. There is scant evidence for it in the capital, and Parente confirms an absence of street commerce in the north: “Mulheres,” 297. 34. Leite, “Tecendo a Liberdade,” 57–59. 35. 29 Oct. 1881. 36. Moraes, “Abolicionismo em Goiás”; Silva, Sombra dos Quilombos, 94–99; Salles and Silva Dantes, “A Escravidão Negra,” 49; Bretas, Instrução, 332. For announcements regarding the freeing of slaves, see Publicador, e.g. 28 March 1885, and for pieces supporting abolition: Publicador, 23 Feb. and 30 May 1885. 37. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 383, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1861–1873,” 1 Dec. 1871. 38. Publicador, 28 March 1885; Moraes, Bulhões, 66–67. Because the state did not have sufficient funds, the Ministry of Agriculture recommended this course: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 274, Ministério da Agricultura–Presidente, 30 Nov. 1878. For a count of free children: AHEG, Doc. Av., box 332, 5 Dec. 1884. 39. Tribuna Livre, 28 May 1881 and 13 July 1882; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 750, “Correspondência com o Ministério da Agricultura, 1883–1885,” 22 June 1883; Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Relatório-1882-1, 169, and 1885, 9; Leal, Terras Goyana, 142. 40. On the use of orphan labor, see Meznar, “Orphans.” 41. Palacín, Quatro Tempos, 18–19. 42. Professors Mary Karasch and Waldinice M. Nascimento are both currently working on the eighteenth-century demography of Goiás. 43. “Subsídios,” 1804, 281. 44. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 49–50 n. 2. 45. Silva e Souza, “Memória,” 159–60. On emigration from Minas Gerais to Goiás see Bergad, Slavery . . . Minas Gerais, 27. 46. Pohl, Viagem, 296–97; Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 121; Moraes, “Hospital,” 157–58.

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47. Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 161–62. 48. Relatório-1838, 21, and 1839, 19–20. 49. Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 36–37, 89. 50. AHEG, Municípios, Silvânia (Bonfim), 4 April 1848; Alencar, Estrutura Fundiária, 56–57. 51. Bertran, Formação Econômica, 62; Palacín, Coronelismo, 18–21; Paternostro, Viagem, 183; Tiballi, “Expansão,” 102. 52. Relatório-1862, 125; AHEG, Doc Av., box 184, Câmara, Conceição–Presidente, 10 Jan. 1868; for a similar complaint, see Municípios, São Domingos, Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 1 July 1890. 53. Rocha, “Política Indigenista,” 49; Doc. Av., box 147, “Índios: Assuntos Diversos,” Subdelegado, Pedro Affonso–Presidente, 10 Aug. 1858. For a similar policy for other presídios, see AHEG, Doc. Div., 297, “Juizes Municipais, 1856– 62,” Pilar, 9 July 1859. 54. Paternostro, Viagem, 273. The 1872 census counted some twenty-four thousand migrants in the south, from São Paulo, Minas, and Rio de Janeiro, and thirty-five hundred in the north, chiefly from Bahia, Piauí, and Pernambuco. See also AHEG, Municípios, Goiás, “1889, Relatório Eclesiástico.” 55. IHGG, Documentos, Pasta 002, Doc. 52, “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangeiros e Marinha, 1829–1831,” 31 Aug. 1829. 56. Relatório-1858-1, 19. 57. Relatório-Mato Grosso-1859, 32. 58. Publicador, 11 July 1885 and 9 Oct. 1886. 59. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 497, various correspondence regarding Portuguese immigration; Governador, Mensagem-1897, 9. For a summary history of immigration efforts, see Mensagem-1930–33, 51–57. Moraes, Bulhões, 145–46. 60. Relatório-1850-1, 23, 1858-1, 19–20, and 1869, 12. Compare Iglésias, Política Econômica, 132 and Aleixo, Vozes no Silêncio, 109. 61. All of the indigenous slaves in the painting “The Slave Hunter” reproduced in da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios, 143, are women and children. In his travels Wells met what he described as an “insane” slaver of Indians, surrounded by captive women and children: Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 222–24. On the role of kidnapping in frontier society, see Martins, Fronteira, Chap. 1. 62. On “just war” see Leonardi, Entre Árvores, 270. 63. “Subsídios,” 83, 280; Bertran, Notícia-1, 58; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 124, “Livro 1o. Correspondência dos Juizes de Direito e Municipais, 1833–1847,” Juiz Municipal, Porto Imperial, 10 Oct. 1845. 64. Pohl, Viagem, 237. For laws banning Indian slavery, see da Cunha, ed., Legislação Indigenista, 134–35, 136–37, 199–202. 65. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 36, “Correspondência da Secretaria dos Negócios do Reino, 1820–1824,” Manoel Ignácio de Sampião, 14 Nov. 1821; IHGG, Documentos, Pasta 002, Doc. 52, “Livro 4o. para o Império, Estrangeiros e Marinha, 1829– 1831,” Miguel Lino de Moraes–Ilmo. Sr. José Clemente Pereira, 25 Sept. 1829. 66. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas Apresentadas ao Conselho Geral, 1829–1838,” 27 July 1835; Karasch, “Catequese e Cativeiro,” 402; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 362.

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67. 29 Jan. 1887. 68. França, Pioneiros, 179. 69. Matutina, 8 Aug. 1832; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 353; Pohl, Viagem, 268. 70. Relatório-1867-3, 8–9. 71. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 124, “Livro 1o. de Correspondência dos Juizes de Direito e Municipais, 1833–1847,” Porto Imperial, 1845; vol. 191, “Correspondência da Presidência ao Ministério dos Negócios do Império, 1845–1848,” 14 Oct. and 12 Nov. 1845. 72. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 308, “Correspondência da Presidência ao Ministério do Império, 1857–1860,” 21 Feb. 1858; Correio Official, 12 Feb. 1859. 73. AHEG, Restaurar, “1879–1883 Livro de Editais” (in fact correspondence with Ministry of Agriculture), 26 Jan. 1880. 74. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas Apresentadas ao Conselho Geral, 1829–1838,” 9 Dec. 1831; Doc. Av., box 75, Câmara, Goiás, 15 April 1850; Restaurar, “1844–89,” Câmara, Natividade, 15 Jan. 1847; BN, I28, 31, 26, “Ofício de Miguel Lino de Moraes dirigido aos Srs. do Conselho Geral da Província de Goiás . . . 1830”; Matutina, 6 Jan. 1831, 26 May and 18 July 1832. See also da Cunha, ed., Legislação Indigenista, 23–31. 75. AHEG, Restaurar, “Livros de Editais, Termos, etc.,” 22 Dec. 1879, Doc. Div., vol. 645, “Correspondência da Província Relativo à Catequese dos Índios,” Encarregado Interino do Serviço de atequese no Valle do Araguaya, 5 Nov. 1880; Relatório-1881-2, 66. See Relatório-1851, 45, regarding Indian orphans sent to apprentice at the Rio de Janeiro arsenal. 76. Cartório da Família, Santa Cruz, 13 June 1864. See also Karasch, “Slave Women,” 83. 77. See, for example, instructions for an 1835 bandeira: AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 125, “Correspondência da Presidência com as Câmaras, 1834–1835,” Câmara, Traíras, 1 Aug. 1835. 78. Relatório-1839, 29; see also Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 40–41, and AN, Ijj9, 498, “Ministério de Império,” Presidente, Goiás–Ministério, 15 Oct. 1845. 79. Relatório-1850-1, 35, 1859-2, 62, and 1869, 12–13; AHEG, Restaurar, “1879–1883, Livro de Editais,” 22 Dec. 1879; Municipios, Goiás, box 1, “Projecto de Reglamento da Catequese,” n.d. (1870s/1880s). For similar arguments by the president of Mato Grosso, see Relatório-Mato Grosso-1859, 34–36. 80. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 304, Ministro da Agricultura–Presidente, Goiás, 17 Aug. 1881, and Doc. Div., vol. 645, “Correspondência da Presidência da Província Relativa à Catequese dos Índios,” Presidente–Diretor dos Índios, 5 Oct. 1881; Municípios, Goiás, “Projeto de Regulamento da Catequese,” n.d. (1870s/80s). 81. Rocha, “Política Indigenista,” 70; Gomes, “Itinerário,” 491; Wells, Three Thousand Miles-2, 216; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 268–69. 82. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 266, Delegado, Porto Imperial–Chefe de Polícia, 23 April 1877; Pohl, Viagem, 227; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 379; Paternostro, Viagem, 175–76. 83. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 207, “Correspondência do Governo com Diversos—

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1848,” Presidente–Rufino Theotônio Segurado, 6 Sept. 1849. See also Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Câmara, 15 Feb. 1848. 84. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capitania a Diversos, 1804–1809,” various; Doc. Av., box 117, “Comissão do Comércio, Agricultura, Indústria e Artes,” 22 Sept. 1857; Municípios, Natividade, “Informação Sobre Alguns Pontos da Navegação para o Pará,” 28 Dec. 1849, and Paraná (Palma), Câmara, n.d. (late 1840s); Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 103–6. 85. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 207, “Correspondência do Governo com Diversos—1848,” Presidente–Rufino Theotônio Segurado, 6 Sept. 1849; Municípios, Natividade, “Informaçáo sobre alguns Pontos,” 28 Dec. 1849 and Paraná (Palma), Câmara, Palma, n.d. (late 1840s); Relatório-1859-3, 69. For travelers’ experiences with this problem, see Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-1, 342 and Mello Franco, Viagens, 161–64. 86. AHEG, Municípios, Porto Nacional (Porto Imperial), Câmara, 12 Jan. 1882; Couto de Magalhães, Viagem, 187; Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 149–50, has a copy of an 1846 law meant to regulate river labor; there is no evidence that it was enforceable. 87. On the origins of vagrancy in the colonial period, see Souza, Desclassificados, Chap. 2. 88. Rabelo, “Excessos,” 65, and Moraes, “Estratégias,” 105–6; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 442, “Relatórios, 1868–1882,” “Polícia, 1880–81.” See also Relatório1881-1, 11, and 1881-2, 53–54. 89. Chorographia, 77–78. For similar comments a half-century earlier, see “Subsídios,” 126; AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 442, “Relatórios, 1868–1882,” Polícia, 1880–81”; Relatório-1881-3, 54. 90. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 54, “Cópias,” 9 April 1847. 91. Matutina, 19 May 1832. 92. Rabelo, “Excessos,” 68. 93. Quoted in Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 20. 94. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas Apresentadas ao Conselho, 1829–1838,” 10 June 1835; Doc. Av., box 187, report, Câmara, São José do Tocantins, 22 Feb. 1869; Municípios, Natividade, 16 Jan. 1874. 95. Relatório-1881-1, 11. See also AHEG, Municípios, Cavalcante, Subdelegado–Câmara, 6 Sept. 1883. 96. AHEG, Municípios, Catalão, 19 May 1890. 97. For example: AHEG, Municípios, Niquelândia (São José do Tocantins), Câmara, 15 Oct. 1893. 98. AHEG, Municípios, Catalão, 8 March 1900. But compare Rabelo, “Excessos,” 169–71. 99. Brasil, Coleção das Leis do Império do Brasil, vol. 3, 42–43. 100. But see the advertisement for printed contracts in Província de Goyáz, 4 Aug. 1870. 101. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 108, “Livro de Registro de Propostas Apresentadas ao Conselho Geral, 1829–1838,” 27 July 1837. 102. Lamounier, “Formas de Transição,” and “Trabalho sob Contrato”; Correio Official, 22 and 29 Nov., 3 Dec. 1879.

274

notes to chapter 7

103. Vasconcellos, Santa Dica, 152–61. 104. Moura, Saindo das Sombras, Chap. 1. Mattos de Castro, Ao Sul da História, 113–19, 179–87; Graham, Patronage and Politics, 20–21. 105. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 68, “Correspondência—Cunha Mattos”: lists of men available for military service and their families. 106. Castello Branco, Arraial, 181–82. 107. Compare Martins, “Growing in Silence,” 327. For a bleaker appraisal of the agregado’s situation, see Franco, Homens Livres, 143–47. 108. Castello Branco, Arraial, 152. See also Audrin, Sertanejos, Chap. 10. In many parts of Brazil both jagunços and capangas were hired professional killers, but Audrin, who lived many years in the sertão of Goiás, clearly distinguished the two in the case of that province. 109. For example, Souza, “Sociedade Agrária,” 119–20. 110. Elis, Veranico, 41. 111. Mattos de Castro, “Beyond Masters and Slaves,” 82. For an example of an agregado apparently pursued and killed by his enemies see AHEG, Doc. Av., box 197, “Polícia,” 4 March 1870. 112. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 313, 8 Aug. 1882. 113. Brasil, Ministério da Agricultura, Synopse, 37. For the vocabulary of the cowboy, see Synopse, 85–86. Paternostro, Viagem, 208–14 has a good description of the activities of cowboys. 114. Ataídes, “Flores,” 32; Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 93–95. The counts for the 1871 and 1885 slavery laws identified several slaves as vaqueiros, though these may have been simply cowboys. 115. Melatti, Índios e Criadores, 21. On manipulation of the sorte system by the fazendeiros—”the principal injustice practiced in the sertão”—see Audrin, Sertanejos, 161–62. 116. For a description, based on oral traditions, of how vaqueiros developed their own herds and ranches, see Anzai, “Vida Cotidiana,” 53–54. 117. Compare Chasteen, “Background,” 741. 118. Relatório-1835, 29; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 197, “Requerimento,” n.d. (circa 23 Aug. 1870): a camarada took money but fled to Mato Grosso before signing the contract. See also Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 46. 119. Relatório-1836, 13; Castelnau, Regiões Centrais-2, 116–17. 120. Moraes, “Estratégias,” 107. 121. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 257, Delegado, Jaraguá, 12 Nov. 1876. 122. Campos, “Questão Agrária,” 119. 123. Male slave artisans included 35 metalworkers, 91 woodworkers, 55 who worked in construction, and 17 leather workers, among others. Some 800 slave women were seamstresses or “cloth workers.” 124. For example: Pohl, Viagem, 142; Matutina, 15 June 1830; Silva e Souza, “Memória,” 147; and Relatório-1843, 6. Saint Hilaire was more complimentary: Goiás, 52. 125. Palacín, Goiás, 88; Cunha Mattos, Chorographia, 68–69. 126. Relatório-1861-3, 5. 127. AHEG, Municípios, Luziânia (Santa Luzia), Câmara, 31 Jan. 1848. On

notes to conclusions

275

the debased position of manual labor see Siqueira, “Trabalhador Livre,” 107, and Rabelo, “Excessos,” 59–62. 128. Moraes, “Hospital,” 153. On slave artisans, see Salles, “Trabalhador Escravo,” 626–31. 129. Relatório-1843, 7. 130. Relatório-1850-1, 55, and 1861-21, 6; AHEG, Doc. Av., box 137, Alencastre–Inspetor Tesouraria, 30 April 1861; Publicador, 8 May 1886. 131. Pohl (Viagem, 222) encountered a woman managing a sugar mill. On the life of urban elites, see Rabelo, “Excessos,” Chap. 4. But in the 1930s Paternostro still found that women living off the main roads “hid from visitors”: Viagem, 193. 132. Brandão and Ramalho, Campesinato Goiano, 58 n. 12; Anzai, “Vida Cotidiana,” 91–92. In addition to corn and other agricultural products, the estate of Maria Volante dos Anjos (Cartório, Goiás Velho, n.d.) included three spinning wheels and a loom. 133. AHEG, Municípios, Pilar, 1842; see also Parente, “Mulheres,” 294–96. 134. França, Pioneiros, 64. 135. AHEG, Gabinete, “1838–1845 Registro de Ofícios da Presidência da Província para os Ministérios do Império, Marinha e Estrangeiros,” 16 July 1841. 136. Parente, “Avesso,” 60–62. For the inventory of a small store run by a female, see Cartório das Orfães, Pirinópolis, Anna Aleu da Silva, 1838. The province typically exempted taverns owed by poor women from taxes: AHEG. Doc. Div., vol. 168, “Correspondência da Secretaria da Presidência para a Secretaria da Fazenda, 1840–1848,” 15 June 1851; and Relatório-1853-5, 23. 137. Parente, “Mulheres,” 299; Tribuna Livre, 21 April 1883. 138. Simões de Paula, “Leopoldina,” 308. 139. Costa, “Meiaponte,” 97. 140. Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 54. This had a long history: “Subsídios,” 284. 141. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 327, “Termos de Bem Viver.” conclusions 1. Uricoechea, Patrimonial Foundations, 155. 2. On indirect and delayed returns to state investment in infrastructure, see Summerhill, Order Against Progress. 3. Riviere, Forgotten Frontier. 4. Matutina, 15 June 1830. 5. Volpato, Cativos do Sertão. 6. One exception: the telegraph arrived at Carolina (Maranhão) and, therefore, at least indirectly, the north of Goiás decades before it reached the south of that province. 7. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 8, “Correspondência do Governo e Autoridades Fora da Provincia, 1808–1809,” Francisco de Assis Mascarenhas–Ministro e Secretario de Estado dos Negócios Estrangeiros e da Guerra, 20 June 1808; Leite Moraes, Apontamentos, 88; Tribuna Livre, 28 April 1883; Informação Goyana, 15 Feb. 1918; Spix and Martius, Viagem-1, 104. 8. Cunha, Legislação Indigenista, 134. 9. Relatório—Maranhão-1855, 46; Relatório-Paraiba-1853, 24.

276 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

notes to conclusions Relatório—São Paulo-1859, 25. Relatório—Alagoas-1848, 11–12. Relatório—Minas Gerais-1857, 12 (quote shortened). Relatório—Paraná-1878, 10. Relatório—Pernambuco-1854, 7; Relatório—Rio Grande do Sul-1851, 11.

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Index

Agregados, 19, 107, 163, 168, 199, 200, 201 Agriculture: colonial policies, 105–6; and weather, 112–13; pests and parasites, 111–12, 250n35; practices, 18–19, 108–9, 110–11, 209–10; precapitalist, 211–12; slave labor, 107–8; subsistence production, 107; transport costs, 108. See also Taxes Aldeias, 13, 41, 74–77, 78, 102, 178; abuses, 76; source of slaves, 194. See also Boavista; Duro; São José de Mossâmedes Alencastre, José Martins de, 12, 13, 80, 143–44, 147, 154 Alves de Oliveira, Joaquim, 80, 94, 98, 111, 126, 128, 135 Amaro Leite, 74, 77, 114, 141, 191 Anicuns, 83–84, 106, 186 Antas (Anápolis), 129, 166, 175 Apinayé(s), 12, 72, 76, 193, 195 Araxá, 136 Army, regular: ineffectiveness of, 40; as police, 39–40; recruitment, 39, 229n79 Arraias, 64, 65, 90, 143, 144, 170, 172; ecology, 176; land conflict, 177; tax collection, 52; vampire bats, 138 Artisans, 203–4, 274n123 Assembly, Provincial, 28–29 Bahia, 8, 19, 145, 154, 164, 190; bandits, 68, 69, 71; counterfeiting, 70; criminals, 140; markets, 131; slave prices, 183 Bandeiras/bandeirantes, 14, 22, 58, 74, 78, 141, 156, 192–93 Bandits, 68, 69, 70–71. See Bahia; Crime; Jalapão Barreiros (MG), 143 Bats, vampire. See Cattle Boavista, 30, 40, 52, 63, 65, 67, 68, 76, 102, 103, 146, 195 Bonfim (Sylvânia), 7, 40, 63, 64, 91, 98,

129, 166, 167, 170, 174, 190; cattle fair, 143–44; lynching, 36–37, 66 Borders, interprovincial disputes, 68, 125, 153–54, 173 Budgets: municipal, 56–57; provincial, 28–29, 50–51, 55–56 Bulhões, 27, 169 Caldas Novas, 7 Camaradas, 198–99, 202. See also Agregados Campinas, 7, 90 Canoeiros (Avá-Canoeiros), 12, 13, 193; attacks by, 72, 78, 116, 141, 191; expeditions against, 58, 74 Capangas, 34, 97, 200, 274n108 Capuchins, as missionaries, 13, 22, 76 Caracatys, 12 Carijós, 193 Carmo, 73 Carolina (MA), 52, 102, 114 Carretão, 75, 138, 139 Carts, ox, 95–97; damaged caused by, 246n84 Castelnau, Francis, 67, 84, 90, 94, 111, 138 Catalão, 26, 32, 40, 61, 71, 112, 117, 125, 151, 153, 154, 171, 172; cattle smuggling, 153; crime, 68; immigration, 190; slave exports, 185 Cattle, 130–54, 210–11, 259n84; capital requirements, 135–36; colonial period, 130–31; commerce, 142–50; disease, 139–40; exports, interprovincial, 149– 50, 210–11, 260n98; marchantes, 143; markets, 143–45; pests and parasites, 138–39; prices, 145, 148, 259n78; regional, 132–33; roundups, 134–35; sales, 146–48, 259n89; and salt, 136– 38; smuggling, 150–53; technology, 18, 133–36; thieves, 67, 140–41; Vão de Paranã, 131–32 Cavalcante, 33, 41, 74, 117, 131, 143,

294

index

166, 174; bandits attack, 71; saltpeter mining, 212 Cemeteries (Campo da Forca), 48–49 Chamboiá(s), 73, 77 Chapada, 182 Chapéu, 143 Chimangos, 26 Church, Catholic, state relations, 13, 40–41 Clergy, 41–43; quality of, 13; problems with, 42–43; training, 42 Colégio Isabel, 76 Colônia Blasiana, 189 Commerce, 89–93; imports, 92–93; mascates, 89–90, 200, 209; merchants, wealth of, 224n73; shops, 91–92; traders, 90; taverns, 90–91 Conceicão, 48, 143, 172; bandits, 71; gold mining, 84 Conscription. See Army, regular Corumbá, 33, 85, 91, 143, 170, 174; slave holders, 107, 127 Cotton: export difficulties, 128; production, 127–29 Counterfeiting, 69–70, 144 Cowboy, drawing of, 256n16 Coxim (MT), 96, 137 Crime, 61–71, 140–41; causes of, 65–67; death-sentence commutation, 236n44; “impunity,” 66; provincial boundaries, 68; and weakness of the state, 66–67 Crixás, 108, 138, 186; sugar mills, 126 Cunha Mattos, Raymundo José da, 9, 11, 35, 84, 111, 131, 132, 190, 196, 203 Cunha Menzes, Luíz da, 106 Curralinho, 63, 65, 174 D’Alincourt, Luiz, 111 Delegados/subdelegados, 29–31; competence, 31; and crime, 30–31; lack of support, 30; substitutes, 30; threats against, 31 Delgado, Fernando, 35, 46, 80 Desemboque, 136 Devoluta, 19; colonial 155–56; national, in Goiás, 162–64; sales, 169, 172–73 Diamonds: mining, 85–86, 244–45n42; state monopoly, 223n47 Diseases, 46–47, 231–32n122; smallpox, 46–47, 252n124; malaria, 47 Dízimo, 53–54; abolition of, 117; agricultural, 113–17; cattle, 148–49;

collection procedures, 114–16; debated, 114–15; debts, 116–17, 252n65; dízimo urbano, 267n83; exemptions, 113–14 Doctors, shortage of, 47, 232n128 Duro (Dianópolis) (aldeia), 68, 78, 151, 178; bandits attack, 71; gold mining, 84 Education, 44–46 Elections, 2–3, 27; violence, 20, 27 Eschwege, Wilhelm Ludwig von, 136 Fires, effects of, 7, 8, 14, 109, 135, 256n25 Flores, 40, 87, 144; anti-Portuguese violence, 26; community land, 171–72; stock raising, 131; trade, 143 Food: supply and prices, 120–25; for Goiás (city), 124–25; high prices, causes of, 121–23, 252n73 Formosa, 40, 63, 64, 143, 162, 187; attack on gypsies, 69; cattle smuggling, 151; community land, 171; as “Couros,” 255n6; iron foundry, 88; political struggle, 27; Vão do Paranã, 8, 131–32 Frontiers, 13–22, 208–9 Gardner, George, 43, 84, 140, 186 Gaviões, 193 Gerais, 140, 164 Goiás (city), 11, 37, 94, 107; land sales, 168; market, 108, 118–19, 125, 143; municipal land, 172; public health, 48; slaughterhouse, 119–20; sugar mills (Vila Boa), 126; slave population, 187; Vila Boa, 11, 83 Goiás (province): geography, 8–9; population, 14, 15; settlement patterns, 15 Gold: mining, 6–7, 9, 82–85, companies, failure of, 84–85; quinto, decline of, 223–24n50 Gomes de Siqueira, João Bonifácio, 28, 88 Gradaús, 12, 76 Guajajáras, 12 Gypsies, 68–69 Horses, 54, 141–42, 147; disease, 141– 42; prices, 141; smuggling, 150; taxes,

index 148, 149; theft, 140; vampire bats, 138; Vão do Paranã, 113, 132–32 Immigration: international, 191–92; interprovincial, 189–91, 271n54 Indians: attacks by, 9, 18, 50, 57, 71–73, 78, 141, 193, 239n89; attacks, causes, 73–74; attacks, effects, 73; as cattle thieves, 140–41; complaints by, 241n118; groups, 12–13; as labor, 193–94, 213; as labor on river boats, 195; Luzo-Brazilian attitudes toward, 14; slavery, 14, 18, 192–96, 271n61. See also Canoeiros; Kayapós; Xavantes; Xerentes Industries, 79, 242n2. See also Cotton; Iron; Textiles Ipameri, 71, 171 Iron, 87–89, 245n47 Jagunços, 200, 247n108 Jalapão, 154 Januária (MG), 137, 143, 256n30 Jaragua, 25, 106, 117, 143, 164, 167, 202 Jataí, 19, 64, 68, 80, 122, 171, 193; export of cattle, 147; immigration to, 190 Javaés, 12, 13 Javahus, 12 Judges: juiz de direito, 31–33; court sessions, 227nn35,39; murder of, 225n5; substitutes, 32, 33–34; justice of the peace, 31; municipal, 32 Juries, 34 Karajás (Carajás), 12, 13, 77 Kayapós (Caiapós), 12, 76, 194; attacks, 13, 19, 72, 73, 77, 82, 86–87, 182, 193; at São José de Mossâmedes, 75 Krahós (Carahós), 12, 140–41 Labor: female, 91, 204–5, 275n131; free, 212; forced wage, 5; laws, 198, 273n86; “laziness,” 4–5, 181–83; on river boats, 195–96; role of the state, 20; shortages, 81, 180; in textile factory, 81–82. See also Agregados; Camaradas; Slavery Land: capital flows to, 169; as a commodity, 179, 213; community ownership, 171–72; conflicts, 20–21,

295

177–78; and control of labor, 178–79; fragmentation of, 267n89; settlement of, in Goiás, 161–62; law of 1850/54, 158–61; law of 1850/54 in Goiás, 162, 166–67; markets for, 167–69, 213; measurement costs, 266n59; municipal, 266n71, 267n74; patterns of ownership, 170–71, 174–77, 267–68n91; prices 168; registration, 165–66, 263n29, 264–65n48; sales 265n53; surveyors, shortage of, 164–65; taxes, 174. See Posse(s); Devoluta Leal, Oscar, 46, 48, 70, 85, 88, 91, 95 Lino de Moraes, Miguel, 26, 47, 81, 84, 133, 192, 193 Lynching, in Bonfim, 36–37, 66 Magalhães, Couto de, 103, 104 Mascarenhas, Francisco de Assis, 83, 106 Mal triste (tristeza), 139–40 Marchantes, 143 Markets, 118–19 Mascates, 89–90, 200, 209 Mato Grosso (forest), 7–8, 109 Mato Grosso (province), 17, 19, 45, 72, 76, 79, 127, 185, 188, 191, 210; border dispute, 154, 173; food sent to, 122; horse exports to, 142; tobacco exports to, 129; troops transferred to, 37, 38; slave exports to, 59; slave violence in, 58; salt trade, 137 Medicine, popular, 47–48 Meiaponte (Pirenópolis), 5, 68, 85, 88, 90, 99, 106, 174, 187, 205; agricultural techniques, 110–11; business practices, 91; decline of, 11; land possession, 165; mal triste, 139; market, 107, 108, 118, 125, 143; National Guard, 35; slave population, 186, 205 Mello Franco, Virgílio de, 11, 48 Mercury, 85 Migration. See Immigration Militia, colonial, 34–35. See also National Guard Minas Gerais, 19, 40, 45, 52, 65, 66, 69, 86, 125, 131, 140, 151, 185, 214; border disputes, 68, 153–54; cattle fairs, 143, 144; cattle fattening, 145; emigration, 7, 8, 27, 122, 132, 161, 189–90; mal triste, 139; political

296

index

parties, 26, 28; salt trade, 96, 137; slave sales to, 188 Missionaries. See Capuchins Moquém, 26, 43–44, 65, 90, 209, 212 Morrinhos, 168, 190 Mule trains, 93–95; organization, 94; problems with, 94–95; labor on, 96–97 National Guard, 35–37; conscription, 39; officers, 228n56; organization, problems with, 35–36; as police, 36–37, 59; at presídios, 57, 77, 78; resistance to service, 37 Natividade, 30, 40, 67, 90, 97, 120, 143, 144, 162, 174; National Guard troops, 36; priests, 43; public lands, 164; river traffic, 102; slave population, 186, 187; vagrancy, 197 Palma, 30, 48, 57, 74, 90, 102, 143, 172, 186; trade with Belém, 103 Paracatú (MG), 8, 46, border disputes, 68, 125, 153–54 Paraguayan War, 38, 58, 121–22, 142, 253n91 Parties, political, 3, 26–27; and violence, 27–28 Paternostro, Júlio, 11 Pedestres, 38, 77 Pedro Afonso, 40, 52, 65, 76 Peixe, 102, 143 Pigs, 48–49, 154 Pilar, 40, 143, 172, 204; gold mining, 84; slave population, 186 Piracanjuba (Pouso Alto), 52, 129, 140, 175 Pohl, Johann Emanuel, 11, 86, 109, 138 Police, provincial, 37–38; chief of, 28, 29 Pontal, 73 Population of Goiás province, 12, 14, 15, 223n36 Porto Imperial (Porto Nacional), 9, 40, 47, 64, 73, 74, 103, 114, 116, 138, 143, 176, 187; immigration to, 191; river traffic, 101, 102; slave population, 186 Portos, 98, 137, 151–52, 153, 154, 185 Posse, 87, 90, 143; crime, 67 Posse(s), 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164 President, provincial, 24–26; activities of, 25–26

Presídios, 37, 41, 77–78; criminals, 77. See also Indians Public health, 46–49; conditions in towns, 48 Quilombos, 34–35, 58, 59, 60, 235n33, 235–36n41 Quinto. See Gold Relação, 33 Religion, popular, 41, 43, 230n93, 231n108, 232–33n132, 257n43 Revenue. See Taxes Rio Araguaia, 103–4 Rio Bonito (town), 8, 72, 87, 182; cattle exports, 147; manumission, 188; property patterns, 166, 170, 175–76; slave population, 187 Rio Claro: diamond mining, 86; gold mining, 84 Rio Claro (town), 40, 59, 166, 170, 182; Indian attacks, 72, 73, 87; dízimo, 115 Rio Pilões, 73, 84, 86 Rio São Francisco, 90, 101, 103, 125, 130, 131, 137, 143 Rio Tocantins, 100–103 Rio Verde (town), 31, 40, 63, 68, 171; cattle exports, 147; immigration to, 122, 190; Indian attacks, 19; land sales, 168, 170; slave population, 187 Rio Vermelho, 103 Rivers, 8; communications, 99–104; labor, 102; river craft, 100–101; shipwrecks, 101; smuggling, 103; steam navigation, 104. See also specific rivers Roads, 97–100 Roraima, compared to Goiás, 208 Sabinada, 225n7 Saint-Hilaire, Auguste de, 1, 11, 22, 86, 134, 180, 182 Salinas, 114 Salt, 136–38 Sampião, Miguel Ignácio, 81, 84, 185, 192–93 Santa Cruz, 57, 94, 117, 125, 164, 174, 194; crime, 65, 66; exports, 154; National Guard, 36; slave population, 186; immigration to, 190 Santa Leopoldina, 77 Santa Luzia (Luziânia), 19, 117, 125, 162, 167, 170, 174, 203; agricultural

index techniques, 110; business practices, 91; disease, 46; iron forge, 88; slave exports, 185; slave population, 186, 187; sugar mills, 126 Santa Maria Taguatinga, 131, 164; cattle fair, 143, 144; smuggling, 140, 151 Santa Rita do Paranaíba (Itumbiara), 31, 70, 153 São Domingos, 90, 143, 144, 166 São Francisco, proposed province, 238n70 São José de Mossâmedes (aldeia), 13, 75, 82, 86, 141; iron foundry, 87; land sales, 169 São José do Tocantins, 44, 84, 143, 164, 167, 197 São Miguel e Almas, 67, 154 São Romão (MG), 137, 256n30 Sertão, images of, 15–16 Sesmarias, 155–57, 262nn5,10; in Goiás, 162–64 Sheep, 154 Slaughterhouses, 119–20 Slavery, African, 58–61, 183–89; abolition, 188–89; cost, 183–84; escapes, 58–59, 188; export tax, 54, 185; and food production, 122; importation, 183, 185; manumission, 188; population, 59–60, 270n24; prices, 184, 187; resistance, 60, 61; revolts, absence of, 59; sales, 185–86; and sugar production, 126–27 Slavery, Indian. See under Indians Smallpox, 46–47, 252n124 Smuggling: of cattle, 150–53; of horses, 150 Spix, J. Baptist von, 131, 212 State: formation, 2–6, 24; poverty of, 206–8 Sugar, production of, 126–27

297

Tapirapés, 12, 13 Taverns, 90–91 Taxes: budgets, 50–51; “5 percent” tax, 117–18; interprovincial export, 4; land, 174; revenue, state, 50–57; revenue officials, 51–52, 53, 233n5. See also Dízimos; Slavery, African Textiles, 79–82; factories, 80–82 Tobacco, 128–29 Towns, 9, 11–12. See also specific towns Traíras, 74; cotton production, 128; iron foundry, 87; land, 166, 167; mercantile society, 100; sugar mills, 126; tax collection, 149 Transport, 17, 254n107 Trindade, 64 Tropas. See Mule trains Uberaba (MG), 96, 137–38, 186, 192 Vagrancy, 196–97 Vão do Paranã, 39, 90, 131, 141; flooding, 113, 132 Vaqueiros, 201–2 Violence: anti-Portuguese, 25–26, 69; interpersonal, 19–20, 61, 63, 64, 65. See also Bandeiras/bandeirantes; Crime; Indians: attacks by; Parties, political Wallé, Paul, 91 Wells, James, 95, 136 Women. See Labor: female Xacriabá, 192 Xavantes (Chavantes), 12, 58, 76; attacks by, 72, 73, 141; river labor, 195 Xerentes (Cherentes), 12, 74, 76; attacks by, 72; land, 178