In Meat We Trust (4 page)

Few at the time doubted the wisdom of that decision: the Far Western plains were a ruminant paradise, heaven-sent to satisfy the national appetite for beef. For centuries, the plains were populated by bison—estimates put the number somewhere between 30 and 40 million—herds of such mass “as literally to blacken
the prairies for miles” on end, wrote one awed observer, their endless rumbling bellows echoing like “distant thunder.” Bison, like cattle, are ruminants, and over the centuries their need for food prodded plains ecology toward grasses. Thanks to the Far West’s relatively mild, dry climate, western bison “wintered” on their own, without any special food or shelter; Americans assumed that cattle could do the same. Best of all was the land itself: millions of acres, free for the taking. The logic was as clear as the western sky: if the range could support millions of bison, it could also support cattle, and this otherwise inhospitable terrain—period maps identified much of the region as the “Great American Desert”—could feed millions of Americans. The Far West would preserve and sustain Carnivore Nation.

First, of course, was the matter of eliminating the bison and removing the Native Americans who persisted in roaming the region. Happily—from the perspective of white Americans—the natives relied on the animals’ flesh for food and their hides for shelter and clothing. Exterminate the bison and the Indians’ way of life would vanish, too. Bison hunting, already a favorite midcentury sport (although
hunting
is perhaps not the most apt term for prey that conveniently stands still for the kill), lured even more thrill seekers, the railroad serving as an ironic accomplice to the slaughter: passengers hung from the windows of their slow-moving cars to shoot at the even slower-moving animals. (“Why,”
asked one British sportsman, had “an all-wise Providence” created animals “so utterly incapable of self-protection?”)

As bison and natives disappeared, cattle and whites rushed in. Many of both came up from Texas. There, thanks to earlier Spanish possession, large cattle herds had long grazed, especially along the state’s Gulf coast. Much of that stock had been raised for leather, and the flesh was tough and the “longhorns” more volatile than the placid bovines Americans were used to managing back in Iowa or Ohio. (The “long-legged”
beasts, explained one newspaper reporter, boasted “long taper horns and something of a wild look.”) During the food shortages of the 1850s, a handful of enterprising traders had driven longhorns to Illinois, where local cattle kings fattened them for shipment to eastern meat markets. The corn rations reportedly did little to improve the finished product. Texas beef resembled venison and was tough when cooked and considered inferior to meat from domestic cattle. During the 1850s and war-torn sixties, tough beef was better than no beef at all, but after the war, a new generation of western ranchers began breeding stock designed to weather the range and produce fine beef when finished on corn.

Moving the animals from west to east was not easy. Cattle drives bordered on the brutal, the trail marked from beginning to end by rain, extreme temperatures, Indians, and rustlers. A man who drove a herd from Texas to Iowa in 1866 recited a litany of woes: eight months of sunburn and stampedes, and long days hunting down skittish and wandering animals or driving them over rain-swollen rivers. “Stampeded last night
among 6 droves & a general mix up and loss of Beeves,” he wrote after nearly four months on the trail. “Men all tired & want to leave. [A]m in the Indian country [and] am annoyed by them believe they scare the Cattle to get pay to collect them.” “Hard Rain & Wind,” he wrote a few days later. “Big stampede & here we are among the Indians with 150 head of Cattle gone hunted all day & Rain poured down with but poor success Dark days are these to me Nothing but Bread & Coffee Hands all Growling & Swearing—every thing wet & cold.”

Joe McCoy had a better idea. He had seen the future and it consisted of an endless parade of railcars crammed with cattle and headed from his stockyard in Abilene, Kansas, straight to eastern markets and profit. Well, more or less straight there. McCoy didn’t much care what happened to the cattle once they departed Abilene, just as long as they did so and someone paid him for the privilege of moving them. McCoy’s trail to Abilene started in Illinois, where he and two brothers raised cattle, hogs, and sheep. But McCoy said later that he was not “contented to live quietly
at home on a good sized, finely improved farm,” even one that yielded as much as a quarter-million dollars in livestock a year. The brothers contemplated the Texas cattle herds, the trails that ran up from the southwest, and a new rail line being laid to Kansas and came up with a plan. In Joe’s words, they would “establish a market
whereat the southern drover and northern buyer would meet upon an equal footing, and both be undisturbed by mobs or swindling thieves,” the “equal footing” being the McCoys’ stockyard, and Joe McCoy the man who would bring North and South together. After sealing a handshake agreement with the president of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, Joe headed to Abilene to make the McCoy fortune. The choice of brother may have been a mistake (given what we know about Joe, he probably bullied the other two into sending him). An Abilene resident who knew him well described him as “a man of hasty temper,”
a true “Mr Know it all” who “never asked any Ones opinion of any act of his or any proget [
sic
] . . . his will & wishes were law.” As far as Joe McCoy was concerned, he was “the whole cheese” and the rest of the world mere “skim milk.” (McCoy also possessed a rich sense of humor and a willingness to poke fun at anyone and anything, including himself. His published writings, including an 1874 account of his meteoric success and equally spectacular failure, sparkle with wit and self-deprecating humor.) One fact is certain: Joe McCoy’s ego outstripped his entrepreneurial talents, and over the next few years, he dragged not just himself but his two brothers into financial ruin.

At the time, Abilene was a typical no-account western town: oozing self-importance and ambition, but more or less devoid of people and profit. By McCoy’s reckoning, the townscape consisted of a dozen “log huts,”
one of which was grandly identified as the Bratton Hotel, but not much else. He built a stockyard near the sole rail line then running through town and dispatched messengers to spread the word along the cattle trails: Drive your herd to Abilene and Joe McCoy would ship it east. Drivers obliged and for a few months, all was well—more or less. The cattle carried “Texas fever,”
a then-mysterious disease that had no effect on the Texas bovines but invariably infected and killed other herds that came in contact with them. During the first longhorn drives back in the 1850s, Missouri farmers had waged war against Texas drovers and their infected animals and managed to minimize the damage. But in the wake of the Civil War, with tens of thousands of longhorns on the move, with men like Joe McCoy eager to ship them east, and with hungry urbanites clamoring for meat, the danger of Texas fever loomed large. Even as McCoy welcomed drovers to his yard, farmers in both Kansas and Missouri persuaded their state legislators to establish quarantine zones into which the longhorns could not go; and Abilene sat squarely inside one of those. In McCoy’s skewed but colorful version of events, the Kansas farmers were less disease-fearing ranchers than crooks, out “to stop the drover
by mob violence, then rob or swindle him out of his stock.” If the prairies of Kansas and Missouri could speak, wrote McCoy, their tales of “carnage, wrong, outrage, robbery and revenge” would surpass the “annals of the most bloody savages.” But McCoy being McCoy, he simply ignored the quarantine law, which surely didn’t apply to a big cheese like himself. (It helped that in Abilene, as in much of the West, there weren’t enough people, or, more accurately, enough people who cared, to enforce the laws passed by a state or territorial legislature—a more-or-less willful apathy that contributed to the reputation of the West as “wild.”) So began the great McCoy cattle parade.

It didn’t last long. Joe had made his shipping arrangement with a single railroad, but within months other rail companies—bigger roads backed by bigger money—had reached Kansas, and Abilene’s career as the Great Cattle Town of the West ended as quickly as it had begun. Dodge City, through which ran the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe, commandeered the McCoy cattle trade. Having picked the wrong railroad and the wrong cowtown, McCoy saw his fortune, and his brothers’, vanish. (McCoy earned a bit of it back by publishing an account of his western adventure, an often hilarious, and always lopsided, view of the West-according-to-McCoy. His book did as much as anything to seal the image of the Far West as the land of danger and daring, bad guys, good guys, saloons, rustlers, and easy women willing to flash their ankles—and more—in exchange for a drink and some cash.)

But for every failure there were a dozen successes, and money, people, and livestock poured into the Far West. By the early 1870s, a vast congregation of cattle roamed the western plains and ranged from the Texas Gulf coast up into what would become Montana and Idaho. Many of those beasts never left the West. In the years after the Civil War, the federal government expanded its presence in the region, and federal agents bought thousands of head for consumption at newly established Indian reservations and military outposts. Mining industries mushroomed, as did railroad construction and the general flow of humanity from east to west. All of it necessitated beef.

But millions of head moved east to stockyards in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. Indeed, the flood of cattle sealed Chicago’s reputation as the nation’s premier livestock market. Since that city’s founding in the early 1830s, area farmers had sold both cattle and hogs there, and in the early 1860s, its residents stole the title of “Porkopolis” away from Cincinnati. In 1865, Chicagoans confirmed their livestock leadership when a group of investors consolidated the city’s many scattered rail lines and stockyards into a unified whole. The Union Stock Yards sprawled over 323 acres and housed rail terminals, animal pens, a water and sewer system, hotels, banks, and restaurants. Surrounding the yards was Packingtown, a dense hodgepodge of manufactories devoted to slaughtering and processing cattle and hogs. For pork packers, raved one member of that tribe, there was “only the one place
& that is Chicago,” “the greatest provision market in the world.” He “never saw a day in Chicago where regular meats could not be sold,” and “no place where there is such a selection & steady supply of Hogs.” He was right. Chicago was pork purveyor to the world, sending barrels of ham, shank, and bacon to troops in British India, to businessmen in China and the Caribbean; to fishing crews trolling the oceans for cod and sardines; to factory workers in Liverpool and Manchester; to soldiers patrolling the garrisons and forts of the American Far West.

But much of the action revolved around the stockyards and live animals. Every day trains deposited thousands of cattle and hogs, their fates decided by dickering swarms of livestock producers, commission agents, brokers, and meatpackers. Most of the hogs stayed in Chicago, transformed into bacon and ham by Packingtown’s butchers. Cattle traced a more complicated path. Some of the range animals, grass-fed stock that yielded relatively poor beef, were taken to local slaughterhouses where workers packed barreled beef for western mining camps or military garrisons, or for ships bound for Asia, South America, or Europe. But Americans craved fresh beef, and much of the cattle still had miles to travel. Some of the grass-fed western stock was herded onto railcars destined for eastern cities, there to be slaughtered and sold. But a substantial quantity of those western cattle were purchased by farmers from Illinois, Iowa, or Missouri, who fattened the stock on corn and then shipped it back to Chicago for transport to eastern cities, where it was slaughtered and the fresh beef delivered to hungry urbanites.

The task of moving millions of animals a thousand miles east inspired the construction of an infrastructure that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic seaboard. The stockyard at Chicago was funded primarily by railroad companies, which recognized that livestock represented one of their most lucrative and important categories of freight. But the Chicago yards, and those at St. Louis, Kansas City, and elsewhere, were only one cog in the meat-making machine. Investors, nearly all of them connected to the railroads, built duplicate stockyards at the other end of the line: in Manhattan and across the river in New Jersey; in Philadelphia and Baltimore. An enormous yard at Albany, New York, served livestock dealers in New England. Along the rail routes from west to east lay more cogs, a series of railroad-owned “watering” stations where cattle and hogs could be fed and watered and nearby farmers could load their own livestock for shipment east.

By the early 1870s, the American meat-making machine spanned the continent, grass-rich range of the Far West at one end and slaughterhouses and wholesale markets at the other, with Chicago and “Corn Belt” farmers in the middle. Some Americans paid a steep price for the benefits of this behemoth but efficient machine, while others reaped nothing but profit. East Coast farmers, for example, were all but eliminated from the meat-making equation because, as one man explained, they could not compete with the “great facilities
for bringing cattle from the far west at a low price, and in great quantities, at all times of the year.” So, too, with hogs: “The number of swine
raised . . . in New England, is far less than formerly,” noted a report from the commissioner of agriculture in 1861. Between the “high price of grain” in New England on one hand, and the speed with which Corn Belt hogs could be “rushed from the Mississippi to the Atlantic” on the other, eastern hog farming was no longer profitable. The numbers were stark:
In 1845 farmers in New York’s Harlem Valley, nestled between the Hudson on one side and the Connecticut border on the other, owned 12,000 hogs; by 1875, there were fewer than 4,000. There were 9,000 steer and oxen in the mid-1840s, and just 2,100 three decades later. But western and Far Western farmers and ranchers weren’t sure they fared any better. They complained that railroad tyrants imposed unfair freight rates and gouged users for the privilege of using the rails.