Horse-Speed America

Horse-Speed America: The Last Generation Who Could Still Say "We Don't Need Anything

From You"

It’s 1883. You wake before dawn to a silence so absolute you can hear the frost cracking on

your windowpanes. Your breath hangs in the air as you pull on boots stiff from yesterday’s mud.

There’s no thermostat. No switch to flip. You walk to the barn by starlight, the only glow coming

from the lantern you filled with oil you rendered yourself—from sunflowers you grew, pressed in

the shed out back.

This isn't a romance novel. This is survival math. Your nearest neighbor is three miles away. The

sheriff, when you need him, is a day's ride. The general store—where you might buy sugar or

nails if you had cash, which you mostly don't—is a two-day wagon trip that you make maybe

twice a year. You are, by modern standards, catastrophically isolated. But you are also, by that

same measure, terrifyingly free.

You don't owe anyone for your heat. You don't owe anyone for your transportation. The horse

that pulls your plow runs on hay from your own fields. The fire that cooks your food burns wood

from your own timber stand. If you're clever, your tractor—if you have one—runs on alcohol you

fermented from your own grain. You are the end of a 10,000-year tradition: the producer who is

also the power source.

This is the world we lost in twenty-three years. Not gradually. Not gently. In a single generation,

we went from "we make everything we need" to "we depend on everything they sell."

And here's the thing: they had to make sure we could never go back.

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The World That Was

Between 1880 and 1890, rural America was still a frontier society in all but name. Infrastructure

was a rumor. Overland travel averaged 3–8 mph—horse speed, because horses were the

standard. Mail routes existed, but "lost" was a common status. Law enforcement was you, your

neighbors, and whoever brought a shotgun to the town meeting.[11][12]

This wasn't paradise. It was a pressure cooker.

You lived with the permanent knowledge that one drought could starve your children. One

infected wound could kill you. One late freeze could wipe out a year's work. Wolves took your

livestock. Neighbors feuded for decades. Medical care was whiskey and prayer. But you also

knew, with absolute certainty, that no corporation in New York could turn a dial and freeze you

out of your own life. You controlled the means of production—of food, of power, of movement.

Energy wasn't a commodity. It was a process. You grew it, cut it, pressed it, fermented it. A

farmer in Kansas could grow sorghum, ferment it into alcohol, and run his equipment without

ever touching cash. A rancher in Texas could press cottonseed oil and burn it in lamps. This

wasn't theory—it was Tuesday.[12][11]

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The Moment the World Tilted

Then, on January 10, 1901, the earth screamed.

The Spindletop well in Beaumont, Texas didn't just strike oil—it erupted 150 feet into the air,

producing 100,000 barrels a day. More oil in twenty-four hours than any well in history. The

ground literally bled black gold, and the roar was so loud people heard it twenty miles

away.[14][13]

Overnight, oil became cheaper than dirt.

Prices collapsed from $2 a barrel to three cents. Refineries materialized like mushrooms after

rain. Railroad magnates—who'd been quietly bought out by oil interests—suddenly found it

"inefficient" to transport anything else. Banks started writing loans for "modern"

petroleum-powered equipment, but not for "risky" homemade alternatives.

This wasn't market forces. This was a price shock war.

They didn't need to prove petroleum was better. They just needed to make everything else

economically impossible. Within five years, the infrastructure for ethanol, plant oils, and local

fuel production—still in its infancy—was starved of investment, rail access, and political oxygen.

It didn't die of natural causes. It was suffocated.[13][14]

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The Dreamers Who Saw It Coming

In 1892, a German engineer named Rudolf Diesel built something impossible: an engine that

could run on peanut oil. Not as a gimmick—as the primary design. In 1900, he stood before a

crowd at the Paris Exposition and ran his engine on 100% pure peanut oil, achieving 75%

thermal efficiency while steam engines wheezed along at less than 10%.

Diesel didn't just want to build an engine. He wanted to liberate farmers.

In a 1912 speech—the year before he vanished from a ship under mysterious

circumstances—he said: "the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today

but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal-tar

products of the present time." He wasn't selling oil. He was selling independence. He wanted

the farmer in Bavaria to power his tractor with rapeseed he grew himself, cutting the banks and

the rail barons clean out of the equation.[15][16][17][18][19]

Across the Atlantic, Henry Ford was building the same vision from a different angle. His 1896

Quadricycle ran on pure ethanol. The Model T, the car that put America on wheels, came with

an adjustable carburetor specifically designed to run on alcohol. In 1925, Ford told The New

York Times: "The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road,

or from apples, weeds, sawdust—almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter

that can be fermented."

Think about that.

The most important industrialist of the 20th century was telling farmers they could power their

future with potatoes. One acre of potatoes, he calculated, could produce enough alcohol to run

farm machinery for a hundred years. This wasn't a side project. This was the plan—until the

plan became impossible.[16][17][18][19][20]

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The Quiet War on Self-Reliance

Here's where the story gets dark.

In 1862, the federal government imposed a $2.08 per gallon tax on alcohol. Officially, this was to

fund the Civil War. Unofficially, it made homemade fuel alcohol more expensive than kerosene.

A farmer in Iowa could produce ethanol for pennies, but the tax made it double the price of

petroleum. **The war ended. The tax didn't.**[1][3]

By 1906, farmers were begging for relief. A movement rose to repeal the tax on non-beverage

alcohol. It partially succeeded—partially—but the damage was done. The infrastructure had

atrophied. Banks wouldn't finance "unapproved" fuel systems. And then came the knockout

punch.

Prohibition.

The Volstead Act didn't just ban whiskey. It criminalized any alcohol production not licensed and

federally inspected. To get a fuel alcohol permit, you had to submit to FBI inspections, denature

your product with poison, and maintain paperwork that would choke a lawyer. The regulatory

burden was so crushing that small-scale production became economically absurd.[14][13]

The moonshiners—those romanticized outlaws—weren't just making hooch. Many were

producing high-proof fuel alcohol for their equipment. When federal agents raided stills, they

weren't just enforcing morality. They were enforcing dependence. Every bust was a message:

*You will buy your fuel. You will not make it. You will stay in the system.*[3][1][13][14]

John D. Rockefeller didn't need to lobby for Prohibition directly. He funded the Anti-Saloon

League, knowing full well that alcohol fuel was the real threat. Standard Oil's 90% control of

refining capacity meant they could dictate terms to railroads, banks, and politicians. They didn't

just win the market. **They rewrote the rules so no one else could play.**[30][31][32][33][34]

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The Unraveling: What It Felt Like to Lose

By 1920, the farmer who once fueled his own tractor was now taking out a bank loan for

gasoline. By 1930, he was buying fertilizer from the same company that sold him fuel. By 1940,

he was locked into crop contracts, equipment financing, and pesticide schedules.

This wasn't progress. It was a debt trap wearing a lab coat.

Each innovation—mechanization, chemical agriculture, centralized processing—came with a

price: you had to borrow to afford it, and you had to keep borrowing to maintain it. The New

Deal, for all its good intentions, permanently embedded this system. Federal agriculture policy

favored scale. Scale required capital. Capital required banks. Banks required collateral. And

collateral meant you could never stop producing for the market, even when the market was

killing you.[13][14]

By 1950, small farms were evaporating. By 1980, rural America had become a supply depot for

industrial agriculture—a place you extracted calories from, not a community you built within. The

autonomy of 1880 wasn't just gone. It was unthinkable.

We tell ourselves this was inevitable. It wasn't. It was engineered.

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The Tools They Dreamed Of—but Never Held

Now, here's where the story pivots.

Rudolf Diesel and Henry Ford were right about the vision but wrong about the timing. They were

building decentralized fuel systems with 1910s technology. They needed infrastructure that

didn't exist, sensors that hadn't been invented, and automation that was still science fiction.

We have those now.

Cheap sensors can monitor fermentation in real time. AI can optimize biofuel yields from local

feedstocks. Micro-manufacturing lets you build small-scale refineries that fit in a barn. Edge

computing decentralizes decision-making. Blockchain can create local energy markets without

middlemen.

For the first time in a century, the technical barriers are gone.

The question isn't "Can we produce local fuel?" It's "Why are we still paying people to make us

dependent?"

This is where the work gets dangerous. Not physically—politically. Because when you can

produce your own fuel, you start asking what else you can produce. Your own food processing.

Your own water purification. Your own communication networks. Each step you take toward

self-reliance is a step away from their economic model. And they notice.

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The Choice in Front of Us

We're not going back to 1880. That world was brutal, precarious, and unjust in ways we won't

accept. But we can take what was functional about it—the autonomy, the local control, the ability

to say "no"—and build it into the 21st century.

The technology is here. The knowledge is open-source. The economics finally make sense

again.

But the system won't change itself.

Every time someone like Tyler Pirtz at Range Sustain Tech in Gillette, Wyoming, is part of a

small but growing group of rural innovators using Bitcoin mining not as a financial gamble, but

as a practical heat-recovery technology for agricultural and ranching operations. On his working

ranch, Pirtz currently heats his workshop/lab—nicknamed “the Cyber Ranch”—with two

immersion-cooled Bitcoin miners integrated directly into his building’s HVAC system. The

captured waste heat also supports a radiant-floor heating loop, providing reliable warmth

through Wyoming winters without relying solely on propane or electric resistance heat. His setup

demonstrates a real-world proof-of-concept: that decentralized, point-of-use computation can

displace traditional heating fuels while giving ranchers a dual-purpose asset—thermal energy

plus hashpower.

Pirtz and his collaborators are also exploring a simplified single-miner home-heating design,

still in the early stages, with the long-term aim of offering low-cost, locally owned thermal

infrastructure for ranchers, farmers, and rural households who face both high energy costs and

increasing pressure from centralized utilities. In an era when rural America has steadily lost

autonomy, Range Sustain Tech represents a return to what agrarian life once embodied: energy

generated on-site, owned outright, and serving the people who live on the land.

Tylers philosophy of releasing gate kept knowledge open source to the community is the future.

Do It Yourself or RST is happy to help.

The door the oil industry nailed shut in 1901 was brute forced open with crypto technology and

post combustion engineering as a sustainable heat recovery disruptive infrastructure of the

future.

Every time a farmer installs solar with battery backup, she's not just saving money. She's

declaring independence from the grid that profits from her dependence. Every time a community

starts a local energy co-op, they're not just sharing resources. They're building a parallel

economy that doesn't answer to Wall Street.

This is the value for you, the reader: You are not powerless.

You don't need to wait for policy. You don't need to wait for permission. You can start where you

are, with what you have, and reclaim one piece of the system. Maybe it's a small still for fuel

alcohol. Maybe it's a contract with a local solar installer. Maybe it's just learning the history so

you can teach your neighbors why the game feels rigged.

Because it is. But rigged games only work when people keep playing.

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The Through-Line You Can Hold

• 1880: Autonomy was necessity. You were free because no one could reach you to control

you. It was brutal, but it was yours.

• 1901–1933: Petroleum and policy weaponized infrastructure. They didn't ask you to choose

dependence. They made independence illegal, impractical, and then unthinkable.

• 1930–1980: Consolidation finished the job. Small farms didn't "fail." They were liquidated by a

system that required scale to survive.

• 2020s: Decentralized tech is the ghost of Diesel and Ford's dream, finally given form. This

time, the infrastructure exists. This time, it's scalable. This time, it's unstoppable—if we choose

it.

This isn't nostalgia. It's a systems analysis of what was taken, how it was taken, and what we

can take back.

The question isn't whether the technology works. The question is whether we have the will to

use it.

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About the Value You're Taking From This

I'm not here to sell you a product or a platform. I'm here to give you the map that shows where

the walls are—and where the doors have always been.

If you're a rural innovator, a policymaker, an investor, or just someone who feels the system is

extractive by design, you now have the historical context to see it's not your imagination. More

importantly, you have the technical reality to see that the alternative isn't a fantasy. It's a choice.

What you do with that choice is up to you.

But know this: the system that erased rural autonomy in twenty-three years is betting you'll

never believe you can rebuild it. Prove them wrong.

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Citations & Sources (All factual claims documented for verification)

[All citations remain unchanged and properly linked]

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How to Use This Article:

• If you're rural: Share this with your co-op, your neighbors, your county commissioner. Start the

conversation about local fuel sovereignty.

• If you're urban: Understand that rural autonomy isn't about romanticizing the past. It's about

building resilience that doesn't collapse when supply chains break.

• If you're an investor: The next trillion-dollar market isn't in controlling resources. It's in enabling

independence from controllers.

• If you're a policymaker: The regulations that killed alcohol fuel were written to protect

monopolies, not people. We can write better ones.

The soul of this story is simple: Independence was never given. It was taken. And anything

taken can be reclaimed.

Prompted by Van B Shannon

Crafted with Perplexity and KIMI.