Historical February 1986 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
The stockyards of East St. Louis are some of the last vestiges of the slaughterhouses and meat production facilities which once were in almost every part of St. Louis. Old neighborhoods like Butcher Town on the north side near Salisbury and 1-70 were once active processing and rendering sites. Cattle driven east along Market Road from the farms west of Grand Avenue were trotted north along what is now Jefferson Avenue to Butcher Town and sold to the packers. Railroads and centralization of meat production are often blamed for the change to feeder lots and local meat processing sub-factories, but the weather was as much responsible for that as anything else.
Although something of a long story to tell, it is instructive to know how modern practices are as much the result of conditions as planning —perhaps more so.
By the summer of 1865, the Civil War was over and families were attempting to put their lives back together. Cities grew rapidly in population beginning the trend of large urban growth while agricultural populations dwindled.
The movement of people from farms to cities aggravated the obvious food shortages after the war—the herds and the crops had been almost totally destroyed either to feed the armies or by the armies in their battles. Late in 1865, the long horn cattle between the Nueces and the Rio Grande Rivers constituted the largest meat resource in the nation other than the buffalo. Abandoned by the Spanish, the long horn herds belonged to no one. Almost as an experiment, a herd of 1200 head in early 1866 was run from the Nueces to Sedalia, Missouri, because that was as far west as the railroads had made it. That first herd was shipped to St. Louis for processing and sold to eastern markets. Joseph McCoy, a meat packer from Chicago, saw the opportunity and passed the word to the cattle drivers that he would accept long horn beeves at Abilene, Kansas.
He put his words in writing to the drivers, managed to get the railroad to Abilene to haul his meat on the hoof to Chicago through Hannibal, and kept all his contracts with the drivers while issuing new ones for the coming year.
His chits became “the real McCoy” because he was always successful in meeting his markets.
Even when the railheads moved beyond Abilene to Ogallala, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the mid-1870’s, the “real McCoy” was always there.
To cut costs, the long drives from Texas were eventually replaced by herd management in western Kansas and eastern Wyoming.
The long horn was replaced by English and French breeds, which were more manageable and more productive.
By the early 1880’s, large ranches populated the Great Plains along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains. Virtually 90 percent of the herds were financed with English money using American herders and European cattle stocks.
The buffalo was all but gone; the Indian was controlled in mountain vastness if still pursued by the Army of the West under command of General William T. Sherman based in St. Louis at Jefferson Barracks.
Thus, by summer of 1885, the long drive was replaced by the herding of cattle from off large range spreads where the animals wandered and ate at will until harvest time.
The winters of 1885-86 and 1886-87 changed all that.
The meat packers of St. Louis had lost out to Chicago by that time and those winters are remembered as among the coldest of the nineteenth century when the Mississippi was frozen from shore to shore. Out on the Plains, it was also a pair of memorable winters.
Unlike the buffalo which knew how to survive in cold arctic snow storms, the European cattle all but vanished in the icy blasts of those two years. Well over 95 percent of all cattle left to run the ranches in the Plains were frozen to death during those two winters.
The old ranchers could not pay the mortgages to the English money lenders.
The latter sent representatives to inspect the situation; they reported back that there was nothing but truth in the statement that the industry was all but dead as it had been managed. Their correspondence suggested not foreclosing on the ranchers but rather developing another method of raising cattle on the Plains. Rather than letting the cattle roam to find their food without fences, why not raise the food separately and bring it to the cattle kept in fenced lots.
Not a new idea—in fact it was typical of the European procedure given the need for economic use of land— it worked. Feeder lots were planned and developed to begin by 1887. Crops were selected to grow on the Plains rather than let the cattle wander all over the landscape.
These crops doubled for human consumption as well as for cattle consumption: Russian wheat, corn, oats, and rye.
The feeder lot system had the added advantage of keeping the cattle less active and therefore able to fatten and grow more rapidly.
The centralized Chicago stockyards continued to hold predominance over local meat packing until the mid-twentieth century. Union packers drove up the cost of the large urban packing plants to the point it became more economic to slaughter locally. New technologies, portable refrigeration units, and mobil packing teams called an end to the large operations based in Chicago.
It was cheaper to harvest and cut herds near the feeder lots because shipment was less space demanding. Roads and trucks made it possible to bring herds to smaller slaughter houses near railroads setup just for that purpose.
One of the major regional packing sites is East St. Louis.
It also has the advantage of grain supply for small feeder lots within and near the city limits.
Although simplified, the above history is essentially accurate.
The winters of the 1880’s produced the feeder lot industry and the large meat production we are used to in this country.
It also signaled the eventual decline of Chicago as the meat packing capital of the world.
It should be noted within this history is some of the impact of the Civil War: if that war had not been so destructive of livestock, it is doubtful the cowboy, the long drive, the feeder lot system, or Chicago as meat packing center would have happened in the same way as they did.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, February 1986.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1986_02.pdf, printed page(s) 6; PDF page(s) 6.
