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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 permis-
sion 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 cen-
tury. I. Title.
HC188.G6M36 2006
330.981’73—dc22
2006005165

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/12 Sabon


Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction:
A Province on the Edge of the Modern World 1
1. State Structure 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. Work 180
Conclusions 206

Glossary 217
Notes 221
Bibliography 277
Index 293
Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank my family, my wife Angela and our chil-
dren, 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 manu-
script. Thanks, Mary.
In Goiâna Professor José Antônio C. R. de Souza hired me as a visit-
ing 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 Cath-
olic University of Goiás, was kind enough to invite me into her group work-
ing 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 Wil-
len, 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 enterpris-


ing 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 deca-
dence. 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 provin-
cial 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 colo-
nial 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 prov-
ince’s fall from grace while at the same time hoping that a vanished pros-
perity 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 con-
sciousness not easily loosened or supplanted.
2 introduction

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 subse-
quently 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 distribu-
tion 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 legiti-
mation through effective popular involvement in the political process. An
important part of the process was performance: citizens become accus-
tomed 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
introduction 3

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 com-
bined 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 com-
petition 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 manipu-
lation of literacy requirements.
Under such circumstances, how did the mass of the population, mar-
ginalized 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 com-
pared 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 popu-
lation, 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 power-
ful, 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 politi-
cal resources under his direct control to a negotiated ability to mobilize
support from the provincial, or state, and national governments. Identifica-
tion 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 Bra-
zilian state under the Empire, it nevertheless remained in many areas of the
4 introduction

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 ill-
treatment. 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 Amer-
ica in these years, and instead the central regime achieved a steady, if
uneven, growth in hegemony over the national territory, even as this ter-
ritory 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, com-
pliance, 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 pro-
cess 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 con-
nection 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
introduction 5

Empire made no serious effort to forcibly incorporate the mass of the pop-
ulation into wage work. Contract laws and regulations against “vagrancy”
existed, but these were little enforced in rural areas, and the Empire under-
took 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 fam-
ily, 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 High-
ness 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 national-
ism 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.
6 introduction

What should this state do or be able to do? Marx famously defined


the capitalist state as a managing committee for the bourgeoisie, and clas-
sical economics essentially agrees, assigning the state the role of guaran-
tor of private property. Recently, by contrast, analysts have given more
attention to the “relative autonomy” of the state, to its institutionaliza-
tion 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 depen-
dence 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 monop-
olize legitimate violence necessarily raised transaction costs, but this served
the interests of the locally powerful who had no use or need for the guar-
antees of bourgeois law.

The Weight of Memory

The “decadence” of the present and the reasons for it were a con-
stant 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 success-
ful 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-
introduction 7

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 con-
stant 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 mon-
archy to an empire to a federal republic, the arrival of the printing press
and newspapers, party politics, escalating Indian attacks, exciting new con-
sumer goods, and a flux of immigrant and transient populations, including
mineiro (from Minas Gerais) and paulista (from São Paulo) cattle ranch-
ers 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 sea-
sonal, 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 Gener-
ally 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 cen-
tury still sheltered indigenous enemies. Travelers found it difficult to make
a passage through the Mato Grosso, particularly during the rainy season
8 introduction

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 dur-
ing the rains. Commonly they overflowed their banks, creating travel barri-
ers 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 dis-
ease.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 cat-
tle 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 atten-
tion 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
introduction 9

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 news-
papers 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 nour-
ished separatist ambitions.29
For a predominantly rural economy with a modest population, nine-
teenth-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
n

tin
s
Boavista

The Province of Goiás


Circa 1822
Carolina
0 50 100 km

ia
ua
ag
Ar
o
Ri

Porto Imperial

Goi·s
Province
Natividade
Duro
Peixe
Santa Maria
Taguatinga
Palma

Arraias

Cavalcante
Posse
São José do Tocantins
Flores
Ri
o

Ve Formosa
r me Jaraguá
lho Meiaponte
Goiás Corumbá

Santa Luzia
a Bomfim
ai
gu
ra
Rio A

Rio Bonito Santa Cruz


Rio Verde

Jataí Santa Rita do Catalão


Paranaiba
Paranaíba
Rio
introduction 11

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 physi-
cal 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 naviga-
ble 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 two-
story buildings most had no glass windows, replacing these with sheets of
locally mined mica. The stock of the few stores (lojas) was poorly orga-
nized 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 con-
trast, Cunha Mattos found the public buildings “very good for an interior
province” and the streets well laid out, but agreed that the town’s loca-
tion 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 comple-
ment: “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 inde-
pendence 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
12 introduction

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 some-
times 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 pre-
dominant 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, how-
ever, 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 impor-
tation 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 nine-
teenth-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 pop-
ulations 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 government-
sponsored 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
introduction 13

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 Mossâ-
medes 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 oppo-
nents 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 toler-
ance 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 popula-


tions 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 nine-
teenth century it is necessary first to understand its position as a frontier,
remembering, of course, that all frontiers are ideological constructs, and
14 introduction

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 associ-
ated with the frontier in the North American-Frederick Jackson Turner tra-
dition 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 fron-
tiers 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 num-
ber 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 inva-
sions and population adjustments well before the first European bandei-
ras (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, includ-
ing 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
introduction 15

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 devel-
oped around the strikes, with little “in-fill” between them. For tax pur-
poses and to keep the miners focused on gold, the Crown initially did not
allow farms and ranches to expand much beyond to the immediate envi-
rons 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 “archi-
pelago” form which writers have discovered for other areas of Latin Amer-
ica: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 his-
tory 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 sep-
arated 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
16 introduction

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 par-
allel to that argued for the frontier of the western United States.55 How-
ever, 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, character-
istics 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 capi-
tal, capital that built up plantations, improved transport and communica-
tions, 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 displac-
ing 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 Planta-
tion 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
introduction 17

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 econo-
mies. 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 com-
munications. Rather, the province suffered from primitive communications
because it was poor, because there were no reason and no resources avail-
able 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 fron-
tier was, by contrast, “hollow,” nineteenth-century Goiás might best be
thought of as a “Swiss cheese” frontier, or perhaps as a congeries of fron-
tiers. 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 popula-
tion 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] per-
manent” 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,
18 introduction

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 prov-
ince’s north and center of settlers; ranches and towns were abandoned; and
the Luzo-Brazilian and slave populations stagnated or declined. A provin-
cial 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 Ameri-
can 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 exter-
mination, 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 oppor-
tunity. To judge by the number of caboclos that there were in the popula-
tion, 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 cen-
tury 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, includ-
ing 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
introduction 19

conservative but not stupid, and in the sertão they knew that the line sepa-
rating 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 Bra-
zil impoverished farmers and rural workers from the south and the north-
east 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 even-
tually 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 capi-
tal.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,
20 introduction

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 patron-
age 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 nonsangui-
nary; 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 pov-
erty 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.
introduction 21

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 provin-
cial political economy. In some areas of Latin America increased integra-
tion 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 large-
scale 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 physi-
cal 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 cen-
ters. 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 them-
selves 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
22 introduction

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” fron-
tier, 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 declin-
ing, 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 nine-
teenth 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 econo-
mies 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 cen-


tral 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 unantici-
pated in Rio de Janeiro; Chapter 2 looks at several real or potential threats
to state power, including the black slave population, Indians, and crimi-
nals; Chapter 3 examines the failure of basic industries such as textiles and
iron production to develop, as well as the structures and operation of com-
merce 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 mobi-
lization 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
introduction 23

“crabs on the beach,” neglecting aspects of national history not linked


directly to the export sectors. But if we are to understand how Brazil devel-
oped 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 skepti-
cism. 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 trans-
fer of João and his court in 1808 and independence in 1822, the colonial
state had notoriously poor purchase on Brazil’s vast interior. Not surpris-
ingly, 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 political-
administrative standardization in a set of laws and policies meant to be
uniform across the national territory and to be administered by a bureau-
cracy 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 Lib-
eral 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 local-
ism, personal rule, and resistance to outside intervention. What was the
result? What political-legal institutions did the central state seek to imple-
ment 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 insti-
tutions 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 presi-


dent, appointed from Rio de Janeiro and changed depending on the needs
and politics of the central government. Most of these men were law school
State Structure 25

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 exam-
ple, 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 par-
ties in the center exchanged power and of a conscious effort to keep presi-
dents 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 pre-
ferred to a presidency in the sertão, and at least until mid-century a short-
age of trained personnel gave applicants some leverage in negotiations.2
Goiás’s poverty and isolation made it particularly unattractive: for exam-
ple, 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 attrac-
tive 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 con-
cerns 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:
26 chapter 1

in May of 1831, for example, a mob at Flores murdered the Portuguese-


born 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 temporar-
ily 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 histo-
rian 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 popula-
tion, 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 pres-
ident 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 provin-
cial 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-
State Structure 27

tory for pro-government deputies.” A judge described it as a “rotten bor-


ough.”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 pit-
ted 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 com-
petition, 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, par-
ties 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.
28 chapter 1

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 reli-
gious 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 sup-
porters 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 neighbor-
ing 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 fruit-
less struggles.”18 Apart from overseeing the spending of the municipali-
ties and passing the occasional law, the Assembly’s chief task was to write
the annual provincial budget. But chaos dominated revenue collection and
State Structure 29

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 contra-
vene 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 enforce-
ment. Similarly, efforts by the imperial government to obtain information
on the province’s economy, with suspected fiscal motives, or to force regis-
tration 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 over-
saw 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 compensa-
tion 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 clas-
sic 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 incompe-
tent 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
30 chapter 1

at odds with other officials. In February of 1869, for example, the provin-
cial 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 (substi-
tutes). Because of poor communications and illness, posts such as munici-
pal 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 bol-
ster their positions. Following a particularly gruesome murder in Nativi-
dade, 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 pros-
ecutable 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 ene-
mies 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
State Structure 31

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 priva-
tized universe of the backlands.”23 “Justice” often seemed, and indeed was,
but vengeance or a vehicle for personal gain: “When they want to perse-
cute 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, weap-
ons 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 inves-
tigate 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 jus-
tices of the peace, municipal judges, and, most importantly, the juiz de
direito (law judge), with jurisdiction over the entire comarca (judicial dis-
trict). As originally imagined, justices of the peace were to be popularly
elected and had responsibility for policing neighborhoods and small com-
munities, 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
32 chapter 1

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 presi-
dent 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 cer-
tainly 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, vic-
timized 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 igno-
rance 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 rela-
tions 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 ene-
mies 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 infe-
rior 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 facul-
ties and service in a centralized bureaucracy, the state attempted to social-
ize 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, how-
ever, patronage and political connections at least as much as training and
State Structure 33

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 dif-
ficult 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 exam-
ple, 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 prison-
ers 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 immo-
bilized 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 semi-
literate: 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
34 chapter 1

justice.”45 Others used the opportunity to settle old scores. Because of such
problems, many among the population preferred the hopefully neutral out-
sider 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 admon-
ished 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, alterna-
tively, 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 inef-
fectiveness, 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
State Structure 35

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 “half-
dead.” 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 offi-
cers 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 offi-
cers 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,
36 chapter 1

remained “without uniforms, arms, or discipline.” Observing National


Guard troops called to duty at Natividade in 1840 to repel a possible inva-
sion of Balaiada guerrillas, a traveler found “a hundred and forty men,
most armed with only their hunting shotguns, and without muskets, pow-
der 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 disci-
pline 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 prison-
ers. Attacks of this nature were very unusual for the province, and the
chief of police sent a detachment of troops to discover what had hap-
pened. 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-
State Structure 37

tal arrested many among the local population suspected of participating in


the crime, but Bonfim juries exonerated most of these, and those they con-
victed quickly escaped jail, evidently with the assistance of local people.66
Another duty sometimes pressed upon reluctant Guard troops was man-
ning 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 reg-
ular 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 “munici-
pal 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 dis-
tant 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 popula-
tion. 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 offi-
cers and forty-one men, with the troopers to receive a wage of six hundred
38 chapter 1

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 thou-
sand 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 drink-
ing 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 bud-
geted 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 repeat-
edly transferred soldiers for service in Mato Grosso. In 1877, for example,
of an authorized strength of 683, the battalion could muster 233 sol-
State Structure 39

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 Para-
guayan 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 subdel-
egado who had impressed her son to punish him for some small disagree-
ment. 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, frus-
trating 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 sym-
pathized 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 reg-
istries, 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
40 chapter 1

public order and individual security and aiding with the requirements of
justice, with recruitment, [and] the collection of taxes.”84 Typically presi-
dents 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 conjunc-
tion 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 garri-
sons 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 train-
ing 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 For-
mosa, 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 presi-
dent 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 involv-
ing 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-
State Structure 41

tution guaranteed the preeminence of Roman Catholicism and the fund-


ing 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 inhabit-
ants instead were strongly faithful to such local manifestations of Catholi-
cism 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 authori-
ties 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 reac-
tion 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 suf-
fered the effects of a poorly trained and sometimes poor-quality clergy,
and too few of these. This was not a new phenomenon. One commen-
tator 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-
42 chapter 1

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 nec-
essary 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 com-
plained, 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 exces-
sive fees for their services or extorted bribes to, for example, perform dubi-
ous marriages. The bishop put the situation succinctly in 1880 when he
informed the president that there were no priests in Goiás suitable for ele-
vation 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 subdel-
egado 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
State Structure 43

simply a “government employee” but remained always under the jurisdic-


tion 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, actu-
ally 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 rela-
tions 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 “incred-
ibly 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 him-
self 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 hierar-
chy, that when the bishop provided his clergy a detailed list of prohibited
activities, including such relatively harmless pastimes as hunting and fish-
ing, he addressed concubinage not at all.107
For the majority of the population that lived in the rural areas engage-
ment 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 affili-
ated 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
44 chapter 1

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 sell-
ing 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 nation-
state as it developed in the nineteenth century was the provision of pub-
lic 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 pro-
vincial 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 inter-
est 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 commu-
nity 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 Amer-
ican 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
State Structure 45

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 math-
ematics, a bit of history and geography, and Christian doctrine. However,
with few supplies, untrained or unmotivated teachers, and frequent clo-
sures, it must have been hard for the students to make progress. After leav-
ing 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 cap-
ita number of schools, and in terms of male students per hundred inhabit-
ants 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 pro-
vincial 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 discour-
aged 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
46 chapter 1

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 influ-
enza, 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 defi-
ciency 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 lit-
tle 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 prov-
ince’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 dis-
couraging 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
State Structure 47

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 popu-
lar reluctance persisted, and with the approach of railroads Goiás was los-
ing 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 rela-
tionship between standing water and “putrid fevers,” though, of course,
not the role of mosquitoes; fear of fevers was one of the reasons that peo-
ple 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 particu-
larly 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, “sud-
denly 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 inte-
rior could be stultifying, with little opportunity to keep up with new dis-
coveries 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
48 chapter 1

“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. Compet-
ing with such amateur doctors were rezadores (prayer makers) or benza-
dores (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 dis-
played “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 pri-
marily opium and alcohol or, worse, “strychnine [and] bichloride of mer-
cury,” 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 suc-
cess 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 contrib-
uted 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 dis-
ease, the provincial government, the city council, and the hospital began at
State Structure 49

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 scav-
engers. Despite complaints that these still occasionally found their way in,
the cemetery became operational in 1859, and shortly thereafter the gov-
ernment 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 irrec-
oncilable 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 nine-
teenth-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 evacua-
tion of towns, forts, and ranches. In fact, state presence and state power in
the countryside advanced and ebbed over the course of the century, mani-
festing 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 pro-
vincial 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
State Power 51

its end, Goiás’s financial crises persisted: “Income has fallen drastically”;
a president explained, “not only do the geographic conditions of the prov-
ince make it difficult to collect taxes on exports, but its industry, agricul-
ture and commerce are ruined by high freight rates, contributing to the
revenue shortages.”3 Other factors included the incompetence and corrup-
tion that plagued the provincial fiscal system, local resistance to paying
taxes, and smuggling.
Goiás had the same trouble finding and keeping honest and effective rev-
enue agents that it encountered with judges and teachers. While applicants

table 2.1
Goiás Provincial Budgets, 1836/7–1888/9 (in milréis)
Budgeted Budgeted Budgeted Budgeted
Income Expenses Income Expenses

1836–37 32:100 36:100 1863 105:000 124:531


1837–38 37:300 49$200 1864 105:380 117:140
1838–39 32:280 44:978 1865 107:150 120:115
1839–40 40:534 57:850 1866 99:535 155:719
1840–41 35:113 53:119 1867 105:824 151:531
1841–42 — — 1868 179:447 202:533
1842–43 57:677 45:104 1869 108:488 182:882
1843 — — 1870 125:125 170:734
1844 — — 1870–71 108:488 182:882
1845 63:340 50:262 1871–72 166:768 170:734
1846 60:740 61:313 1872–73 168:867 163:864
1847 48:750 55:961 1873–74 176:168 168:030
1848 66:475 65:865 1874–75 184:164 180:203
1849 68:800 68:586 1875–76 236:100 203:259
1850 — — 1876–77 189:609 266:161
1851 66:769 59:499 1877–78 248:548 280:904
1852 67:313 59:241 1878–79 228:873 281:383
1853 — — 1879–80 207:013 212:713
1854 40:640 48:577 1880–81 259:077 205:903
1855 48:637 45:522 1881–82 264:574 258:584
1856 72:216 57:196 1882–83 306:144 263:387
1857 97:161 87:416 1883–84 — —
1858 123:105 109:859 1884–85 275:193 244:865
1859 156:125 106:653 1885–86 272:096 255:065
1860 152:011 112:870 1886–87 371:585 346:847
1861 142:946 110:976 1887–88 254:199 263:548
1862 93:855 113:817 1888–89 229:689 213:350

sources: AHEG, provincial budgets.


52 chapter 2

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 collec-
tors 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 half-
century 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 infor-
mation 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 admin-
istrative 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 unde-
tected 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 half-
brother was no longer a state deputy.10 Local pressures and local sympa-
thies 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
State Power 53

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 loca-
tions, 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 “exac-
tors.” 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 inte-
rior 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 some-
times 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 condi-
tion 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-
54 chapter 2

table 2.2
Provincial Income by Tax, 1871–1887: Selected Taxes (in milréis)
Cattle 5% Transit Slave
exports food taxes sales Alcohol Hides

1871–72 16:801 14:143 12:700 3:651 3:126 1:844


1874–75 21:046 17:219 12:169 8:241 2:940 2:185
1877–78 41:163 16:148 9:014 6:703 2:827 8:337
1880–81 65:109 14:982 12:252 4:609 2:046 6:329
1883–84 52:437 15:410 14:739 4:892 2:795 6:982
1886–87 90:534 25:652 25:016 3:238 2:070 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 cer-
tain 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 rev-
enues and expenditures for the coming year (Table 2.1). Unfortunately for
State Power 55

table 2.3
Selected Provincial Expenses, 1835–1885 (in milréis)
Category 1835 % 1845 % 1854 % 1865 % 1875 % 1885 %

Total 53:135 — 58:562 — 47:442 — 149:100 — 203:259 — 233:365 —


Assembly 4:982 9 5:224 9 2:337 5 9:053 6 8:547 4 9:218 4
President 4:550 9 3:300 6 4:150 9 9:800 7 11:080 6 12:208 5
Education 6:300 12 11:652 20 11:760 25 30:600 21 53:650 25 64:660 28
Hospital 1:600 3 2:900 5 1:800 4 6:800 5 8:700 4 10:000 4
Public Works 8:000 15 7:000 12 4:000 8 23:750 16 15:000 7 14:000 6
Missions 5:000 9 4:600 8 1:000 2 1:000 .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 provin-
cial 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 provin-
cial commitment to education, which as a percentage of the budget more
than doubled over fifty years, even if the results remained less than satis-
factory. 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 spe-
cial grants or subsidies from the central government, funds not normally
included in the provincial budget. When money was thought to be avail-
able, 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
56 chapter 2

table 2.4
Imperial Transfers to Goiás, 1860s versus 1870s (in milréis)
Ministry 1860–70 1870–80

Empire 92:049 148:219


Justice 80:589 342:510
War 3.659:069 2.680:120
Treasury 104:044 74:504
Agriculture 325:652 844:801
Total 4.262:316 4.091:156

source: Relatório-1881-2, 111–12.

copper sheets. Using a locally constructed machine the provincial admin-


istration 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, mis-
sionary 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 presi-
dent’s reports and the budget did not always differentiate such assistance,
and because what was promised did not necessarily materialize, it is diffi-
cult 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 com-
parison, 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 exam-
ple, 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 super-
vised 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
State Power 57

small levies on weights and measures, on cattle killed for sale and con-
sumption, 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 bal-
ance, 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 improve-
ments, 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 corrup-
tion 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 popula-
tion 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
58 chapter 2

maintain firearms; at best they might have an old musket or a muzzle-load-


ing shotgun charged with homemade powder and ball, and sometimes not
enough for a second shot.29 Too, whereas the early bandeirantes and min-
ing 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 com-
munities) 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 hun-
dred 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 presiden-
tial 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-
State Power 59

table 2.5
Slave Population of Goiás, 1804–1885
Slaves % of population

1804 21,176 42
1808 19,185 35
1824 13,375 21
1832 13,261 19
1856 12,334 10
1861 11,448 9
1872 10,548 7
1885 5,194 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 exam-
ple, sent employees in pursuit of fugitives or hired private slave catchers.35
National Guard troops and local police only reluctantly involved them-
selves in hunting for runaways, both because these sometimes put up fierce
resistance and because anyone attempting to capture a slave might be pros-
ecuted 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 Bra-
zil 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 traf-
fic 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 poten-
tially more violent, young men from the province. Matrículas (slave regis-
tries) in 1872 and 1885 showed a predominance of older men and women
60 chapter 2

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 indig-
enous 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 exam-
ple, 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 work-
ers, 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, per-
haps 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 organi-
zation or conspiracy, or even communications, difficult. Instead, resistance
State Power 61

was individual. Disgruntled slaves, for example, physically attacked their


masters. Typical were events noted in the 1 April 1838 number of the Cor-
reio 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 evi-
dence, 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 short-
ages and blaming these for the province’s “backwardness.”47 What comes
across dramatically in provincial newspapers and government correspon-
dence 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 devel-
oped 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, protec-
tion of criminals by the locally powerful or the wealthy, the negligence
table 2.6
Selected Criminal Statistics, 1838–1860
Attempted Attempted
Murder Wounds “Robbery”* Murder Wounds “Robbery”*
Murder Murder
1838 17 5 4 1 1861 22 13 34 6
--** -- -- -- -- --** -- -- -- --
1847 6 6 8 1863 14 9 10 4
1848 23 10 9 1864 23 6 12 2
1849 11 1 15 3 1865 13 2 15 2
1850 30 2 6 2 1866 10 6 9 3
1851 53 18 5 1867 17 7 14 7
--** -- -- -- -- 1868 18 10 16 13
1853 19 1 4 1869 23 9 31 5
--** -- -- -- -- 1870 22 6 30 9
1855 24 7 23 6 1871 12 5 18 9
1856 25 8 37 8 1872 14 8 6
1857 29 12 34 11 1873 16 4 9 1
1858 23 4 24 10 1874 11 5 7 2
1859 14 12 35 6 1875 15 6 7 7
1860 13 5 27 9 1876 9 3 6 2

* 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.
State Power 63

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 sur-
viving 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 cap-
tured 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, Anto-
nio Lopes da Trindade fired a shot from a blunderbuss at Cherubina
Laurinda Dias, wounding her right hand.
64 chapter 2

12 March 1881 “Justice official” Tiburício Rodrigues Chaves while pa-


trolling the streets of the town of Arraias encountered the criminal José
Narcizo de Moraes, armed with a blunderbuss and a dagger. Order-
ing 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 volun-
tarily to the law judge of Boavista to be tried.
25 April 1881 The president learned unofficially of various criminal as-
saults 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 em-
ployer, with a knife, because the boy had abused a dog. When the fa-
ther 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 falsifi-
cation of electoral results.
14 August 1881 Second lieutenant João Nepomuceno Dantas at For-
mosa 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
State Power 65

Alves Bandeira reduced a free woman to slavery and sold her at Mo-
quém; 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 alco-
hol. 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 pen-
etrated 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 invigo-
rated 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 exist-
ing 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 well-
founded skepticism about the willingness or ability of the state to intervene
to protect them or to render effective or impartial justice.53 But interper-
sonal violence as such did not obviously or even necessarily threaten the
state as an institution or the elites as a class, though it commonly endan-
gered 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
66 chapter 2

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 fruit-
less 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 rela-
tionship that clearly violated community norms.57
Of course, these same family or patronage links could draw individu-
als 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-
State Power 67

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 capac-
ity 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 threat-
ened to compromise the state, provincial authorities would send a detach-
ment 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 capi-
tal,” 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 mur-
ders 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.
68 chapter 2

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-cen-
tury, 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 Septem-
ber, 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 crimi-
nals 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 typi-
cally grew out of struggles for control of illegal activities such as smug-
gling, 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 particu-
larly 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 secu-
rity 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 per-
secuted 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
State Power 69

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 trav-
els 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 For-
mosa 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 evi-
dence 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 sur-
prisingly, 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 prov-
ince 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 worri-
some problem for state authority arising from within Luzo-Brazilian soci-
ety 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
70 chapter 2

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 buy-
ers 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 com-
merce, but while it remained a problem, counterfeiting never reached epi-
demic 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 prov-
ince’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,
State Power 71

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 hangers-
on, 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 Affon-
so’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 peo-
ple, despite the arrival of troops from the capital, remained terrified that
the gang might attack the town. Clearly the outlaw enjoyed powerful pro-
tection, for he continued to live more or less openly in the Catalão-Ipa-
meri 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 thou-
sand, 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
72 chapter 2

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 shoul-
der 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 hang-
ing from his shoulder a bow and a quiver of arrows.84

The chief threat in the north came from the Canoeiros, who overran set-
tlements, cut off boats on the Rio Araguaia, and generally terrorized the
countryside, and who were notorious for kidnapping, as well as tortur-
ing and killing their unfortunate victims.85 Unlike some of the other indig-
enous 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 out-
siders, the Kayapó rarely kidnapped “Christians.” Neither were they gen-
erally 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 build-
ings, 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
State Power 73

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 pre-
ferred 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 partici-
pants, 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 Sep-
tember of 1831, for example, Xavante killed six people at Thesouras and
prompted the survivors to retreat to Santa Rita, leaving behind their plant-
ings and animals; and at the end of the next decade the câmara of Porto
Imperial reported that the inhabitants of Pontal and Carmo had aban-
doned 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 dia-
mond 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 com-
merce 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 inter-
dicting road travel.99 Tax collectors refused to venture into the countryside,
and Indian assaults, by destroying animals and crops and forcing the aban-
donment 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
74 chapter 2

explained, “just reprisals for what had been done to them.”102 But presi-
dents 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 cen-
turies, 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 “cow-
ardice” 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 presi-
dent feared, enraging the indigenous populations, who went on to ravage
the north for another two decades. After mid-century provincial adminis-
trators 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 inhabit-
ants 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
State Power 75

centuries and then lost control of these as a result of the Pombaline


reforms.108 The Indians residing in these villages generally resisted conver-
sion, 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 diffi-
cult 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 out-
side 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 estab-
lished, abandoned, and reestablished new settlements, chiefly in the north
of the province.114 Because the local clergy lacked the numbers or vocation
76 chapter 2

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 mission-
ary 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 protec-
tion from their enemies. Most such efforts quickly failed, for unsurprising
reasons: the indigenous inhabitants, concentrated together, died of unac-
customed 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 mid-
century 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 junc-
tion 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 vil-
lages, 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 wander-
ing 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
State Power 77

To deal with indigenous groups that refused to settle the state con-
structed presídios,125 again, chiefly in the north of the province and placed
to impede Indian raids, protect settlers, and support river traffic. The prov-
ince lacked sufficient funds to carry out a regular “rationing,” or gift, sys-
tem 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 Monte-
Alegre, 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 situ-
ation 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, equip-
ment 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 civil-
ian 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
78 chapter 2

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, eas-
ily 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 vio-
lence, 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 non-


animal 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 sophisti-
cation, 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 produc-
tion 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 pro-
tected 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 inter-
nal, 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 cot-
ton but secondarily wool, enjoyed the largest actual and potential markets
80 chapter 3

in the province. Apart from luxury imports, most cloth used in Goiás was
the product of female handicraft work: “far from meriting the name fac-
tories, 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 arti-
san, spinning, weaving, and dyeing fabric, and cutting and sewing cloth-
ing.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 tex-
tile 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, “Mas-
ter 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.
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 81

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 gov-
ernor, 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 fac-
tory 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 appar-
ently 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 prov-
ince 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
82 chapter 3

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 cot-
ton 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 equip-
ment. Such miners seem to have been at once omnipresent and nearly invis-
ible. Travelers remarked on encountering them at work in the rivers, but
because most evaded taxes their efforts did not register in the normal run
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 83

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 min-
ing 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 pro-
moting 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 remon-
strances 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 orga-
nization 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 con-
tinue. But dissention soon broke out. Some members rather shortsightedly
complained that instead of putting all of the available labor to work dig-
ging 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
84 chapter 3

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 “scan-
dalously 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 posi-
tive 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 encoun-
tered 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, small-
scale mining persisted at various points in the province from the colonial
period through the nineteenth century but failed to match either the imag-
ined past or current hopes.
There were efforts, too, over the course of the century to organize
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 85

large-scale mining companies, but these did not prosper. At mid-century,


for example, the Companhia de Mineração da Provincia de Goyáz, head-
quartered 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 com-
pany 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 Meiaponte-
Abade 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 mer-
cury 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 mer-
cury, 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, typi-
cally small and of poor quality but found in substantial quantities. The
86 chapter 3

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, dodg-
ing cavalry patrols and hostile Indians and risking fevers and mining acci-
dents. 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-
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 87

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 dia-
mond 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 ade-
quate 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 produc-
tion 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 organi-
zation 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
88 chapter 3

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 cus-
tomers 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 suf-
fered 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 min-
ing 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 Sen-
hora do Rosário of Meiaponte. Rochet acquired the necessary land, com-
missioned construction of buildings, and departed for Europe to purchase
equipment, leaving three contos of the loan with the provincial govern-
ment to pay for transporting the machinery from Santos to Goiás and to
hire workers. But when Rochet returned to Brazil the provincial adminis-
tration in Goiás refused to release the remaining money, and after repeated
failed appeals he left the equipment in customs and took a teaching posi-
tion 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
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 89

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 per-
sisted, 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 dis-
tance 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 sub-
sistence and petty commodity activities, offering few opportunities for spe-
cialization 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, trans-
port 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 com-
merce. 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 occupa-
tions, dabbling only part-time at peddling.51 For the more isolated rural
populations mascates were the source of manufactures most readily avail-
able 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 fam-
ilies did not have to be left undefended while the men traveled to the near-
est 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
90 chapter 3

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 trad-
ing 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 subdele-
gado 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 epi-
demic 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 com-
merce.” The most humble of these establishments were the taverns, which
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 91

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 quanti-
ties 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 giv-
ing 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, cof-
fee, 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, ex-
slaves, 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 exam-
ple, 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 wid-
ows and families in misery.62 In fact, though, notary records reveal that at
least some of these men participated in quite extensive and sophisticated
92 chapter 3

commercial networks, linked through powers of attorney that licensed one


merchant to act for another in a distant town, for trade and in civil mat-
ters 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 dif-
ficult 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 avail-
able 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 econ-
omy. 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 aston-
ishing. 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 Offi-
cial 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 adorn-
ments 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, cin-
namon, steel pens, paper, purple and black dyes, seals and sealing wax, envelopes,
“modern” pipes, scissors and sewing accessories, pencil sharpeners, silver, gold, and
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 93

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, po-
made (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, horse-
shoes, 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 sophistica-
tion 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 con-
nection 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 particu-
larly 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
94 chapter 3

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 ani-
mals.”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 Castel-
nau 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 dis-
tance 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, hope-
fully 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 com-
monly 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 labor-
intensive and time-inefficient but threatened damage to the cargo at every
stop, as did rough trails and frequent river crossings. Limiting the loads
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 95

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 machin-
ery. 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 driv-
ers 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 some-
times broke out, particularly when the carters took for firewood the stakes
the mule drivers needed to secure their animals for unloading and load-
ing. 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 cen-
tury, 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 south-
west of the province. Older and more worn carts carried agricultural prod-
ucts 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 diffi-
culty. 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 for-
warding money and letters between families and merchants. Their arrival
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 97

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 Gener-
ally 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 ser-
tanejo 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 trav-
eled 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 cor-
respondence 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 fear-
some 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 prolif-
eration 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 ani-
mals 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 occu-
pied the attention of Goiás’s public officials more than efforts to improve
communications. Each year the presidents’ annual reports detailed proj-
ects 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 con-
tracted Captain João Luiz Brandão to repair the main highway to Bon-
fim, 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
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 99

the municipality of Meiaponte, and so on for several pages. Relatórios


from the rest of the century were no different. Not until the 1850s, how-
ever, 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 fund-
ing 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 riv-
ers and of what these might do for the province. Logically, the most attrac-
tive 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 will-
ing 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,
100 chapter 3

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 nav-
igation, these were, on the face of it, no worse than the obstacles con-
fronting 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 orga-
nize 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 sup-
plies.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
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 101

traveler described these vessels as looking like “floating shacks.”106 Accom-


panying 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, usu-
ally 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 ardu-
ous. 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 build-
ers for their ignorance. Given the cost of materials, however, and particu-
larly 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 dis-
ease, which seems to have worsened, the chief obstacles to navigation of the
northern rivers were the rocks and rapids that choked their course. Travel-
ers 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, some-
times 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 pro-
cess.113 Neither government subsidies nor private initiative scored signifi-
cant 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 popula-
tion, 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 rap-
ids 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 Indi-
ans 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
Industry, Commerce, and Communications 103

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 indi-
cated 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 hun-
dred 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 long-
distance 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 revi-
talized.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 pro-
portion 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
104 chapter 3

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 Ara-
guaia trading companies organized with the support of provincial govern-
ments 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 tech-
nology 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 ex-
provincial president Couto de Magalhães, and he successfully lobbied for
imperial and provincial subsidies.126 After a struggle of Fitzcarraldian pro-
portions, 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 sup-
port 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 inter-
ested 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 his-
tory. 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 his-
torians 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 involve-
ment 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
106 chapter 4

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, particu-
larly during the years in which a head tax (capacitação) in gold weighed
on each slave. This opened opportunities in agriculture for small produc-
ers, 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 Gen-
eral 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 cap-
taincy 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 “happi-
ness” 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 inhab-
itants,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 farm-
ers 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 activi-
ties could be made more profitable.
Agriculture and Food Supply 107

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 mar-
ket 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 small-
scale 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. How-
ever, these activities rarely advanced beyond petty commodity production:
supply and reproduction took place through the mechanisms of the mar-
ket, 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 cultiva-
tion, 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
108 chapter 4

of those that remained to either more profitable tasks such as sugar pro-
duction or to conspicuous consumption by urban or ranching elites. Small-
scale farmers had to rely instead chiefly on family labor: wives, children,
and, sometimes, relatives or in-laws.16 The more successful of these cultiva-
tors turn up on tax lists, but many evaded the eye of the state altogether.
Food production in Goiás continued throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury 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 trans-
portation 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 esti-
mate 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, “agricul-
turalists either plant only for subsistence or they have great trouble to get
their surplus to market and as result they are generally poor and every-
one 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 com-
munications meant that each part of the province of necessity had to be
largely self-sufficient, providing little opportunity for regional specializa-
tion 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 farm-
ers 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-and-
burn and other techniques adopted by the first settlers and little advanced
since: “Hoe, axe, sickle, and fire are the favorite instruments of our agri-
culturalists.”20 Late in the 1820s the municipal council of Crixás explained
local agricultural practices to the province’s president: “The method of
Agriculture and Food Supply 109

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 for-
est. 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 clear-
ing 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 for-
ested 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 dif-
ficult, 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
110 chapter 4

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 dam-
age 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” destruc-
tion 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 dispers-
ing 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 slash-
and-burn fields full of stumps and fallen trees.30 And the general lack of
domesticated cattle, which could have provided both fertilizer and trac-
tion, further impoverished agriculture. In an unusually reflective analysis,
the town council of Santa Luzia late in the 1840s meditated upon the ques-
tion why agriculture did not seem to be prospering.31 Local residents, it
complained, refused to pay attention to their crops or to adopt new meth-
ods; stuck in “routine,” they found the productivity of their plantings fall-
ing. 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
Agriculture and Food Supply 111

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 council-
ors 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 lim-
ited 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 imme-
diate 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 . . .
112 chapter 4

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 agricul-
tural 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 inter-
ests of ranchers outweighed those of small farmers. Instead, municipalities
sought to require cultivators to defend their plantings: “They [are to] con-
struct 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 seri-
ous 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 prob-
lem 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-
Agriculture and Food Supply 113

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 newspa-
per 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 Ver-
melho rose and flooded the capital, at least in part, it seemed, in conse-
quence 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 pre-
mier 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 reputa-
tion for arbitrary assessment and abusive collection: “The quinto impov-
erished 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 standard-
ized 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 encour-
age 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 Maran-
hão, 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 num-
ber 11 of 5 September 1838, for example, exempted from dízimos for ten
114 chapter 4

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 govern-
ment, 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 actu-
ally 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 pro-
voke 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 administer-
ing 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 dif-
ficulties 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 prov-
inces,” 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 them-
selves 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 col-
lection of dízimos at the entrance to towns and that they be levied on inter-
provincial sales. Goiás’s municipal council now favored to this approach,
Agriculture and Food Supply 115

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 sev-
eral possible systems of collection rained letters on the Matutina Meiapon-
tense,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 wait-
ing for the officials to appear. Because the government’s agents received a
percentage of what they collected, they had a strong incentive to overes-
timate 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 inevi-
tably 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 situ-
ation 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
116 chapter 4

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 some-
times 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 con-
nections. 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 hum-
bly and bare-footed, and among them was an old man outfitted in anti-
quated 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 Bem-
te-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 col-
lection 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
Agriculture and Food Supply 117

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 arrange-
ments, 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 agricul-
tural 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 quar-
ter 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 vexa-
tious 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 pro-
ducers but consumers and these chiefly in a few towns. Indeed, almost
the only place that the state managed to consistently collect the “5 per-
cent” 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
118 chapter 4

Markets

The key to the effective collection of the 5 percent tax was a well-
supervised 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 per-
cent” 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 regu-
lations (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
Agriculture and Food Supply 119

remained be put up for wholesale. Products might not be kept in the mar-
ket without being offered for sale, no transactions could take place at night,
and sellers were to immediately remove and destroy all spoiled or dam-
aged 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 newspa-
per O Publicador Goyano, admittedly no friend of the government, noted
that while it was certainly a productive source of revenue, the capital’s mar-
ket 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 some-
times 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 collec-
tion 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 gov-
ernment 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 agricul-


tural food products came attempts to regulate the butchering, distribution,
and sale of meat, chiefly beef. From the late colonial period a public slaugh-
terhouse 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 cat-
tle 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 clan-
destine 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
120 chapter 4

“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 mod-
est improvements in the existing structure, including expanding the corral,
providing pasture for the animals, and cleaning the interior of the build-
ing 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 cor-
ralled, 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 construc-
tion 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 prohibi-
tively 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 out-
lier, 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
Agriculture and Food Supply 121

table 4.1
Food Prices, 1842 (in réis)
Corn* Beans** Corn* Beans**

Goiás 400 1000 São Jose T. 400 900


Bonfim 300 900 Arraias 450 900
Catalão 400 640 Traíras 480 960
Natividade 960 3840 Meiaponte 320 800
Flores 480 1920 Santa Cruz 240 600
Cavalcante 400 1280 Santa Rita Paranaiba 450 960
Formosa 320 640 Rio Claro 320 640

* 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)
Corn* Beans**

1846 640 2$000


1847 620 1$640
1848 480 1$000
1849 480 2$000
1850 400 1$600
1851 320 1$280
1852 400 1$280
1853 540 1$160
1854 520 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 spe-
cific. 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 cor-
rect: destructive and unproductive agricultural techniques, a lack of mod-
ern 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
122 chapter 4

quickly or to deliver what they did produce to consumers rapidly enough


to stave off price increases. But precisely because of such market irregulari-
ties, there was little incentive in normal times for the individual producer
to invest capital or labor in increasing output substantially beyond subsis-
tence 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 coun-
try—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 impor-
tant 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. Neverthe-
less, many among local elites and the officials sent to administer the prov-
ince 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 trac-
ing 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 mid-
century(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 other-
wise 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 immi-
grants 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
Agriculture and Food Supply 123

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

1846 640 2$000 1867 3$060 4$260*


1847 — 1868 — —
1848 480 1$000 1869 4$920 14$920*
1849 480 2$000 1870 3$200 8$720*
1850 400 1$600 1871 1$360 6$600
1851 320 1$280 1872 — —
1852 400 1$280 1873 3$120 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)
Corn* Beans**

1874 2$500 1$800


1884/85 4$000 1$600
1894 5$800 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 economi-
cally, the men who attended these had price information and certainly
124 chapter 4

transmitted this along their routes. This may have had the effect of helping
to create regional cost-price expectations even in advance of actual mar-
kets; people knew what goods “should” cost even if current prices devi-
ated 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 all-
important. 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 circum-
stances public servants obviously could not devote full time to their gov-
ernment 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 occa-
sion, particularly in some of the smaller towns; travelers reported settle-
ments 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 Typi-
cally, 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: man-
ioc, 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 prod-
ucts 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
Agriculture and Food Supply 125

table 4.5
City of Goiás Market
Sources of Supply
Ourofino Barra Curralinho Anicuns Jaraguá Corumbá Bonfim

Sugar x x x
Rapadura x x x x x x x
Corn flour x x x x x x x
Manioc flour x x x x
Peanuts x x x x x
Chickens x x x x x x
Fatback x x x x x
Beans x x x x x x x
Rice x x x x x x x
Coffee x x x x x
Castor oil* x x x x x x
Cheese x x x x x x
Pork x x x x x x x
Lard x x x
Corn x x x x x x
Tobacco x x x x x
Dried meat x x x x x x
Distance to the 18 24 42 81 125 174 228
capital (km)

* 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 vary-
ing local conditions, supplies would have arrived in the capital from con-
stantly 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, cen-
tralized markets could not function efficiently and prices and availability
must have remained even more unpredictable.
126 chapter 4

Sugar

A reason sometimes advanced to explain food shortages, although


this was as much a moral as an economic critique, was a supposed prefer-
ence 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 large-
scale growers alike could produce these advantageously for the local mar-
ket. 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 grind-
ing and distilling facilities. Indeed, before the expansion of cattle produc-
tion 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 boil-
ing vessels, though the refining and distilling processes, the German sniffed,
remained “primitive.”100
To judge, however, from the abandoned and ruined mills that early nine-
teenth-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 con-
tinued 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 special-
ize 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).
Agriculture and Food Supply 127

table 4.6
Sugar Mills, 1840s
Properties with Properties with Properties with
1–9 slaves 10–19 slaves 20+ slaves

Santa Cruz 13 -- --
Bonfim 17 1 --
Palma 6 -- --
Santa Luzia 12 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 prov-
ince’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 igno-
rance 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 mid-
century Goiás’s interprovincial trade in cattle and horses was expanding,
but landowners and political leaders never abandoned entirely the search
128 chapter 4

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 dam-
aged and poor-quality fibers in with the good, hurting the product’s repu-
tation.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 via-
bility of export production for Goiás. With the closing of the textile fac-
tory 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 gov-
ernment 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 prepara-
tion, or at least preparation not keyed to European consumer interests,
Agriculture and Food Supply 129

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 tradi-
tion, 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 pro-
duction concentrated in the south, at Bonfim, Antas (Anápolis), Bella Vista,
and Pouso Alto (Piracanjuba), perhaps because of access to the approach-
ing 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 prov-
ince wealthy, they could link the local economy and population to a devel-
oping 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, prohib-
ited 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. Simi-
larly, 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
Stock Raising 131

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 Cav-
alcante 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 remain-
ing mining centers, but soon some of them discovered more promising
markets in the coastal sugar plantations of Bahia and neighboring prov-
inces. 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. How-
ever, 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 prov-
ince’s eastern boundary. Centered on the town of Flores, but with sales
outlets through Santa Maria Taguatinga to Bahia and through Couros/For-
mosa 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
132 chapter 5

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 contrib-
uted 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 degrada-
tion 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 preda-
tor 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 via-
ble 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
Stock Raising 133

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 southwest-
ern 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 signifi-
cant 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 Decem-
ber 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, argu-
ing 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 indus-
try 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
134 chapter 5

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 pro-
tect them from brush and thorns, and long horns, but they yielded com-
paratively 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. Periodi-
cally 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 cre-
ole 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
Stock Raising 135

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 prod-
uct and would have been easily recognizable to a colonial rancher. But the
methods employed entirely suited the conditions of the time and the prov-
ince and the available markets.
The capital requirements of extensive ranching were minimal: resi-
dences 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 sad-
dle 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 man-
ioc is scraped, and that where they clean and spin cotton.”20 But Fazenda
São Joaquim was exceptional. More typical would be a modest low build-
ing, 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.
136 chapter 5

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 cor-
ral 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 deci-
sions 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 under-
provided 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 impos-
sible 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 pri-
vate owners or the state worked these, extracting the mineral by evapora-
tion.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 intro-
duced 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-
Stock Raising 137

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 cap-
taincy 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 Para-
guayan War was a blow to the Mato Grosso riverport, but it was the credit
offered by the Uberaba merchants, together with their more general domi-
nance 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,
138 chapter 5

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 exten-
sion of the Mojiana Railroad to Uberlândia in 1895 and then to Araguarí
in 1896 provided the merchants and ranchers of southern Goiás alterna-
tive 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 horri-
fied 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 occa-
sions decimating domestic animals,” and when Castelnau chided the resi-
dents 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-
Stock Raising 139

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 rid-
ding 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 poi-
sonous 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 dis-
ease” = 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 regu-
lations 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 rav-
ages 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 cre-
ole 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
140 chapter 5

themselves into popular memory: late in the 1880s the wife of a rancher
living near Piracanjuba remembered that her father had lost “four thou-
sand” cattle “in the year of the ticks.”49
Of course, the most ingenious and persistent predators to fix them-
selves 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 sup-
plemented 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 con-
tributed 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 produc-
tion 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 generi-
cally 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, kid-
napped and enslaved free persons, and raided fazendas and settlements.53
Indians, too, stole or killed cattle, for food and hides and to harass set-
tlers. The Krahó, for example, described by one writer as “cattle pred-
ators,” 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-
Stock Raising 141

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 Moss-
âmedes, 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 nec-
essarily 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 north-
central 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 Matu-
tina 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 cat-
tle,” 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 suf-
fered 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-suffi-
cient 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
142 chapter 5

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, gen-
erally 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 rea-
son, 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 provin-
cial 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 cen-
sus 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 calcu-
lations, 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-
Stock Raising 143

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 transporta-
tion 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 car-
casses 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 slaugh-
tered 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. Resi-
dents of Flores, for example, carried out a lively exchange with Januária
on the Rio São Francisco, an option that offered a relatively easy road, bet-
ter 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, Con-
ceição, and Porto Imperial also sent animals to Barreiros and to São Mar-
cello, 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 busi-
ness.” Without competitive bidding the seller received lower prices for his
144 chapter 5

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 cer-
tain way of collecting taxes on these it had to rely instead on an inefficient
and much-abused export tax. President Alencastre anticipated that peri-
odic 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 cur-
rency. 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
Stock Raising 145

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 boia-
deiro, 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 “ruraliza-
tion” of the province about which state officials complained. And because
most of the animals needed to winter for six months to a year on fatten-
ing 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 dis-
posed 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 competi-
tion 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 sea-
son (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
146 chapter 5

their horses, awaiting the orders of their bosses to buy cattle and drive
them back.”79 The cowboys, under the direction of the drover, accompa-
nied 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 alliga-
tors, 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 cen-
tury 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 pro-
ductivity differences, and the difficulties involved in coming up with reli-
able 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
Stock Raising 147

table 5.1
Cattle, 1862
Region Herd size Production Export/sales

South 135,334 50,000 14,530


North 162,574* 52,873 20,844
Total 297,908 107,529 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 prov-
ince” 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 news-
paper 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
148 chapter 5

table 5.2
Cattle, 1870s
Region 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)
South North

1820s 4$200 2$000


1830s 6$000 3$000
1840s 7$000 4$200
1850s 9$600 5$000
1860s 12$000 5$000
1870s 12$000 6$000
1880s 12$200 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 buy-
ers 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 cat-
tle and horses: at birth or when the ranchers branded the animals, two or
Stock Raising 149

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 cat-
egories 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 pro-
vincial 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 provin-
cial 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 agri-
culture, 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 set-
tlers.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
150 chapter 5

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 develop-


ment 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 dia-
monds. 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 bor-
ders. Because there were only a few crossing points where the boiadeiros
Stock Raising 151

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 exam-
ple, 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 sim-
ple recitation of laws and policies might suggest. The sheer size of Goiás, its
dispersed population, and the limited presence of the state in the country-
side facilitated tax evasion. A harassed agent at Formosa summarized his
many problems: drovers, he said, escaped his attention by taking advan-
tage of small, little-used crossing points or they “made arrangements” with
local officials to avoid taxes. Ranchers pastured cattle beyond the check-
points, 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 Taguat-
inga 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 every-
one 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
152 chapter 5

threatened local fazendeiros and government officials if these tried to inter-


fere. 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. Per-
haps the simplest way was to bribe the tax collector to undercount the
cattle passing through: “The drover, once the counting was done, pock-
eted 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 repre-
sentatives 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 admit-
ted that recently he had passed the herd of a local boss without collect-
ing 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 guards-
men 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 unten-
ded; smugglers quickly identified these and ran cattle through.117 But pay-
ing work of any sort was rare in rural Goiás, and only the most miserable
of subsidiary agencies failed eventually to attract applicants.
Stock Raising 153

Cattle drovers without the patience or tolerance for negotiations some-


times 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 gov-
ernment 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 pro-
tect 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 repeat-
edly 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 neighbor-
ing 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 Mar-
cos. Thus, both provinces claimed but neither effectively controlled the ter-
ritory 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
154 chapter 5

to another. Goiás backed down, blaming the problem on an overzealous


agent, “truthfully of little intelligence,” and promising to correct the mis-
take.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 lat-
ter served almost exclusively for wool, and countrymen expressed horror
at the idea of eating mutton.128 Pigs, on the other hand, were valued espe-
cially 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, how-
ever, 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 typ-
ically 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 pos-
session 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,
156 chapter 6

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 col-
ony, 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 ques-
tion, sometimes for years or decades, and only sought now to legalize pos-
session 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 ses-
maria 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 owner-
ship. 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, sug-
gesting less than complete compliance.9 Certainly such conditions did not
obtain on the Goiás frontier: in 1779 the captain general reported that
Land 157

“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 valid-
ity 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 con-
ceded 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 accumu-
late 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 invest-
ment, investment more likely if clear title to land could be guaranteed. This
158 chapter 6

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 histo-
rian it “undermined the authority of the government, divided the landown-
ing class, and gave practice to the landless in the employment of weapons
against their social superiors.”17 As coffee cultivation spread and land val-
ues 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 eco-
nomic 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 posses-
sion of land and, on the other, to ensure that immigrants, or the Brazil-
ian 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 increas-
ingly 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 immi-
gration 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 regu-
late property relations by providing clear titles, facilitate agricultural credit,
lower the incidence of land-related rural conflict, encourage property hold-
ers 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.
Land 159

The proposed reforms could also burden them with unnecessary costs:
for example, those who acquired state land would have to have the prop-
erty 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 Conserva-
tives 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 immi-
grant colonization, and for new towns and highways;
7. the proceeds from the sale of public land were to go to support for-
eign 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 sur-
prise 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
160 chapter 6

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 pos-
sibilities for future expansion of their properties.
Notwithstanding any ownership requirements the law imposed, how-
ever, it immediately contradicted these by offering an effectively unquali-
fied 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 require-
ments for the notarization of contracts, the 1854 regulations specifically
recognized private instruments as acceptable evidence of past sale, pur-
chase, 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 boundar-
ies. 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 struc-
tural and conjunctural. At the simplest level, the state could not overcome
the resistance of entrenched local elites. Even recouping illegally occu-
pied 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
Land 161

réis, but few properties of this size even approached such value in mid-
century 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 Provin-
cial bureaucrats commonly showed little diligence in enforcing the various
deadlines provided by the laws or in ferreting out illegal practices. Reg-
istrants, 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, how-
ever, 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 provin-
cial 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 accus-
tomed 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,
162 chapter 6

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 municipal-
ity 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 descrip-
tion 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 gov-
ernments 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 tan-
gled 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 sug-
gested that it was in the interest of municipalities and local elites to iden-
Land 163

table 6.1
Sesmarias and Posses, 1850s
Sesmarias Posses Basis of possession

Santa Cruz 1 yes held by 2d/3d generations


Bonfim — yes many subject to legitimization
Santa Luzia 1 yes many subject to legitimization
Capital — yes some held by second generation
Santa Rita — yes
Jaraguá — yes many subject to legitimization
Pilar various yes many subject to legitimization
Corumbá —* —*
Meiaponte 11 yes a few held by 1st generation
Traíras nothing subject to legitimation/revalidation
Cavalcante — yes
Arraias nothing subject to legitimation/revalidation
Formosa land held in common by the community
Palma — yes many subject to legitimization
Peixe — yes many subject to legitimization
Conceição nothing subject to legitimization/revalidation
Taguatinga nothing subject to legitimization/revalidation
P. Imperial yes yes many subject to legitimation
Carmo 1 yes some subject to legitimization, others in
hand of 2d/3d generations
Natividade — yes many subject to legitimation
Boavista 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 munici-
pality, 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 them-
selves. 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 politi-
cal 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
164 chapter 6

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 simi-
larly reported public land available only bordering the Rios Traíras, Bag-
gagem, 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 evi-
dently serious effort to collect the information requested, gathering mate-
rial 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 pro-
tested 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
Land 165

1858 the president excused himself for not having appointed the survey
judges prescribed by the law, explaining that there was not a single indi-
vidual 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 what-
ever 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 offi-
cial 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 reg-
istration 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 tre-
mendous 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 pro-
cess, 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, sug-
gesting a predominance of this pattern. In others, however, single names
predominate. In these latter cases, does a single name always indicate
166 chapter 6

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 dif-
ferent communities or priests applied peculiar local criteria to the descrip-
tions 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, Pro-
fessor Maria do Amparo Albuquerque Aguiar looked at forms of acquisi-
tion 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 registra-
tions 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. Iden-
tifiable 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 hold-
ings 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 Domin-
gos, 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 genera-
tion 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
Land 167

table 6.2
Type of Possession, Selected Parishes, 1850s
(percentages of properties registered)
Posse Purchase + Inheritance =

Flores — 56 44 100
Bonfim 1 58 41 99
Campinas 1 77 23 99
São Domingos 2 40 58 98
Traíras 3 41 56 97
Cavalcante 7 49 44 93
Santa Luzia 14 55 31 86
Natividade 16 52 32 84
Rio Bonito 30 65 5 70
Porto Imperial 50 21 29 50
São José Tocantins 52 22 25 47
Curralinho 59 29 12 41
Rio Claro 68 24 9 33
Jaraguá 73 27 — 27
Antas 82 >1 15 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, sug-
gesting a rush to create at least on paper a status that did not require legiti-
mization 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 num-
ber of these transactions were certainly fictitious, there is little evidence of
168 chapter 6

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 munici-
palities, 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 devel-
oping agricultural region of Morrinhos, two of the more dynamic local
economies in the province during the second half of the century, Profes-
sor 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 pas-
tureland 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 reg-
ister 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 emerg-
ing commercial cattle industry, particularly as its southern and southwest-
ern 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 mar-
ket, and the subsistence plots of agregados subordinated to the remain-
ing large, and largely traditional, estates. The breakaway municipality of
Rio Verde, by contrast, was on the leading edge of the southwestern com-
mercial 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 pros-
pered 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-
Land 169

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 Mossâ-
medes. Not until 1873 did the province finally declare the aldeia “extin-
guished” 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 pur-
chasers 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 capi-
talize 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 pur-
chase 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
170 chapter 6

table 6.3
Property Sizes, 1850s
Sample of parishes
Number of Size in km2
properties Mean Median

Rio Verde 90 311 144


Rio Claro 59 270 108
Rio Bonito 60 267 131
Amaro Leite 35 151 108
Campinas 139 108 81
Santa Luzia 335 76 34
Natividade 100 72 32
Palma 106 68 36
Porto Imperial 50 61 36
Pouso Alto 74 60 27
Arraias 171 38 36
Bonfim 420 37 16
Meiaponte 233 36 14
Antas 62 29 9
São Domingos 168 25 18
Flores 197 24 18
Curralinho 221 23 18
Corumbá 275 22 9

sources: See sources for Table 6.2.

property sizes for a sample of parishes (Table 6.3). The older municipali-
ties, 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 aver-
age. 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 regis-
tered. 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
Land 171

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 reg-
ister 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 prop-
erty 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 inhabit-
ants 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 Sen-
hora 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,
172 chapter 6

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 com-
munity land. Goiás’s president evidently subscribed to this same interpreta-
tion 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 avail-
able 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;
Land 173

—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 allow-
ing the purchase of state land on credit, there continued to be little inter-
est 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 pur-
chased 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 legit-
imizing 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 proper-
ties 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 pos-
session 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
174 chapter 6

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 Fed-
eral 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 agricul-
ture 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, Cur-
ralinho, and Natividade had continued to fragment, as would be expected.
In Corumbá the fall in the mean/median with a stable number of hold-
ings 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
Land 175

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

Rio Bonito 60 267 131 196 154 40


Santa Luzia 335 76 34 210 80 27
Natividade 100 72 32 245 28 18
Palma 106 68 36 127 45 32
Porto Imperial 50 61 36 64 41 23
Pouso Alto 74 60 27 191 11 5
Arraias 171 38 36 288 19 14
Bonfim 420 37 16 525 12 4
Meiaponte 233 36 14 153 34 20
Antas 62 29 9 203 20 18
São Domingos 168 25 18 174 22 11
Curralinho 221 23 18 247 13 6
Corumbá 275 22 9 272 14 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 num-
bers 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 munici-
pality, 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 consid-
erably 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-
176 chapter 6

table 6.5
Ranch Statistics, 1870s
Avg. property size, hectares Avg. herd size Avg. hectares per animal

Santa Luzia 7,800 70 111


Rio Bonito 21,000 250 84
Bonfim 2,500 70 36
Jaraguá 2,400 110 22
Palma 5,700 270 21
Porto Imperial 5,100 470 11
Arraias 2,900 720 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 Brazil-
ian 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, sug-
gesting an active circulation of elites. In all, a clear pattern of polarization
of land holding emerges from the data. In 1886 the newspaper O Publica-
dor 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 popula-
tions 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
Land 177

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 gar-
den 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 prob-
lem in nineteenth-century Goiás that they were, for example, for the sugar-
producing 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 owner-
ship 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 har-
vest the crop. In the confrontation that resulted at least three people died
178 chapter 6

and others were wounded, forcing the state to intervene.97 Routine con-
flicts, 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 sur-
vival. 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 con-
fused 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 intrud-
ing 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 pro-
tested 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; gen-
erally 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
Land 179

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 gov-
ernment 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 Span-
iards 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 ris-
ing 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 eco-
nomic opportunities, for example the rubber boom. Ironically, both the
importance of slavery and the penetration of capitalist relation of produc-
tion 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 Saint-


Hilaire came upon a property near Arrependidos: “The Fazenda Riacho
Frio is quite extensive by the standards of the region,” he noted, “never-
theless, 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 nine-
teenth-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 strug-
gled 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 per-
haps 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 employ-
ers lamented.2
Work 181

The “National Worker”

From the point of view of the employer, the labor problem had sev-
eral dimensions, including, apart from that of simple numbers, quality,
mobilization, and control. The question of the suitability, or lack of suit-
ability, 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 nota-
ble 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 evi-
dent 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 eco-
nomic 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 relation-
ship 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
182 chapter 7

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 cus-
tom 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 plant-
ings 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 dis-
paragingly that “goianos are not industrious . . . because they allow them-
selves 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 declin-
ing 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
Work 183

became more valuable and, therefore, less available to squatters, push-


ing 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. Coffee-
producing 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 abso-
lute 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 gov-
ernor 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, buy-
ers 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 predomi-
nance 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 eighteenth-
century 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,
table 7.1
Slave Prices, 1822–1878 (in milreis)
Goiás Minas Gerais Bahia
Male Female Rio Claro, SP Rio de Janeiro Paraná Male Female Male Female

1822–24 130$ 130$ — 281$ — 133$ 116$ — —


1825–27 — — — — 150$ 132$ 207$ 170$
1828–30 190$ 200$ — 552$ — 222$ 185$ 266$ 197$
1831–33 250$ 300$ — 289$ — 282$ 247$ — —
1834–36 — — — — — 311$ 270$ 292$ 249$
1837–39 — — — — — 325$ 283$ 483$ 368$
1840–42 325$ 300$ — 400$ — 384$ 328$ — —
1843–45 — — — — — 412$ 348$ 558$ 417$
1846–48 265$ 265$ 460$ 350$ — 427$ 375$ — —
1849–51 410$ 385$ 650$ 385$ 540$ 435$ 395$ 543$ 407$
1852–54 475$ 475$ 960$ 723$ — 576$ 508$ — —
1855–57 735$ 635$ 1:700$ 897$ 1:222$ 781$ 703$ 874$ 695$
1858–60 850$ 800$ 1:800$ 1:083$ — 1:063$ 923$ 1:261$ 1:004$
1861–63 710$ 850$ 1:860$ 948$ 1:044$ 946$ 846$ — —
1864–66 800$ 800$ 2:000$ 909$ — 738$ 659$ 1:165$ 887$
1867–69 900$ 800$ — 853$ 987$ 741$ 615$ 1:067$ 882$
1870–72 800$ 700$ 1:770$ 894$ — 791$ 576$ — —
1873–75 830$ 750$ 2:200$ 987$ 833$ 860$ 541$ 784$ 616$
1876–78 840$ 700$ 2:130$ 1:117$ 1:117$ 1:102$ 664$ 800$ 583$

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.
Work 185

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 prov-
inces 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 uncom-
monly 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, reput-
edly 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
186 chapter 7

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 pre-
sumption 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 declin-
ing 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 ambi-
tious 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 own-
ers 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 nec-
essary 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 accu-
mulation, 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
Work 187

by increasing concentration of land ownership and the growing dominance


of cattle exports, including Rio Verde (19 percent) and Rio Bonito (28 per-
cent). Slaves accumulated in these areas not so much because they made
a profit, and in fact, they most evidently worked in low-return food pro-
duction, 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 prop-
erty reported in estate inventories: a single healthy male or female slave
could be worth more than thousands of acres of land or hundreds of ani-
mals 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 ordi-
nary 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 Men-
donça 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
188 chapter 7

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, suf-
fered 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”). Occasion-
ally, 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 communi-
ties 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
Work 189

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 liber-
tos 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 Agri-
culture.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 immigra-


tion 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 popu-
lation probably remained fairly stable or declined only slightly, bottoming
out in the early nineteenth century, and this temporarily.42 But some mar-
ginal 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, mixed-
blood 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 gov-
ernors of Goiás to illiterate tenders of a crossing on the Rio Corumbá.44
Looking about, it is easy to understand why racist and Eurocentric travel-
ers and Crown officials could imagine that the population and “civiliza-
tion” 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 particu-
lar, 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
190 chapter 7

observers found the new arrivals to be “people of good customs, relatively


well educated, who introduce useful practices,” others had a less chari-
table 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 econ-
omy 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 immi-
gration were the towns of Catalão and Santa Cruz, on Goiás’s southeast-
ern 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 mov-
ing into Rio Verde and Jataí.50 Basileu França’s historical novel Os Pionei-
ros 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 through-
out 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
Work 191

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 ranch-
ers 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 pre-
sídio of Genipapo, part of efforts to clear the region of the Canoeiro. Sev-
eral 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 over-
seas. 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 increas-
ing 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 expen-
sive 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 dif-
ficulties of communications do not permit us to hope for a wave of Euro-
pean 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 advan-
tages 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
192 chapter 7

transportation from the coast and to contract European colonization com-


panies 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 opportuni-
ties 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 instruc-
tive in this context to consider the changing attitudes of province’s Luzo-
Brazilians 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 chil-
dren, 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
Work 193

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 aggres-
sive 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 mem-
bers 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 prob-
lem by having the child shot.68
As was the case in Africa, the indigenous populations of Goiás them-
selves 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 spe-
cifically 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 respon-
sible 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 judi-
cial 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 chil-
dren; 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 suc-
cess he demanded an explanation from the local judges.72 A generation
194 chapter 7

later another president lamented that the continued willingness of settlers


to buy Indian children stimulated wars among indigenous groups and con-
tributed 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 chil-
dren 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 government-
sponsored 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 rela-
tionship of young captives sent to be “civilized” to degenerate into slav-
ery: 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 situ-
ation 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 poli-
cies 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
Work 195

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 incor-
poration 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 exist-
ing 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 agri-
culture faces, and for which for a long time there will be no other solu-
tion.”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 mar-
ket 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. Desper-
ate merchants and shippers competed for their labor, sometimes “poach-
ing” 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.
196 chapter 7

Worse, some took the money and disappeared or abandoned boats in mid-
voyage because of real or imagined slights, “and since they are not respon-
sible 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 rela-
tions. 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 mobi-
lization 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, particu-
larly 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, beg-
ging, 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 pub-
lic 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 crim-
inals that live there under the shadow of a powerful protector.”89 Some-
times 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
Work 197

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 ineffec-
tive 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 con-
cern 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 employ-
ment 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
198 chapter 7

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 con-
tracts 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 extra-
economic 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 understand-
ing 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
Work 199

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 occasion-
ally 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 multi-
ple 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 vary-
ing 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-in-
law 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 fam-
ily 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.
200 chapter 7

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 occa-
sional 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 peri-
ods 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 num-
ber of professional practitioners of violence, the capangas found hanging
around the main house or drunk and stirring up trouble in nearby settle-
ments. These men made no pretence of working at agriculture or herding
cattle and hired their skills out to the highest bidder. Much more numer-
ous, 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 essen-
tially “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 asso-
ciated with cattle herding and driving animals to market, as well as con-
tacts 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
Work 201

In fact, on the frontier the status of agregado offered poor families a


number of positive advantages. One was access to land, and almost cer-
tainly 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 com-
promised to local power, the small rancher or farmer without protection
risked being crushed by or between better-connected neighbors. A pow-
erful 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 brand-
ing, 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
202 chapter 7

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 arti-


sans, 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
Work 203

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 tai-
lors 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 com-
plained that “one of the biggest obstacles encountered here in the execu-
tion of public projects is the scarcity and incompetence of the workers,
especially the masons and carpenters who demand high wages but are com-
pletely 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 nineteenth-
century 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 igno-
rant of simple mathematics, these employed even more poorly prepared
assistants, who repeated the cycle. Where artisans were not available ama-
teurs (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 ade-
quately 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 con-
tracting 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,
204 chapter 7

still described as an “able mechanic,” was also a provincial deputy, sug-


gesting 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 nine-
teenth-century rural Brazil and their isolation from strangers were noto-
rious 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
Work 205

for extended periods while engaged in, for example, river navigation or
driving cattle to market, leaving women on their own to run the fazen-
das. 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 establish-
ments, got into fights with each other and ended up in prison, men and
women alike.”137 A few women obtained an education and found employ-
ment 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 profes-
sion 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 Mei-
aponte 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 nine-


teenth 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 contin-
ued to delegate authority to local elites, or, more properly, it continued to
negotiate with such groups, which on their own assumed the right to paro-
chial 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 stim-
ulate economic growth, nor could it deploy an adequate coercive appara-
tus 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
conclusions 207

province and invested with little likelihood of short-term return.2 No sys-


tems 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 rela-
tions. 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 mini-
mum 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 Repub-
lic, 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 seri-
ously 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 rebel-
lion 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
208 conclusions

regime failures, probably strengthened rather than weakened popular alle-


giance 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 fam-
ily, 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 cen-
tury before: ranches tended to be small or medium-sized, most labor was
either family or paid by sorte, towns were unimportant, and access to mar-
ket 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 characteris-
tic 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 subsis-
tence agriculture and ranching. Apart, however, from a few decades in the
mid-eighteenth century when gold exports flourished, each of these econo-
mies 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 Bra-
zil 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 fron-
tiers at once. Most obvious was that which separated and linked the set-
tlers 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 nine-
teenth 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
conclusions 209

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 con-
tempt in which residents of the more developed parts of the Empire held
the sertão and its inhabitants, local elites struggled with the sense of infe-
riority most such frontier groups suffered. They sought to mask the inse-
curities 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 prov-
ince 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 pass-
ing 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 insti-
tutions and their limited presence, a predominance of subsistence farm-
ing 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 circum-
stances, a sense of belonging to a more distant Brazil may have been stron-
ger than that of being part of the province.
Local residents and visitors and officials arriving from the outside cas-
tigated Goiás’s farmers and ranchers for their “backward,” wasteful, and
210 conclusions

destructive methods. Much of this was a discourse born of inappropri-


ate 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 cen-
tury 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 technologi-
cal development in Brazil persisted, and persists in some areas today, with
pernicious effects.
For its inhabitants and the state to prosper, Goiás needed a commod-
ity 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 mil-
lion 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 rail-
road 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 via-
ble dried meat industry decades before the railroad offered this to Goiás.
Exogenous factors combined to relegate Goiás to a marginal position in
conclusions 211

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, promis-
ing 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 prob-
lem 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 pas-
ture and the controlled cross-breeding of cattle. These same changes laid
the basis for Goiás’s emergence in the late twentieth century as a large-
scale 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 ani-
mals 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. Sur-
vival 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 pre-
capitalist mode it could survive on returns that a more advanced econ-
omy 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 frame-
work of capitalist accumulation gave the industry an enormous capacity to
absorb market swings. In all, it is hard to imagine a comparable commer-
cial 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
212 conclusions

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 rudi-
mentary 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.” Through-
out the nineteenth century miners at Nova Roma, São Felix, and Caval-
cante dug saltpeter and sold it, chiefly at the Moquém fair, but gunpowder
remained a product for home manufacture, and much of that of low qual-
ity; 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 deci-
pher. 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 eas-
ily 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, landhold-
ers 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. Ulti-
mately, then, large land holders had only limited control over their agrega-
dos 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 pro-
duction 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 activi-
ties 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 reg-
ularized properties serve the interests of large ranchers by allowing the
easy abandonment of used-up land and providing room for future expan-
sion, it projected their power over wide areas of the countryside, facili-
tating 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 condi-
tions 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
214 conclusions

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 till-
ing 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 sug-
gests, 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 find-
ing competent people for public offices, [that] worked to guarantee impu-
nity 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 fail-
ure 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 an expedition or attack into the interior; a partici-
pant in a bandeira
benzedor one who gives blessings, a curer
boi steer
boiadeiro cattle drover
bugre “beast”: an Indian
caboclo Indian-white mixed blood
câmara town council
camarada wages worker
capanga hired thug
carro de boi; carreteiro oxcart; carter
catequese 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 marshal; deputy
devoluta 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 large property; owner of large property
freguesia parish
geralista, generalista someone from the province or state of Minas
Gerais
goiano someone from the province or state of Goiás
imposto territorial land tax
juiz de direito law judge; judge of comarca
league 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 hindquarter disease of horses
mal triste; tristeza Texas tick fever
mascate; mascatagem peddler; the work of being a peddler
mata forest
matrícula registry or list (of slaves)
mineiro someone from the province or state of Minas Gerais
1
oitava /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 219

rapadura raw, caked sugar


recebedoria; recebedor point for collection of “export” taxes; tax collec-
tor
registro point of inspection for commercial traffic entering or leaving the
province
reglamento regulation or rule
relatório report
remeiro member of riverboat crew
rezador one who cures or resolves problems by praying
roça; roceiro subsistence agricultural plot; subsistence agriculturalist
romaría religious pilgrimage
sertão; sertanejo the “interior”; one who lives in the interior
sesmaria royal land grant, typically one by three leagues
sítio “site” or “place”; small agricultural or ranching property
suplente substitute
tigre “tiger”: any large cat
tropa; tropeiro mule train; supervisor of mule train or mule driver
vago vagrant
vão valley
vaqueiro cowboy; lead cowboy or foreman
1
vintém /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 Nation-
alism, 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”; Gra-
ham, 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,
222 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 fertil-
izer 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: Itin-
erário-1, 140.
notes to introduction 223

36. Contemporary estimates for the nineteenth century population of Goiás


include:
Year Total Year Total
1804 50,365 1848 110,000
1808 55,422 1856 121,992
1819 63,168 1859 129,953
1823 61,000 1861 133,565
1824 62,518 1872 160,395 (census)
1832 68,497 1890 227,572 (census)
1838 97,692
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 prov-
ince 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 Agri-
cultura, 1861–1873,” 12 Jan. 1862.
40. On Indian names see da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios, 526–27 and Ro-
cha, “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 cen-
tury 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 paral-
lel 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
224 notes to introduction

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 ter-
minology: “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 wid-
ows 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 Re-
formers, and Saeger, Chaco Mission Frontier.
notes to chapter 1 225

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. Concern-
ing 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 Inde-
pendence 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 Auto-
ridades, 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, Via-
gens, 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 par-
ties, see AN, Ijj9, 500, Ministério do Império—Ofícios—Goiás, 25 Feb. 1863,
and AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 393, “Correspondência da Província às Autoridades
226 notes to chapter 1

Diversas, 1862–1869,” Ministério de Justiça, 6 Aug. 1863; Mello Franco, Via-


gens, 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 Piracan-
juba (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, Ministé-
rio 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), Subdel-
egado–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 Secre-
taria 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-
notes to chapter 1 227

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, “Corre-
spondência 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 gener-
ally 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 re-
moval of the juiz de direito at Porto Imperial as “turbulent.”
38. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secre-
taria 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 “reestab-
lish his health,” perhaps the most common reason given by law judges when ask-
ing 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 Rela-
ção 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 Secre-
taria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1858–1862,” various; vol. 429, “Registro de Cor-
respondência do Governo com os Juizes de Direito, 1866–1872,” Juiz de Direito,
Corumbá, 11 Dec. 1868; vol. 466, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secre-
taria 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
228 notes to chapter 1

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 Secre-
taria 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 Gui-
marães, 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: Governa-
dor, 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 Del-
gado 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, Milí-
cia 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 “business-
men,” 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, “Corre-
spondência 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 con-
victed of serious crimes to serve their sentences in the capital, considered to have
the only secure facility in the province.
notes to chapter 1 229

66. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 202, “Correspondência do Governo com a Sec-
retaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 27 Sept. 1851; vol. 248, “Corre-
spondência 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 Secre-
taria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1870–1873,” 25 Feb. 1873.
70. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 294, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secre-
taria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1856–1858,” 12 Mar., 1858.
71. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 340, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secre-
taria 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, Coman-
dante, 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 Judici-
ais, 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
230 notes to chapter 1

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 Secre-
taria 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 Secre-
taria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,” 1 Feb. 1850.
89. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 262, “Correspondência do Governo com a Secre-
taria 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; Publica-
dor, 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 Ecle-
siástico,” 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, Mor-
rinhos, 13 March 1872; Doc. Av., vol. 287, Subdelegado, Palma–Chefe de Polícia,
notes to chapter 1 231

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, Portar-
ias, 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 Portar-
ias, 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 prov-
ince, 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
232 notes to chapter 1

impacted Goiás but received little notice: Leal, Terras Goyanas, 155–56. On ma-
laria: Rabelo, “Excessos,” 39–40, Cunha Mattos, Itinerário-1, 98, and Pohl, Via-
gem, 124. On liver problems as the chief cause of hospital deaths, see Relatório-
1859-1, 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 Im-
pério, 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
notes to chapter 2 233

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, Men-
sagem-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 Geo-
grafia, 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 cen-
tury 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 Pro-
vincial, 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.
234 notes to chapter 2

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 Mar-
cos 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, “Cor-
respondência 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, “Cor-
respondência 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 (Governa-
dor, 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
notes to chapter 2 235

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 vari-
ous 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. Ma-
tutina, 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 Auto-
ridades 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 Es-
trangeiras 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
236 notes to chapter 2

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 Habitan-
tes 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 com-
pared to operations on the coast: AHEG, Municípios, Santa Cruz, “Relação dos
Engenhos na Coletoria da Vila de Santa Cruz,” 7 Oct. 1841, and Silvânia (Bon-
fim), 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 be-
tween 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 sui-
cides 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 ev-
ery 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,” Presi-
dente–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 Polí-
cia, 1 Oct. 1868; Doc. Div., vol. 248, “Correspondência do Governo Provincial
para as Autoridades Judiciais e Policiais, 1851–1858,” Juiz de Direito, Porto
notes to chapter 2 237

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, Presi-
dente–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 an-
other from the Conceição jail: Relatório-1881-3, 42.
63. On the rarity of theft, see Saint-Hilaire, Goiás, 47; Cunha Mattos, Itin-
erário-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 Regis-
tros 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 Bar-
bosa, 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
238 notes to chapter 2

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 pro-
moted 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 Negó-
cios 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, Via-
gem, 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; Ma-
tutina, 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 Sec-
retaria 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 Autori-
dades Policiais, 1842–1851,” Chefe de Polícia, 24 July 1850; vol. 202, “Corre-
spondência do Governo com a Secretaria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1847–1853,”
Presidente–Ministério de Justiça, 20 Sept. and 1 Aug. 1850; and vol. 466, “Cor-
respondência 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,” Presi-
dente–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, Presi-
dente, 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, Mu-
nicípios, Conceição, Delegado–Chefe de Polícia, 7 June 1884; Doc. Div., vol. 816,
notes to chapter 2 239

“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 Secre-
taria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1881–1884,” 14 March 1883; AHEG, Série 1800,
“1883–Secretaria de Polícia do Estado,” report, 29 May 1883; Municípios, Ipa-
meri, 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, Documen-
tos, 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 Provin-
cial 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 Capi-
tania 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 Tocan-
tins, 22 Feb. 1869; Municípios, Arraias, 1 April 1855; Traíras, Coletor–Superin-
tendente da Tesouraria, 21 Sept. 1842; Pirenópolis (Meiaponte), Coletor, Palma
(sic)–Superintendente da Tesouraria, 17 Jan. 1847; Relatório-1839, 24, and 1859-
1, 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.
240 notes to chapter 2

98. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capi-
tania 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 Apresenta-
das 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; Tri-
buna 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; “Subsí-
dios,” 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 Auto-
ridades 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
notes to chapter 2 241

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, Minis-
tério 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, Es-
trangeiros 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: Relatório-
Mato 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 Agri-
cultura–Presidente, 17 Aug. 1881.
127. Relatório-1861-2, 23–27. See also Alencastre, Anais, 331–36; Relatório-
1880, 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,” vari-
ous 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
242 notes to chapter 3

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-1859-
1, 54.
133. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 211, “Correspondência da Presidência para as Câ-
maras 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 Of-
ficial, 7 May 1889.

chapter 3. industry, commerce, and communications


1. “Subsídios: Reflexões . . . 1804,” 286; Publicador, 7 March 1885; Governa-
dor, Mensagem-1900, 11.
2. Publicador, 7 March 1885. An 1862 estimate suggested, with suspect pre-
cision, 755 sugar mills and 227 distilleries, 93 tile works, 319 tanneries, and 19
sawmills, as well as small iron foundries at Formosa and Cavalcante: Relatório-
1862, 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, Des-
pertar 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, “Pro-
visões 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.
notes to chapter 3 243

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, Reg-
istro 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; Governa-
dor, 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 As-
sistente ao Despacho do Real Erário, Feb. 1809; vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do
Capitão General da Capitania a Diversos, 1804–1809,” Captão General–Super-
intendência, 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 Se-
cretário 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, “Corre-
spondência 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 soci-
ety 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 notes to chapter 3

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 Im-
pério, 11 Feb. 1857. On mining techniques, see Relatório-1862, 102. For a colo-
nial example of a “society” formed by ex-slaves and free black miners, see Kar-
asch, “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 Goya-
nas, 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 Sen-
hor 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-
notes to chapter 3 245

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: Cor-
reio Official, 1 Dec. 1875.
44. On early iron foundries in Brazil see Holanda, Fronteiras, 157–67; von Es-
chwege, 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 Cle-
mente 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 Ag-
ricultura, 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, re-
port, 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, “Con-
sumo,” 118–19.
246 notes to chapter 3

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 orna-
mentation 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
notes to chapter 3 247

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, “Corre-
spondência com as Câmaras Municipais da Província, 1874–76,” Meiaponte, 25
June 1875; Doc. Av., box 225, “Relatório sobre as Obras Públicas, 1876”; Mu-
nicípios, 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 Im-
pério, 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, “Corre-
spondência 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 Explora-
ção pelos rios Tietê, Paraná, Paranaíba, Rio Verde, dos Bois e Anicuns . . . , 1 June
248 notes to chapter 3

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 Cap-
itania 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: Fu-
nes, 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 Explo-
radora 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 Distru-
ição 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; Relatório-
1850-1, 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 Pro-
vinciais, 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 Leg-
islativa, 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
notes to chapter 4 249

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 open-
ing 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”; Tri-
buna 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 Econ-
omy,’“ 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 num-
bers, 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, Minis-
tério 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, “Cor-
respondência do Comandante de Armas” (Raymundo José Da Cunha Mattos).
Generally, see Cândido, Parceiros, 117–25.
250 notes to chapter 4

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 gen-
erally: 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 tech-
niques 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.
notes to chapter 4 251

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; Relatório-
1845, 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, Caval-
cante, 1842 and 1843, Traíras, 1843, etc.
48. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 3, “Cópias de Ofícios do Capitão General da Capi-
tania 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 Segu-
rado, 27 Jan. 1820.
49. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 191, “Correspondência da Presidência com a Sec-
retaria dos Negócios do Império, 1845–1848,” n.d. (follows 15 Feb. 1847); vol.
200, “Correspondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Prove-
dor–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 Con-
ceição, 17 Aug. 1847.
51. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 16, circular, April 1821. A copy is available in Fu-
nes, 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 Dízi-
mos . . . 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.
252 notes to chapter 4

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), Cole-
tor–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), Co-
letor–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, Assem-
bléia Legislativa, 22 Aug. 1838. Almost a century later: Governador, Mensagem-
1920, 75.
73. AHEG, Doc. Div., vol. 337, “Correspondência da Presidência com Auto-
ridades Policiais, 1858–1860,” Subdelegado, Goiás, 27 July 1859. In other prov-
inces 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 Autori-
dades 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
notes to chapter 4 253

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 Secre-
taria dos Negócios da Justiça, 1858–1862,” 15 July 1859. For Brazil more gener-
ally, 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 regu-
lar 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 (frag-
mentos),” 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, Pirenópo-
lis (Meiaponte), July 1873.
254 notes to chapter 4

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-Adminis-
trativa, 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 Agri-
cultura, 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.
notes to chapter 5 255

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 col-
lected there to be sent to Rio de Janeiro and other places”: Cunha Mattos, Choro-
graphia, 38.
7. AHEG, Municípios, Taguatinga, Câmara–Presidente, 8 Jan. 1874; Nativi-
dade, 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 Encar-
regada 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, Mensagem-
1899, 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 con-
tract laborers: Informação Goyana, 11 June 1922.
15. Informação Goyana, 11 June 1922, 12 July 1927, and 6 Jan. 1928. De-
fenders 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, Minis-
tério da Agricultura, Synopse.
256 notes to chapter 5

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 gen-
eral 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,” Fer-
nando Delgado Freire de Castillo–Conde de Gálvez,” 20 Dec. 1813; Pohl, Via-
gem, 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; For-
mosa, Câmara, 13 Jan. 1848. For a description of São Romão in the mid-nine-
teenth 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,
notes to chapter 5 257

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 Agri-
cultura, Synopse) was the high cost of salt: e.g., Alemão, Pouso Alto, Goiás, Cur-
ralinho, 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 Cen-
trais-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, “Correspondên-
cia 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 Dízi-
mos . . . 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
258 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 Autori-
dades 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 Ro-
drigues 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 Fa-
zenda, 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 ex-
ample, 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.
notes to chapter 5 259

74. AHEG, Doc Div., vol. 36, “Correspondência dos Negócios do Reino,
1820–1824,” 4 Jan. 1821; Doc. Av., box 144, Recebedor, Duro–Inspetor da Dire-
toria 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, “Secre-
taria 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, Cole-
tor–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 ex-
ample, 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, “Corre-
spondência da Provedoria da Fazenda Provincial, 1847–1850,” Provedor–Coletor,
260 notes to chapter 5

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 Pro-
vincial 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, Mu-
nicípios, 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 Mu-
nicípios, 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 5 261

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 Provinci-
ais–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 Pa-
ranaíba,” 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 Ren-
das 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 Tesoura-
ria, 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 Cole-
tor–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.
262 notes to chapter 6

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–Presi-
dente, 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, Administra-
dor 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 agri-
cultural 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: Ber-
tran, 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, “Sesma-
rias,” 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.
notes to chapter 6 263

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 al-
lowed 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 au-
thorities 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 Wil-
cox, “Cattle Ranching,” 153–54.
34. AHEG, Doc. Av., box 109, Ministério dos Negócios do Império, circular,
13 Jan. 1855.
264 notes to chapter 6

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 pan-
ning for diamonds: Bertran, Formação Econômica, 66; Cunha Mattos, Choro-
graphia, 79–82.
41. AHEG, Doc. Div., Vol. 308, “Correspondência do Presidente com o Minis-
tério 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 Minis-
tério dos Negócios do Império, 1851–57,” 11 Jan. 1856; Doc. Av., box 127, Cole-
tor, Santa Cruz–Presidente, 27 Dec. 1858. For devoluta reported by other com-
munities, see Doc. Av., box 129; Municípios, Natividade, Subdelegado–Presidente,
1 Oct. 1858; Taguatinga, Vigário–Presidente, 3 Nov. 1858 (Responding to a presi-
dential 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, Cole-
tor 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 6 265

Chapéu 63
Flores 275
S. Domingos 147
Palma 152
S. Miguel/Almas 44
Taguatinga —
Chapada 38
Corumbá 275
Bonfim 411
Campinas 206
Pouso Alto 74
Conceição 181
Morrinhos 227
S. Rita Paranaíba 76
Ipameri 245
Catalão 697
Formosa 185
Pilar 136
Crixás 38
Amaro Leite 34
S. José Tocantins 111
Traíras 103
Natividade 117
P. Imperial 50
Carmo 60
Boavista 239
S. Felix 64
Duro 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 prov-
ince 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 appropria-
tion”(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.
266 notes to chapter 6

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.,” Presi-
dente–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; Alen-
car, 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, Via-
gem, 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; Governa-
dor, 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 Agricul-
tura, 20 March 1874; Doc. Div., vol. 532, “Correspondência da Presidência com
o Ministério da Agricultura, 1873–1877,” 10 May 1874.
notes to chapter 6 267

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 indig-
enous 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, Estru-
tura 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 re-
ported 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 frag-
mentation, 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, middle-
range ranch in Rio Grande do Sul during these years as approximately 11,000 ha,
268 notes to chapter 6

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, “Corre-
spondência 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 Secre-
taria 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 Provín-
cia 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 Munici-
pal, 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.
notes to chapter 7 269

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, “Cor-
respondência do Governo e Autoridades Fora da Província, 1808–1809,” Min-
istro 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, “Hos-
pital,” 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 Fa-
zenda, 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
270 notes to chapter 7

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, Bul-
hões, 68–75. For petitions from slaves asking for the state to complete their pur-
chase 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 ab-
sence 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 Agri-
cultura, 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.
notes to chapter 7 271

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; Pater-
nostro, Viagem, 183; Tiballi, “Expansão,” 102.
52. Relatório-1862, 125; AHEG, Doc Av., box 184, Câmara, Conceição–Presi-
dente, 10 Jan. 1868; for a similar complaint, see Municípios, São Domingos, Del-
egado–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, Es-
trangeiros 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 immigra-
tion 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 cap-
tive 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, Documen-
tos, 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.
272 notes to chapter 7

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, “Corre-
spondência 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 Ministé-
rio 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, I-
28, 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,” Câ-
mara, 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, “Pro-
jecto 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 Provín-
cia 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—
notes to chapter 7 273

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 Diver-
sos—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, Desclassifica-
dos, Chap. 2.
88. Rabelo, “Excessos,” 65, and Moraes, “Estratégias,” 105–6; AHEG, Doc.
Div., vol. 442, “Relatórios, 1868–1882,” “Polícia, 1880–81.” See also Relatório-
1881-1, 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, Subdel-
egado–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, “Exces-
sos,” 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 Apresenta-
das ao Conselho Geral, 1829–1838,” 27 July 1837.
102. Lamounier, “Formas de Transição,” and “Trabalho sob Contrato”; Cor-
reio 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, Alen-
castre–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 prov-
ince 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, there-
fore, 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 notes to conclusions

10. Relatório—São Paulo-1859, 25.


11. Relatório—Alagoas-1848, 11–12.
12. Relatório—Minas Gerais-1857, 12 (quote shortened).
13. Relatório—Paraná-1878, 10.
14. Relatório—Pernambuco-1854, 7; Relatório—Rio Grande do Sul-1851, 11.
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BN Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro
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Index

Agregados, 19, 107, 163, 168, 199, 200, 129, 166, 167, 170, 174, 190; cattle
201 fair, 143–44; lynching, 36–37, 66
Agriculture: colonial policies, 105–6; and Borders, interprovincial disputes, 68, 125,
weather, 112–13; pests and parasites, 153–54, 173
111–12, 250n35; practices, 18–19, Budgets: municipal, 56–57; provincial,
108–9, 110–11, 209–10; precapitalist, 28–29, 50–51, 55–56
211–12; slave labor, 107–8; subsistence Bulhões, 27, 169
production, 107; transport costs, 108.
See also Taxes Caldas Novas, 7
Aldeias, 13, 41, 74–77, 78, 102, 178; Camaradas, 198–99, 202. See also
abuses, 76; source of slaves, 194. Agregados
See also Boavista; Duro; São José de Campinas, 7, 90
Mossâmedes Canoeiros (Avá-Canoeiros), 12, 13, 193;
Alencastre, José Martins de, 12, 13, 80, attacks by, 72, 78, 116, 141, 191;
143–44, 147, 154 expeditions against, 58, 74
Alves de Oliveira, Joaquim, 80, 94, 98, Capangas, 34, 97, 200, 274n108
111, 126, 128, 135 Capuchins, as missionaries, 13, 22, 76
Amaro Leite, 74, 77, 114, 141, 191 Caracatys, 12
Anicuns, 83–84, 106, 186 Carijós, 193
Antas (Anápolis), 129, 166, 175 Carmo, 73
Apinayé(s), 12, 72, 76, 193, 195 Carolina (MA), 52, 102, 114
Araxá, 136 Carretão, 75, 138, 139
Army, regular: ineffectiveness of, 40; as Carts, ox, 95–97; damaged caused by,
police, 39–40; recruitment, 39, 229n79 246n84
Arraias, 64, 65, 90, 143, 144, 170, 172; Castelnau, Francis, 67, 84, 90, 94, 111,
ecology, 176; land conflict, 177; tax 138
collection, 52; vampire bats, 138 Catalão, 26, 32, 40, 61, 71, 112,
Artisans, 203–4, 274n123 117, 125, 151, 153, 154, 171, 172;
Assembly, Provincial, 28–29 cattle smuggling, 153; crime, 68;
immigration, 190; slave exports, 185
Bahia, 8, 19, 145, 154, 164, 190; Cattle, 130–54, 210–11, 259n84; capital
bandits, 68, 69, 71; counterfeiting, 70; requirements, 135–36; colonial period,
criminals, 140; markets, 131; slave 130–31; commerce, 142–50; disease,
prices, 183 139–40; exports, interprovincial, 149–
Bandeiras/bandeirantes, 14, 22, 58, 74, 50, 210–11, 260n98; marchantes, 143;
78, 141, 156, 192–93 markets, 143–45; pests and parasites,
Bandits, 68, 69, 70–71. See Bahia; Crime; 138–39; prices, 145, 148, 259n78;
Jalapão regional, 132–33; roundups, 134–35;
Barreiros (MG), 143 sales, 146–48, 259n89; and salt, 136–
Bats, vampire. See Cattle 38; smuggling, 150–53; technology, 18,
Boavista, 30, 40, 52, 63, 65, 67, 68, 76, 133–36; thieves, 67, 140–41; Vão de
102, 103, 146, 195 Paranã, 131–32
Bonfim (Sylvânia), 7, 40, 63, 64, 91, 98, Cavalcante, 33, 41, 74, 117, 131, 143,
294 index

166, 174; bandits attack, 71; saltpeter collection procedures, 114–16;


mining, 212 debated, 114–15; debts, 116–17,
Cemeteries (Campo da Forca), 48–49 252n65; dízimo urbano, 267n83;
Chamboiá(s), 73, 77 exemptions, 113–14
Chapada, 182 Doctors, shortage of, 47, 232n128
Chapéu, 143 Duro (Dianópolis) (aldeia), 68, 78, 151,
Chimangos, 26 178; bandits attack, 71; gold mining,
Church, Catholic, state relations, 13, 84
40–41
Clergy, 41–43; quality of, 13; problems Education, 44–46
with, 42–43; training, 42 Elections, 2–3, 27; violence, 20, 27
Colégio Isabel, 76 Eschwege, Wilhelm Ludwig von, 136
Colônia Blasiana, 189
Commerce, 89–93; imports, 92–93; Fires, effects of, 7, 8, 14, 109, 135,
mascates, 89–90, 200, 209; merchants, 256n25
wealth of, 224n73; shops, 91–92; Flores, 40, 87, 144; anti-Portuguese
traders, 90; taverns, 90–91 violence, 26; community land, 171–72;
Conceicão, 48, 143, 172; bandits, 71; stock raising, 131; trade, 143
gold mining, 84 Food: supply and prices, 120–25; for
Conscription. See Army, regular Goiás (city), 124–25; high prices,
Corumbá, 33, 85, 91, 143, 170, 174; causes of, 121–23, 252n73
slave holders, 107, 127 Formosa, 40, 63, 64, 143, 162, 187;
Cotton: export difficulties, 128; attack on gypsies, 69; cattle smuggling,
production, 127–29 151; community land, 171; as
Counterfeiting, 69–70, 144 “Couros,” 255n6; iron foundry, 88;
Cowboy, drawing of, 256n16 political struggle, 27; Vão do Paranã,
Coxim (MT), 96, 137 8, 131–32
Crime, 61–71, 140–41; causes of, 65–67; Frontiers, 13–22, 208–9
death-sentence commutation, 236n44;
“impunity,” 66; provincial boundaries, Gardner, George, 43, 84, 140, 186
68; and weakness of the state, 66–67 Gaviões, 193
Crixás, 108, 138, 186; sugar mills, 126 Gerais, 140, 164
Cunha Mattos, Raymundo José da, 9, 11, Goiás (city), 11, 37, 94, 107; land sales,
35, 84, 111, 131, 132, 190, 196, 203 168; market, 108, 118–19, 125, 143;
Cunha Menzes, Luíz da, 106 municipal land, 172; public health, 48;
Curralinho, 63, 65, 174 slaughterhouse, 119–20; sugar mills
(Vila Boa), 126; slave population, 187;
D’Alincourt, Luiz, 111 Vila Boa, 11, 83
Delegados/subdelegados, 29–31; Goiás (province): geography, 8–9;
competence, 31; and crime, 30–31; population, 14, 15; settlement patterns,
lack of support, 30; substitutes, 30; 15
threats against, 31 Gold: mining, 6–7, 9, 82–85, companies,
Delgado, Fernando, 35, 46, 80 failure of, 84–85; quinto, decline of,
Desemboque, 136 223–24n50
Devoluta, 19; colonial 155–56; national, Gomes de Siqueira, João Bonifácio, 28,
in Goiás, 162–64; sales, 169, 172–73 88
Diamonds: mining, 85–86, 244–45n42; Gradaús, 12, 76
state monopoly, 223n47 Guajajáras, 12
Diseases, 46–47, 231–32n122; smallpox, Gypsies, 68–69
46–47, 252n124; malaria, 47
Dízimo, 53–54; abolition of, 117; Horses, 54, 141–42, 147; disease, 141–
agricultural, 113–17; cattle, 148–49; 42; prices, 141; smuggling, 150; taxes,
index 295

148, 149; theft, 140; vampire bats, 177–78; and control of labor,
138; Vão do Paranã, 113, 132–32 178–79; fragmentation of, 267n89;
settlement of, in Goiás, 161–62; law
Immigration: international, 191–92; of 1850/54, 158–61; law of 1850/54
interprovincial, 189–91, 271n54 in Goiás, 162, 166–67; markets
Indians: attacks by, 9, 18, 50, 57, for, 167–69, 213; measurement
71–73, 78, 141, 193, 239n89; attacks, costs, 266n59; municipal, 266n71,
causes, 73–74; attacks, effects, 73; 267n74; patterns of ownership,
as cattle thieves, 140–41; complaints 170–71, 174–77, 267–68n91; prices
by, 241n118; groups, 12–13; as 168; registration, 165–66, 263n29,
labor, 193–94, 213; as labor on river 264–65n48; sales 265n53; surveyors,
boats, 195; Luzo-Brazilian attitudes shortage of, 164–65; taxes, 174. See
toward, 14; slavery, 14, 18, 192–96, Posse(s); Devoluta
271n61. See also Canoeiros; Kayapós; Leal, Oscar, 46, 48, 70, 85, 88, 91, 95
Xavantes; Xerentes Lino de Moraes, Miguel, 26, 47, 81, 84,
Industries, 79, 242n2. See also Cotton; 133, 192, 193
Iron; Textiles Lynching, in Bonfim, 36–37, 66
Ipameri, 71, 171
Iron, 87–89, 245n47 Magalhães, Couto de, 103, 104
Mascarenhas, Francisco de Assis, 83, 106
Jagunços, 200, 247n108 Mal triste (tristeza), 139–40
Jalapão, 154 Marchantes, 143
Januária (MG), 137, 143, 256n30 Markets, 118–19
Jaragua, 25, 106, 117, 143, 164, 167, Mascates, 89–90, 200, 209
202 Mato Grosso (forest), 7–8, 109
Jataí, 19, 64, 68, 80, 122, 171, 193; Mato Grosso (province), 17, 19, 45,
export of cattle, 147; immigration to, 72, 76, 79, 127, 185, 188, 191, 210;
190 border dispute, 154, 173; food sent to,
Javaés, 12, 13 122; horse exports to, 142; tobacco
Javahus, 12 exports to, 129; troops transferred
Judges: juiz de direito, 31–33; court to, 37, 38; slave exports to, 59; slave
sessions, 227nn35,39; murder of, violence in, 58; salt trade, 137
225n5; substitutes, 32, 33–34; justice Medicine, popular, 47–48
of the peace, 31; municipal, 32 Meiaponte (Pirenópolis), 5, 68, 85,
Juries, 34 88, 90, 99, 106, 174, 187, 205;
agricultural techniques, 110–11;
Karajás (Carajás), 12, 13, 77 business practices, 91; decline of, 11;
Kayapós (Caiapós), 12, 76, 194; attacks, land possession, 165; mal triste, 139;
13, 19, 72, 73, 77, 82, 86–87, 182, market, 107, 108, 118, 125, 143;
193; at São José de Mossâmedes, 75 National Guard, 35; slave population,
Krahós (Carahós), 12, 140–41 186, 205
Mello Franco, Virgílio de, 11, 48
Labor: female, 91, 204–5, 275n131; Mercury, 85
free, 212; forced wage, 5; laws, 198, Migration. See Immigration
273n86; “laziness,” 4–5, 181–83; Militia, colonial, 34–35. See also
on river boats, 195–96; role of the National Guard
state, 20; shortages, 81, 180; in textile Minas Gerais, 19, 40, 45, 52, 65, 66,
factory, 81–82. See also Agregados; 69, 86, 125, 131, 140, 151, 185, 214;
Camaradas; Slavery border disputes, 68, 153–54; cattle
Land: capital flows to, 169; as a fairs, 143, 144; cattle fattening, 145;
commodity, 179, 213; community emigration, 7, 8, 27, 122, 132, 161,
ownership, 171–72; conflicts, 20–21, 189–90; mal triste, 139; political
296 index

parties, 26, 28; salt trade, 96, 137; Presídios, 37, 41, 77–78; criminals, 77.
slave sales to, 188 See also Indians
Missionaries. See Capuchins Public health, 46–49; conditions in
Moquém, 26, 43–44, 65, 90, 209, 212 towns, 48
Morrinhos, 168, 190
Mule trains, 93–95; organization, 94; Quilombos, 34–35, 58, 59, 60, 235n33,
problems with, 94–95; labor on, 96–97 235–36n41
Quinto. See Gold
National Guard, 35–37; conscription,
39; officers, 228n56; organization, Relação, 33
problems with, 35–36; as police, Religion, popular, 41, 43, 230n93,
36–37, 59; at presídios, 57, 77, 78; 231n108, 232–33n132, 257n43
resistance to service, 37 Revenue. See Taxes
Natividade, 30, 40, 67, 90, 97, 120, 143, Rio Araguaia, 103–4
144, 162, 174; National Guard troops, Rio Bonito (town), 8, 72, 87, 182; cattle
36; priests, 43; public lands, 164; river exports, 147; manumission, 188;
traffic, 102; slave population, 186, property patterns, 166, 170, 175–76;
187; vagrancy, 197 slave population, 187
Rio Claro: diamond mining, 86; gold
Palma, 30, 48, 57, 74, 90, 102, 143, 172, mining, 84
186; trade with Belém, 103 Rio Claro (town), 40, 59, 166, 170, 182;
Paracatú (MG), 8, 46, border disputes, Indian attacks, 72, 73, 87; dízimo, 115
68, 125, 153–54 Rio Pilões, 73, 84, 86
Paraguayan War, 38, 58, 121–22, 142, Rio São Francisco, 90, 101, 103, 125,
253n91 130, 131, 137, 143
Parties, political, 3, 26–27; and violence, Rio Tocantins, 100–103
27–28 Rio Verde (town), 31, 40, 63, 68, 171;
Paternostro, Júlio, 11 cattle exports, 147; immigration to,
Pedestres, 38, 77 122, 190; Indian attacks, 19; land
Pedro Afonso, 40, 52, 65, 76 sales, 168, 170; slave population, 187
Peixe, 102, 143 Rio Vermelho, 103
Pigs, 48–49, 154 Rivers, 8; communications, 99–104;
Pilar, 40, 143, 172, 204; gold mining, 84; labor, 102; river craft, 100–101;
slave population, 186 shipwrecks, 101; smuggling, 103; steam
Piracanjuba (Pouso Alto), 52, 129, 140, navigation, 104. See also specific rivers
175 Roads, 97–100
Pohl, Johann Emanuel, 11, 86, 109, 138 Roraima, compared to Goiás, 208
Police, provincial, 37–38; chief of, 28, 29
Pontal, 73 Sabinada, 225n7
Population of Goiás province, 12, 14, 15, Saint-Hilaire, Auguste de, 1, 11, 22, 86,
223n36 134, 180, 182
Porto Imperial (Porto Nacional), 9, Salinas, 114
40, 47, 64, 73, 74, 103, 114, 116, Salt, 136–38
138, 143, 176, 187; immigration Sampião, Miguel Ignácio, 81, 84, 185,
to, 191; river traffic, 101, 102; slave 192–93
population, 186 Santa Cruz, 57, 94, 117, 125, 164, 174,
Portos, 98, 137, 151–52, 153, 154, 185 194; crime, 65, 66; exports, 154;
Posse, 87, 90, 143; crime, 67 National Guard, 36; slave population,
Posse(s), 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 186; immigration to, 190
164 Santa Leopoldina, 77
President, provincial, 24–26; activities of, Santa Luzia (Luziânia), 19, 117, 125,
25–26 162, 167, 170, 174, 203; agricultural
index 297

techniques, 110; business practices, Tapirapés, 12, 13


91; disease, 46; iron forge, 88; slave Taverns, 90–91
exports, 185; slave population, 186, Taxes: budgets, 50–51; “5 percent” tax,
187; sugar mills, 126 117–18; interprovincial export, 4; land,
Santa Maria Taguatinga, 131, 164; cattle 174; revenue, state, 50–57; revenue
fair, 143, 144; smuggling, 140, 151 officials, 51–52, 53, 233n5. See also
Santa Rita do Paranaíba (Itumbiara), 31, Dízimos; Slavery, African
70, 153 Textiles, 79–82; factories, 80–82
São Domingos, 90, 143, 144, 166 Tobacco, 128–29
São Francisco, proposed province, Towns, 9, 11–12. See also specific towns
238n70 Traíras, 74; cotton production, 128; iron
São José de Mossâmedes (aldeia), 13, foundry, 87; land, 166, 167; mercantile
75, 82, 86, 141; iron foundry, 87; land society, 100; sugar mills, 126; tax
sales, 169 collection, 149
São José do Tocantins, 44, 84, 143, 164, Transport, 17, 254n107
167, 197 Trindade, 64
São Miguel e Almas, 67, 154 Tropas. See Mule trains
São Romão (MG), 137, 256n30
Sertão, images of, 15–16 Uberaba (MG), 96, 137–38, 186, 192
Sesmarias, 155–57, 262nn5,10; in Goiás,
162–64 Vagrancy, 196–97
Sheep, 154 Vão do Paranã, 39, 90, 131, 141;
Slaughterhouses, 119–20 flooding, 113, 132
Slavery, African, 58–61, 183–89; Vaqueiros, 201–2
abolition, 188–89; cost, 183–84; Violence: anti-Portuguese, 25–26, 69;
escapes, 58–59, 188; export tax, interpersonal, 19–20, 61, 63, 64,
54, 185; and food production, 122; 65. See also Bandeiras/bandeirantes;
importation, 183, 185; manumission, Crime; Indians: attacks by; Parties,
188; population, 59–60, 270n24; political
prices, 184, 187; resistance, 60, 61;
revolts, absence of, 59; sales, 185–86; Wallé, Paul, 91
and sugar production, 126–27 Wells, James, 95, 136
Slavery, Indian. See under Indians Women. See Labor: female
Smallpox, 46–47, 252n124
Smuggling: of cattle, 150–53; of horses, Xacriabá, 192
150 Xavantes (Chavantes), 12, 58, 76; attacks
Spix, J. Baptist von, 131, 212 by, 72, 73, 141; river labor, 195
State: formation, 2–6, 24; poverty of, Xerentes (Cherentes), 12, 74, 76; attacks
206–8 by, 72; land, 178
Sugar, production of, 126–27

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