CORONADO

Just in case you think I’m making this up, I’ll have you know I’m reading this out of a book called Seeds of Change, which the Smithsonian Institution put out for the 500th anniversary of Columbus sailing. So: From the moment the cattle he brought stepped onto Hispaniola, eating and breeding began in earnest:

Herman J. Viola, Carolyn Margolis, eds., Seeds of change: a quincentennial commemoration, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 80-82:

The cows were soon dropping calves two and three times a year, and the first bulls were massively bigger than those back in Spain, a report confirmed by modern archaeology. In 1518 Alonzo de Zuazo informed his king that thirty or forty strays would grow to three or four hundred in as little as three or four years.

p. 95:

"In the 1520s the chronicler Fernández de Oviedo reported many herds of five hundred on Hispaniola and even some of eight thousand.

"[After Cortes brought Cuban cattle to Mexico in 1521,] the greatest herds developed in the savanna of northern Mexico - the southern­most extreme of the Great Plains. Nueva Vizcaya was colonized in 1562, but feral cattle propagating in great numbers had preceded European colonists. In 1586, two estancias of the region branded a total of 75,000 calves. Peralta reported about 1579 that some ranches in the north owned 150,000 head of cattle, and that 20,000 was considered a small herd.

p. 97:

From Mexico, herds of cattle were also taken to Peru, arriving in Lima before 1540. From Peru, they spread south into Chile, and from there they wandered into the Argentine pampas where the productivity of cattle has been the greatest in the world. By 1619, Governor Gondra of Buenos Aires reported herds of more than 240,000. In succeeding decades, cattle continued to push south toward Patagonia. Eyewitness reports of the size of the Argentine herds bring to mind the North American plains, ‘blackened by buffalo.’

Horses, pigs and other species Columbus brought to America found it equally lush upon arrival, and their eating and multiplying changed the landscape/ecosystem before people changed it some more.

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