Historical June 1989 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Frankly, most St. Louisans don’t consider the place a cattle town.
Most equally never consider St. Louis a meat packing center. Hardly anyone knows that the Whittemores were among the cattle barons of Montana, along with the Niedringhaus family and other large range owners in the West.
The Danforths made a fortune in feed preparation for cattle and horse ranching. Only later did they get into dogs and cats.
A few have heard of “Butcher Town,” but even fewer will know that it was a part of the village of Bremen just above the river bottom at the north end of Salisbury Street. Hardly anyone remembers that the local herds of livestock used to be driven east on Market Street to Jefferson Avenue where they turned north to go to Butcher Town. Only small private meat packers and sausage makers work there now.
When Krey moved out long after Hunter moved over to the east side, that entire episode in St. Louis history was just forgotten.
It all began because of the Civil War.
By the end of the war in 1865, all the livestock herds east of the Mississippi were either depleted or destroyed by the war effort. Grain and vegetable food stocks were badly damaged as well, but they came back, some by the fall of 1865. That was not true of the livestock, especially cattle.
All of a sudden there was a meat shortage in the east and there were men floating around looking for work after living in the army camps in the open.
In the Nueces River Valley just north of the Rio Grande River in Texas were millions of Spanish longhorns which had thrived in the wild during the dozens of decades since they had been introduced. Happily, no one owned them.
They were “wild” animals there for the taking.
In the spring of 1866, the first year after the Civil War, drivers, most of them refuse from the Civil War, started 260,000 head toward Sedalia, Missouri.
The goal was to get to the meat packing facilities of St. Louis.
The reason to go first to Sedalia was simple: the Missouri Pacific Railroad. That was as far west as it went, and from there east to St. Louis was a simple trip for the animals in cattle cars.
There were two problems: trees, and Missouri farmers.
It is easy to see why taking long horn cattle through the forests of the Ozarks south of Sedalia would be a problem.
A number of the animals died stuck in the woods, literally.
The farmers were a more serious concern.
They had heard of Texas fever and did not want their cattle infected; they also were receiving prime dollar on their livestock and didn’t want the competition. Enter the hero—from Chicago. Joseph G. McCoy was an Illinois meat dealer who wanted to corner the meat packing market and wanted it in Chicago.
He learned that the Kansas Pacific Railroad was heading west from Kansas City.
By July, 1867, he had his men heading down the Sedalia Trail to tell the herders, now called cowboys, that they could avoid the problems of Missouri and bring their cattle to Abilene, Kansas.
Not many did that first year because McCoy’s men got to them too late.
But Joe McCoy left calling cards with the foremen and cattle drivers, offering $45.00 a head in Abilene in 1868—some $10.00 more than the 1866 price and without either the woods or the Missouri farmers in the way. Joseph McCoy’s “real McCoy” (that is the source of the phrase since he always paid as he promised) promises worked and the Sedalia trail faded. St. Louis did not fight Chicago for the meat packing title, and soon the railroads from the cowtowns, including Dodge City, Ogalala, and Cheyenne, all went to northern Illinois. Late in the 1870’s, the MKT completed trackage in Texas and the long drives began to wane.
The MKT brought much of the livestock to St. Louis, and a late challenge to Chicago’s meat packing leadership emerged.
But mother nature played the most important role in the mid-1880s.
The winters of 1885-86 and 1886-87 were the worst the cattlemen would ever see that century. Over 90% of the cattle in the West froze. Charlie Russell began his artistic career with a little painting of a near frozen cow sent to the newspapers of Chicago depicting the harshness of the weather. Meat prices skyrocketed, and cattle ranching entered a new era. Open range ranching was too risky. Feed lots emerged immediately, and along with it the need for feed grains and feed suppliers.
It was better to bring the food to the cows than to let the animals wander around subject to weather, rustlers, and disease. Soon St. Louis was producing cattle feed for ranches throughout the West.
The Ralston Purina mills emerged as clear favorites by the turn of the century. Chicago still held the meat packing power, but the meat packed was fed on St. Louis feed.
The feed business also was good for the chemical business. Anti-disease additives, growth hormones, and dozens of other products for removing insects, dissolving waste, and fertilizing grain growing on the open plains now safe from buffalo, Indians, and grazing cattle, helped other industries prosper in St. Louis in concert with the feed business.
The Sedalia Trail was used for only a short period of time. Missouri herders continued to take their animals to Sedalia even after Joe McCoy managed the Texas herders into going to Kansas.
The railroad went around St. Louis to Chicago with the animals to meet the meat demand in the east after the Civil War.
In fact, if there had been no Civil War there would not have been cowboys as we romantically remember them, no long drives, and probably no Indian Wars either. Dependence on western cattle, built up during a period of mild winters after the Civil War, made the turn to feedlots almost automatic after the winter of 1886-87, the second in a row of killer blizzards on the open ranches.
With the development of feedlots came the need for feed, feed suppliers, chemicals, and product control technology.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, June 1989.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Cattle-loss percentage, phrase-origin claim and counterfactual assertions are the author’s period interpretation; no new independent verification asserted.
Original source: SD_Times1989_06.pdf, printed page(s) 6; PDF page(s) 6.
