by Maureen Ogle
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.
The truth was more complex. Railroads, the great wonder of the age, attracted deep-pocketed investors who believed that the profit possibilities were infinite. In reality, they overbuilt the system, especially in the eastern half of the United States, provoking brutal rate wars that threatened to send the entire edifice crashing into bankruptcy. At a time when the railroads were the largest corporations in the world, and their size and complexity both novel and startling, no one fully understood how to manage such enterprises or the competition between and among them. Road owners experimented with “pools” in which they mutually agreed on freight rates and divided the available livestock among themselves. The arrangements rarely succeeded, depending as they did on voluntary cooperation and mutual trust (both in short supply among the railroad kings), but the owners tried the tool often enough that traders noticed and complained that such “cooperation” was nothing more than monopolistic collusion (a criticism echoed over the decades by many historians). Critics complained, too, that the watering yards, stockyards, and slaughterhouses represented another form of monopoly: shippers who wanted to move livestock from west to east were forced to use the infrastructure and to pay rates set by owners who could charge whatever they pleased. But the railroad owners pointed out, correctly, that their stockyard-slaughterhouse-railroad edifice injected efficiency into the project of feeding the cities. Livestock shipping, explained one road representative, “was a business that moved itself—went around on its own feet and legs, and could be driven here and there,” and thus was difficult to manage and monitor. Suppose a man contracted to ship hogs from Chicago to Albany but decided to sell the stock during the rest stop at Buffalo. Neither buyer nor seller was required to report the sale. The new owner simply loaded the hogs back onto the train and transported them to the final stop—without paying the railroad. Or suppose a shipper in Chicago arranged with a road to transport five cars of cattle to Philadelphia, but on the designated day a competing road lured him away with a lower rate. When the first train pulled into Philadelphia hauling five empty cars, the traffic manager telegraphed Chicago to ask why. Meanwhile, the road manager who received the unexpected cargo telegraphed his Chicago counterpart demanding to know who owned the cattle and what he was supposed to do with them. Meanwhile, “this butcher and that would go to his . . . regular market,” discover empty pens and yards, and then “be compelled to run around until he found the cattle.” Without established markets and yards, and without pools and other agreements between and among the owners of roads and yards, the system lacked stability and predictability. “The more you can concentrate this business” into just a few hands, argued one railroad executive, “the less expense it can be done with” and thus the less consumers paid for meat.
He was right. Monopolistic though it may have been, the infrastructure provided an efficient mechanism for tapping into the hog farms and cattle herds of the West and Far West and for giving Americans what they wanted: cheap meat and plenty of it. As complex and relatively modern as it seemed, the postwar meat-making colossus was essentially an elaborate version of the colonial cattle-corn-hog complex, albeit one spread over much of a continent. Where the modern system parted ways with that older one, however, was in the cities it served. Back in the colonial era, few Americans lived in villages or towns, and sizable cities were few in number. No one much cared about the livestock parades that tramped the countryside, or about the noisome mess that slaughtering created. Not so in the 1870s and after. Americans wanted cities. They wanted meat, too. But they no longer wanted the one in the other. In modern America, the making of meat would increasingly be out of sight and out of mind.
2
“We Are Here to Make Money”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1882, workmen armed with sledgehammers leveled a collection of aging storefronts and sellers’ stalls on a wharf near New York City’s Washington Market, an enormous wholesale-retail emporium where city residents bought everything from fish and fruit to bacon and veal. (The market lay near the Hudson River just north of where the World Trade Center once stood.) Having demolished the old, crews began constructing the new: a structure that ran eighty feet front to back, stood two stories high, and was reported to be a giant “refrigerator.” No one knew much about the property’s purpose or owner, but the rumor mill churned with tidbits that pointed toward a company that planned to distribute fresh beef shipped from Chicago.
The speculation ended in early October when workers hoisted a sign into place—G. F. & E. C. SWIFT. A barge crossed the Hudson River from New Jersey and delivered several tons of fresh beef to the water-side door, and the manager opened the facility to visitors, buyers, and reporters and explained the whats and whys of the venture. Yes, he said, the Swift brothers would ship fresh beef rather than live cattle from Chicago to New York; doing so would reduce the price that consumers paid for steaks and roasts. The shipments of fresh beef would also eliminate the need to transport live cattle from west to east and to march them through New York’s streets to the nearby slaughterhouses. Dressed beef, crowed a reporter, promised to eradicate the city of the “abominable nuisances” of local butcheries, rendering plants, and “bone-boiling works.” Now all of that could stay out in Chicago “where they rather like such things.”
If only it were that simple. Within days, the city’s stockyards and slaughterhouses buzzed with new rumors, this time warning of retaliation and warfare. According to gossips, the Swifts’ dressed-beef venture threatened the titans who transported live cattle by train from Chicago to New York; who owned the trains that carried the cattle; who owned all or part of the stockyards in Chicago, New York, and along the route to the East; and who owned New York slaughterhouses where the animals were turned into beef for M
anhattan, Brooklyn, and other towns and cities in the region. Surely those men would not allow the Swifts to drive a wedge between them and their profits. By early November, newspapers nationwide were reporting that the railroad-stockyard-cattle-dealer-slaughterhouse kingpins, led by the powerful Vanderbilt family of New York, planned to destroy the Swift brothers by launching a rival dressed-beef venture. The old guard denied the rumors, but they warned the public to beware: the Swifts were “trying to force their beef on the public,” explained John Dutcher, a major cattle dealer and investor in both railroads and stockyards. If they succeeded, they would create “one of the greatest monopolies ever known in this country,” and then they would “put on the screws, and make consumers pay whatever price they please” for meat. Nonsense, retorted the man who had designed the Swifts’ refrigerated railcars. The brothers were neither monopolists nor “sharks” but entrepreneurs who had developed a “superior system” of supplying beef. Gustavus Swift was a good “Christian” and a “public benefactor,” he told an inquiring journalist, who wanted to “do good rather than evil” by providing Americans with inexpensive meat and employing “hundreds” of men with “good and sure pay.”
A Boston newspaper reporter took the matter directly to the Swifts themselves in an interview at their offices in that city. Did they believe the rumors? he asked. Did they fear Vanderbilt and his cronies? Gustavus Swift dismissed the fuss. The name-calling and rumors of revenge were inevitable, he said. His opponents had invested millions building an infrastructure to transport live cattle from west to east and had earned “gigantic fortunes” doing so. But in the end, what did they have? Stockyards, and those were nothing more than a few acres of “sheds and fences,” property that his “refrigerator business” would render worthless. So, prodded the reporter, would the Swifts back down? Could the “cattle yard railroad ring” stop them? “Stop us!” G. F. Swift reportedly shouted in reply, slamming his fist on his desk. “[N]ot while we have an inch of pocketbook or a drop of blood left!” “We have no fears,” he insisted. He and his brother would fight for “their rights, to the last drop of blood.” “We shall fight,” Edwin Swift added, “till blood stands four inches deep on the floor!”
We can end the suspense here: Gus Swift won the “dressed-beef war.” Over the next decade, his beef-filled refrigerated railcars drove many slaughterhouses and stockyards out of business in New York and other cities. For the next century, his name adorned packages of beef and pork sold around the world, and he’s typically credited (wrongly) with inventing the refrigerated railcar and (wrongly) with being the first to ship dressed beef. So how did a small-time cattle buyer who boasted neither wealth nor friends in high places transform a centuries-old system of making meat and bring the railroad-stockyard kingpins to their knees? The short answer is that he figured out a way to give Americans what they wanted: not just cheap beef but also large-scale, factorylike slaughterhouses and, what mattered most to Americans at the time, cleaner cities.
Gus Swift was born in 1839 on Cape Cod, where his ancestors had landed some two centuries earlier. In the early 1850s, he began working as a butcher’s apprentice, but after a few years he decided he could make more money as the middleman who supplied beef to butchers than he could standing behind a counter cutting it. He began traveling to Brighton, a century-old livestock market near Boston, to buy cattle and sometimes a few hogs, taking them back to the Cape where he sold the stock to local butchers. By the early 1870s, Swift had earned enough cash, and reputation, to invest in partnerships with two livestock wholesalers, one in Fall River, Massachusetts, and a second in Boston, buying cattle for his partners at the markets in Brighton and in Albany, New York. But as was true for everyone on the East Coast who traded in agricultural products, Swift’s fortunes were chained to Chicago and the railroads, and like many Americans, he failed to see how the vaunted efficiencies of those roads benefited anyone or anything but their owners. The cattle he bought, whether at Brighton or Albany, came from Chicago, and the more miles livestock traveled, the less profit he earned. To the actual price of the animal the roads tacked on the cost of transporting the stock, the water and feed doled out at the watering stations (whether the cattle ate or drank was irrelevant; the trader got charged anyway), and the sawdust used as bedding. Swift complained that these “simply enormous” fees made other men “immensely rich” at his expense. The yard owners paid $6 or $8 a ton for hay, for example, but charged cattle buyers like himself $40 to $50 for the privilege of using it. The yard paid a penny or two per load of cattle bedding but charged him a dollar a bushel for the stuff. And as he well knew, the pain didn’t end there. One of Swift’s livestock colleagues, a Boston hog trader and pork packer, learned that the hard way. The packer was infuriated that yard managers charged him $1.50 a bushel for corn that sold “right over the fence [for] 35 cents” and forced him to feed his hogs at the road’s yards. Frustrated by the pickpocketing, the man built his own yard at Buffalo. Retaliation was immediate. When his men tried to load his animals, railroad employees refused to ship them because the livestock had not been “fed and watered . . . in their yards.” They held the beasts until noon and shipped them to Albany, where he was required to use stockyards controlled by the railroad’s partner. But by the time the hogs arrived, the trading day, which began at dawn, was over and buyers had taken themselves off to the stockyard hotel bar to compare notes and boast of deals over drinks. The rebel’s agent was left to wander the deserted stockyard, doomed to take whatever price he could get. Lesson for Swift and others: Play by the railroads’ rules, or don’t play at all.
Swift was as ambitious and profit-hungry as the men who dominated the railroads, and he was not inclined to live his life as the entrepreneurial equivalent of a doormat. In 1875, he moved to Chicago. He would still have to rely on railroads to move his cattle east, but at least in Chicago he could buy his own cattle, rather than rely on an agent to buy on his behalf, and thus eliminate one set of hands snatching his profits.
Had Swift continued to focus on buying and shipping cattle, we likely never would have heard of him; he was, after all, just one of thousands of men trolling the Union Stock Yards in search of a deal. But within a year of moving west, Swift launched a new venture: he would buy cattle, but instead of shipping them east, he would slaughter them in Chicago and ship only the carcasses. That project would make him famous and rich. Because of it, he’s been hailed as an entrepreneurial genius. As we’ll see, there was genius involved, but Swift succeeded primarily because he constructed a unified system for delivering fresh, cheap beef to urban markets, and because he made his move at an opportune moment. By the mid-1870s, many Americans had decided that the old system of making meat—herding live animals through city streets and slaughtering them on every other corner—was unhealthy, dangerous, and unsuited to life in a modern nation increasingly dominated by cities.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the sights, sounds, and smells of livestock and meat making permeated urban life. Even small towns boasted at least one stockyard, and big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore housed dozens. Stockyards ranged from a few hundred square yards to acres of choice real estate, and they constituted swampy mud holes in spring and billowed thick dust in summer. Children straddled fences to watch as traders armed with hooked staffs prodded animals’ flanks and hiee-ed! them to and fro for inspection. Moving livestock from rail yard to stockyard to slaughterhouse spawned an endless animal parade. Pedestrians scattered as cattle plodded through streets jammed with carts and horses, top-hatted lawyers and bankers, servants toting baskets and bags, and shopkeepers standing watch over sidewalk displays. Calves and lambs, some only a few days old and prized for their tender flesh, could not be trusted to their own legs or the streets’ hazards, so teamsters tossed them onto wooden carts, lacing rope about their feet and necks to prevent them from moving. If a wooden wheel collided with a particularly deep rut or a dried mud hump, an animal or two might fly out of the cart and into the r
oad. Squealing hogs raced through streets and lanes, forcing pedestrians, carriages, and carts to give way. Their drovers used whips to keep them in line, but the more willful swine charged into alleys or through shop doors, chased by boys hired to tackle and drag them back to the parade. The constant march of animals provoked national irritation. “There is perhaps nothing more aggravating,” a Milwaukee resident complained, than to trudge home from work “wading through all manner of filth on the sidewalks,” only to “find your garden rooted up, your evergreens bitten off and broken,” and hanging laundry yanked to the ground and stained with “the marks of muddy cloven feet,” all thanks to four-legged invaders.
Slaughterhouses, butchers’ shops, and rendering operations enriched the visual and aural feast (if it can be called that). In cities large and small, slaughterhouses abounded, where the proprietors often slaughtered a dozen or more animals a day, selling the carcasses to retailers or vending them at open-air markets where shoppers congregated by the hundreds. But slaughterhouses weren’t the only places where blood and stench ran thick. Many retail butchers preferred to cut their own stock; they purchased one or more animals a week, herded them back to their shops, and slaughtered them out back. Butcheries large and small nestled up against residential neighborhoods, shared fences with schools, and backed onto churchyards. Throngs of children hung about to watch with fascinated delight, hanging on every word of the “not very elegant language” of the butchers’ world, becoming, critics complained, “habituated to scenes of blood and violence,” a gory and three-dimensional nineteenth-century equivalent of the computer games that adults fret about today. The business of making meat cloaked towns in a gag-inducing stench. Blood and urine coursed along walkways into the streets, then meandered toward the local sewer system, typically nothing more than a shallow trough running down the side of the road. Islands of waste landscaped the alleys adjacent to the butcheries and packinghouses. Legs and heads; hooves, ears, and snouts. Intestines and feces. Piles of stomachs, eyeballs, and brains. Winter’s cold alleviated the stench but coaxed clouds of steam from the still-warm heaps of entrails. In spring and summer, the air sagged with a thick blanket of stench. A Milwaukee newspaperman commented that pedestrians held their breath and quickened their pace in an effort to escape the assault; horses “snorted and pranced and fled along the streets as if flying from some dread presence,” and “mosquitoes, flies and gnats deserted the localities” where butchers reigned. Even the slaughterers weren’t immune, said one butcher, who admitted that he “often lost a meal” when passing especially noisome operations.