Galveston Cotton Exchange Sketches by TEXAS - 1876

Galveston: M. Strickland, 1876. Small 4to. Twelve full-page lithographic cartoons (numbered I-XII including the inside front and rear wrappers). Publisher's wrappers, vertical centerfold, crudely stitched at an early date. Lampooning bull versus bear in the largest Texas cotton exchange. Miles Strickland (d. 1882) was among the earliest lithographers in Texas. The present work is a humorous look at the mid-1870s Texas cotton market, featuring bulls and bears in comic misadventures. The cartoons, by an unnamed artist but perhaps Strickland, poke fun at the growing cotton market, repeatedly showing the bulls getting the best of the bears. In the first cartoon, for examples, a bull is holding bales of cotton (labelled receipts, dry goods and trade) by a chain over a cliff just a few inches from a ledge marked bottom, while a bear bites the bull's hind leg; the chain snaps and the bull lands on the bear's head, turns and chases away the bear prodding it with its horns. In another, a group of bears are trying to give a sick bull medicine and an enema, but end of getting kicked and horned. In the penultimate cartoon, a butchered bull is shown hanging by a curing hook, with the head, and entrails below; the following page a group of bears all clamoring to reach the bull's "oysters" which are suspended from the ceiling. The final cartoon shows both bulls and bears being herded into a shack labelled New York Futures on the edge of the cliff, propped up from below on stilts, with a bull and a bear with axes in hand waiting for it to fill. After the Civil War, production of cotton in Texas increased drastically, due to the expansion of railroad distribution, improved compression baling, and a great influx in sharecroppers. The Galveston Cotton Exchange was formed to address pricing disputes between buyers and sellers; to establish fair trade principles; and to collect and disseminate information concerning the crop and market conditions. Concurrently, cotton futures began trading in New York and Liverpool. Although stated on the upper wrapper as the second edition, we find no record of any other example of any edition of this work.