Continental Reckoning by Elliott West

Author:Elliott West [West, Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036140 HISTORY / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY), HIS036040 HISTORY / United States / 19th Century
Publisher: Nebraska

Beefsteak and the Marriage of Regions

As in California, the plains cattle industry was born from a classic match of demand and supply. At the end of the Civil War the northeastern quadrant of the United States was hungry for beef and was getting hungrier. Americans have always been enthusiastic carnivores. From colonial times they had dined on mutton, fish, chicken, and a variety of game, flying and furred, but beef was considered particularly toothsome, with steak “the symbolic pinnacle of American meat.” Practical matters, however, put a brake on its consumption.25 Most families lived on farms and did their own slaughtering. A cow was cumbersome to butcher, and the excess beyond a few fresh meals was unappealing when cured. Pigs were easier to slaughter and, once disassembled, were perfectly palatable when smoked or salted.

Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, developments encouraged a steady rise in beef consumption. Growing cities were a natural market for fresh, uncured beef, as San Francisco proved in the 1850s. During the war enormous numbers of cattle were shipped and trailed to the field to feed Union troops. Expanded stockyards provided centralized sites where cattle were gathered before being processed by new technologies, including the tin can and the earliest can openers, and dispatched over ever-wider regions. By the latter years of the century middling families might eat beef at every meal—fried, baked, boiled, corned, chopped, and stewed, and served with tripe soup and pickled tongues on the side.

In 1865, however, beef was in short supply where it was most desired. Feeding Union armies and “the waste of the war” had reduced the number of cattle by 7 percent nationwide since 1860 (and pigs by nearly 22 percent), the commissioner of agriculture reported. Losses were especially heavy in midwestern states that had been the main suppliers and, even worse, in the South, which closed off the option of finding cattle there to take up the slack.26 The price of northern cattle consequently soared. In 1866 it was more than 200 percent higher than before the war. The next year a typical cow sold for nearly forty dollars in New York and nearly forty-five in Massachusetts. Swine prices were just as high.27

There was a crucial difference between meeting demands for the two animals, however. Pig raising remained largely decentralized. Pigs required relatively little space, so thousands of farmers could devote bits of property to them even though land prices were rising steeply. Moving them to some central location for slaughter was impractical. Fatter, squattier, smarter, and crankier than cattle, pigs resisted herding and did not travel well. Instead, around November, as the weather turned cold enough to slow the meat’s corruption, farmers slaughtered their own pigs or drove them a short way to some slapdash facility. By the 1850s the first pork-packing centers had appeared—Cincinnati was exporting seventy million pounds annually on the eve of the Civil War—where salted pork and bacon were crammed into barrels and hams and roasts readied for the tables of the elite.28 From

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