Chicago Stockyards

“ Whatever foundation there may be for these jibes, they are in themselves a sufficient evidence that Chicago is alive to her opportunities and responsibilities. She is, in her own vernacular, "making culture hum." Mr. Fuller, I understand, reproached her with her stockyards—an injustice which even Mr. Bernard Shaw would scarcely have committed. Is it the fault of Chicago that the world is carnivorous? Was not "Nature red in tooth and claw" several æons before Chicago was thought of? I do not understand that any unnecessary cruelty is practised in the stockyards ”

“ Over 25,000 men are employed in the industry. Every part of the slaughtered animal is utilized, thus giving rise to the manufacture of important by-products (such as soap and candles) , the value of this product alone in 1900 being over $9,000,000. The tanning of leather is of almost equal importance.
THE STOCKYARDS
The convenient location of Chicago with respect to the coal-fields of Illinois and the iron-ore regions of Lake Superior contributes greatly toward the industries which depend upon these two supplies. ”

“ The Union Stock Yards & Transit Company of Chicago, hereinafter called Transit Company, was incorporated in 1865 to operate stock yards in Chicago. Its business was profitable. Frederick H. Prince became a stockholder. In 1890 packers, who were the company's principal source of business, threatened to remove their plants from Chicago unless they were given a share in its profits. ”

“ These circumstances have contributed to make it the greatest grain and live stock market in the world. But its accessibility to the raw materials of industrial development has also made it a great manufacturing city. Chicago has more than 10,000 factories and the output of its manufacturing zone is probably more than $3,000,000,000 annually. The principal industries and manufactures are meat packing, foundry and machine shop products, clothing, cars and railway construction, agricultural implements, furniture, and (formerly) malt liquors. ”

“ The yards proper cover an area of about five hundred acres, have twenty-five miles of feeding-troughs, and twenty miles of water-troughs, and can accommodate seventy-five thousand cattle, three hundred thousand hogs, fifty thousand sheep, and five thousand horses. From two-thirds to three-fourths of the cattle and hogs are killed in the yards, and sent out in the form of meat. About thirty thousand workers are employed by the packing-houses. Chicago is the greatest live stock and grain market in the world. ”

“ They cover four hundred acres, the plant is valued at four million dollars, and about twenty millions of animals are killed and packed in a year. Similarly imposing are the statistics of most of Chicago’s enterprises. The Board of Trade is one of the most remarkable sights in the country. Its public galleries are usually filled with spectators of the feverish bidding of the grain operators, whose slightest nod affects the markets of the world. The Stock Exchange is yearly taking a more important share in the money market. ”

“ Of the great elements of civic success, we consider manufactures the most important; but, to make a city of the first magnitude, it is obviously necessary to have all the resources of food, industry and commerce. Chicago is remarkable chiefly as a grain city—like Odessa, on the Baltic. But, whence is the grain derived? By the construction of railroads, at that point, from Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin and Iowa, the whole mass of surplus grain in that (p. 223) region—amounting to more than twenty millions of bushels per annum—has been exported from Chicago. ”

“ Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline! The reek and scandal of the stock-yards is really only a gigantic form of that same quality in American life that, in a minor aspect, makes the sidewalk filthy. ”

“ In this way the trade in grain is carried on by the inhabitants of seven or eight of the great States of the West with four or five of the States lying on the sea-shore, and forms the largest part of inter-state commerce in these States. The grain warehouses or elevators in Chicago are immense structures, holding from 300,000 to 1,000,000 bushels at one time, according to size. They are divided into bins of large capacity and great strength. ”

“ A decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $28,000. Chicago was growing with great rapidity; a network of railroads converged there; mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing houses:—a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work. The greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of land. Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted. ”

“ The private houses of wealthy merchants adorn the environs, while Lincoln and South Park, lying on either side of the city, rival anything of the kind in Europe or America. Chicago is the natural centre of the grain trade of our continent, and we had almost said of the food-supply of the world, a statement exemplified in the fact that, during the last year, one hundred and fifty millions of bushels of grain passed through its elevators. ”

“ Shipments of grain and breadstuffs to Central and South America, Cuba, Great Britain, and Germany constitute the city's leading exports.
[103]
As a live-stock market it is no less important. The National Stockyards, located on the Illinois side of the river, contain several hundred acres. Though packing houses and slaughtering houses occupy some of this land, the main part is covered with sheds, pens, and enclosures for the reception and sale of live animals. Millions of cattle, hogs, and sheep are handled here every year. ”

“ Space that I had reserved for some note of Chicago’s industries, the vastness of the stock-yards, the great totals in beasts and dollars represented in the meat-packing business, the lake and railroad tonnage, and like matters, shrinks under pressure of what seem, on the whole, to be things of greater interest and significance. ”

“ The causes which produced three villages surrounding a common business centre will continue to operate. The west side will continue to expand with cheap houses, or even elegant residences on the park avenues—it is the glory of Chicago that such a large proportion of its houses are owned by their occupants, and that there are few tenement rookeries, and even few gigantic apartment houses—over a limitless prairie; the north side will grow in increasing beauty about Lincoln Park; and the south side will more and more gravitate with imposing houses about the attractive south parks. ”

“ As a natural consequence of being a collecting and distributing centre, Chicago has developed an extensive manufacturing industry. According to the census of 1900, the manufactured products reached a total value of $888,786,000, and there were 262,600 wage-earners employed—an increase of 37.8 per cent. during the decade. A large per cent. of the live stock received in Chicago is slaughtered and packed there, the total value of these packing-house products in 1900 being $248,811,000. For two decades the average number of hogs packed annually has been about 5,000,000 head. ”

“ Lincoln Park—including a zoological garden, and being romantically situated upon the lake shore in the northern portion of the city—constitutes a delightful place of amusement for pleasure-seekers. The parks are all connected by boulevards—some of them 200 feet wide—encircling the city, and affording a continuous drive of thirty-five miles.
The trade of Chicago is enormous. Its chief items are grain, live-stock, meat products, and lumber. It principally manufactures iron and steel, wood, brick, leather, chemicals, boots and shoes, cigars and tobacco. ”

“ In fact, not only are the great modern office buildings still exceptional in the most costly and most crowded district, but it is astonishing to hear that the oldest of them is scarcely more than seven years of age. “Men’s deeds are after as they have been accustomed”—and the first impulse of the burnt-out merchants of Chicago was not to seize the opportunity the clean sweep of the fire had given{114} them to improve their warehouses and office buildings, but to provide themselves straightway with places in which they could find shelter and do business. ”

“ There were regions open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas-lamps, fluttering in the wind. Narrow board walks extended out, passing here a house, and there a store, at far intervals, eventually ending on the open prairie.
In the central portion was the vast wholesale and shopping district, to which the uninformed seeker for work usually drifted. It was a characteristic of Chicago then, and one not generally shared by other cities, that individual firms of any pretension occupied individual buildings. ”

“ Chicago is a centre for the manufacture of harvesting machines. The McCormick, and the Deering Harvesting Machine Works are the two largest harvesting machinery manufactories in the world. The former's area is 150 acres. Being a lumber-market, the city has developed extensive manufactures of lumber, the value of the manufactures of furniture being estimated at $12,344,000, and the lumber and planing mills products at $7,530,000. Owing to Chicago's prominence as a railroad centre, the manufacture of dependent products is naturally great. ”

“ Michigan Avenue, Jackson Boulevard and the Lake Shore Drive link the limits with the business section. Extension of Grant Park a mile into the lake, and a shore line parkway, will give Chicago one of the most beautiful waterfronts in the world.
WHAT MADE THIS GIANT CITY
Business is on the same gigantic and aspiring scale as the sky-scrapers, “City Beautiful” plans and the growth in population, which in 1910 aggregated 2,185,283. The earliest lines of trade to be developed, when the western limit of commerce was the Mississippi, were grain and lumber. ”

“ Instead of buying land in the old business centers at ten thousand dollars a foot, and spending a reasonable fortune in carting away débris before beginning to erect new walls let us go to work at once and build on our own lands, they said; the trade of this vast metropolis can not wait, it will come and transact itself on our premises as soon as completed. What was the fact? The clever ones built well and richly, and sat within and wooed the commerce of Chicago to change its seat. ”

“ The products of Chicago manufactures are valued at $325,000,000. In 1881 the receipts of hogs amounted to 6,474,844 head, and in 1882, 5,817,504 head. The wholesale mercantile trade has fallen off somewhat, as it has all over the country, owing to depression that seems to be universal. In manufactures the city is making wonderful development. In growth she is still unchecked and without a rival in the world among large cities and business centres. ”

“ Louis, Omaha, Cincinnati, and Pittsburg are subsidiary to the Chicago market, and their prices are regulated and fixed by the great market on the lake." [35] This great business is practically in the hands of four establishments at Chicago. The largest houses have a capacity for slaughtering 3,500 cattle, 3,000 sheep, and 12,000 hogs every ten hours. When the Senate committee visited Chicago, it was found impossible to obtain the frank and full testimony of either the commission men doing business at the Union Stock Yards, or of the employés of the packing and dressed-beef houses. ”

“ The man who had been here two years, had a hundred acres under fence; raised a large crop of corn and wheat, and had sold at Chicago, only thirty miles distant in a straight line, two hundred and twenty bushels of potatoes for as many dollars. He had built a weir across the river to catch fish, which I walked down to see. He took his boat, went out to the pen, and dipped out with a small net half a boat load of fish.
This is a land of plenty sure enough; and if a man cannot here find the luxuries of the city, he can obtain all the necessaries of life in abundance. ”

“ Everything has changed so now that it is difficult to find an old landmark. There had been great changes even in my remembrance. Gurdon Hubbard had moved his business to Chicago and erected a brick building on the corner of 13 South Water and LaSalle streets, the first in the town. Then he had built a warehouse on Kinzie Street and was doing a flourishing commission and forwarding business with vessels plying between Buffalo and the upper lakes, the Eagle line. Back of this a little was the space a block square that Towner had traded for the Massachusetts farm near a thriving city. ”

“ New machinery and facilities of the most modern kinds were added, and in a very short time the business, both domestic and foreign, began to assume enormous proportions. Branches were rapidly established in various sections of this country, and the export business was greatly increased. So great was the success of the business that, in 1900, the demands for its products exceeded the capacity of its two plants, and in that year it constructed the great Chicago plant, which is conceded by many to be the finest packing plant in the world. ”

“ Give the child-slave worker a tenement for a home in the filthy streets of an ordinary factory city, with open spaces covered with tin cans, bottles, old shoes, garbage, and other waste, the gutters running sewers, and the air foul with [Pg 226] odors and black with factory smoke, and the picture is fairly complete. It is a dark picture, but hardly so dark as the reality, and if one were to describe "back of the yards" in Chicago, or certain mill towns or mining districts, the picture would be even darker than the one given. ”