In Meat We Trust (3 page)

Difficulties aside, the cattle-and-hog bonanza attracted more settlers, among them young Benjamin Franklin Harris, who had grown up in northern Virginia not far from the South Branch cattle district. There he’d worked for his father hauling goods by wagon to and from Baltimore, and often down into the Ohio Valley, a job that taught him how to handle horses, responsibility, and the rigors of life on the road in early America. In 1832, the family left Virginia for Ohio, where his father bought a farm near Springfield. Benjamin, by then in his early twenties, found work as a drover’s hand, helping another man move three hundred cattle from Ohio to Pennsylvania, a trek that required fording two rivers and crossing the Alleghenies. After the drove boss sold the stock, the buyers hired Harris to help run those cattle, plus another five hundred head, to the market at Lancaster. The adventure convinced the young man that a life devoted to cattle trading offered more reward than one spent droving or steering a plow. Within a year, he’d accumulated $1,000 and managed to borrow another $3,000 (that speaks volumes to his character and reputation, and to the importance of cattle and meat: at that time and in that place, banks were few and cash and credit scarce). Harris stashed the money in a belt strapped around his waist, saddled up, and headed for Illinois. There, a handful of prairie “cattle kings” had amassed holdings of hundreds of acres and duplicated the cattle-corn-hog complex. Over the next six years, Harris returned to Illinois five times to buy cattle, driving those back to Ohio where he fed them over the winter on corn, and then herding the fattened stock to markets in Pennsylvania. He earned good money, but it was never easy, especially because the cattle, and the cash that drovers and traders carried, attracted thieves who often used guns to startle the animals into stampede. More than once, Harris barely avoided roadside traps set by armed men. During one trip, he encountered a stranger who offered to accompany him along the road. At one point, the man rode on ahead, and Harris noticed a knife handle poking out of the man’s coat collar. Harris asked him about the weapon and the man replied, “I alwase
go armed havent you arms on your person?” Harris pulled out his pistol and informed his companion that he “could shoot a man fifty yar distant” and that he kept “watch all the time.”

Cattle grazing, feeding, and driving were just three arms of the diverse meat-production industry that emerged in the Ohio River valley in the early nineteenth century. The rich soil produced an extraordinary abundance of corn that allowed farmers to fatten hogs that, in turn, supported a pork-packing industry. Demand for this easily transported protein was immense and global, and American packing flourished. Skilled artisans focused on making quality hams. German immigrants gravitated to the region, transforming meat scraps into sausage, and head, feet, and organs into headcheese. British firms dispatched representatives to set up shop in Ohio. But bacon and ham weren’t the only spurs to growth. Hog fat yielded lard, an inexpensive substitute for butter and other fats, and that, too, made its way to ports around the world. In the 1840s, inventors perfected a method of turning lard into light, a development that demolished the trade in whale oil. At a time when metal engines were replacing wooden water wheels, lard oil served as an inexpensive lubricant. Hog processing seeded soap manufacture. Procter & Gamble was born a soap maker in Cincinnati, and Eberhard Anheuser, eventual beer king, earned his first American fortune manufacturing soap in St. Louis, using the leavings of hogs driven there from farms in Missouri and Illinois. Hog bristles and hair ended up in mattresses and hairbrushes. Bone became button, and blood, dye and ink. It was hard to know which was more important: barreled meats or byproducts.

By the 1840s, what had begun as seasonal enterprises run out of rented shacks had mushroomed into a year-round industry housed in purpose-built brick structures, easily the largest buildings in Cincinnati, which reigned for some years as the center of American pork production (and earned the name Porkopolis). In the slaughterhouses that lined that city’s streets, hands drove hogs into a pen, packing them tightly so the kill man could walk across their backs as he slammed their heads with a metal sledgehammer. Other workers dumped carcasses into boiling water for soaking, the easier to loosen bristles and hair. Another crew beheaded and gutted what was left, trundling the offal to rendering vats and slinging the carcasses onto iron hooks for butchering into hams and bacon, tongue and rib roasts, some 36 million pounds’ worth in 1840. The demand inspired the region’s farmers to improve and systematize hog production. They invested in quality breeding stock and, rather than let them scavenge, fed them with intention, and for good reason: a corn-fed hog earned 30 to 60 percent more than a scavenger, and many packers refused to buy the lesser beasts.

By the eve of the Civil War, the meat-making complex of Porkopolis had become world renowned, and so had Americans’ prodigious appetite for meat. “There are few things
in the habits of Americans, which strike the foreign observer with more force,” mused one writer, “than the extravagant consumption of . . . meat.” “Truly we may be called a carnivorous people.” Thanks to new printing technologies that made newspapers and magazines both affordable and ubiquitous, advisers regaled readers with tips on how to cook, preserve, and serve meats. To use leftovers, advised a contributor to one magazine, chop them fine and season with salt, pepper, and butter. Soak stale bread in milk, chop a few fresh peeled tomatoes, mix, and bake for an hour. One popular cookery book
suggested coating meat pieces with egg and flour before frying in beef suet, lard, or butter. A farmer’s wife instructed readers of another periodical in the fine art of cooking calf head: Clean “nicely”
the “head, pluck [organs] and trotters” of a “
good
calf” until there was not “a hair to be seen upon them.” Slice open the head, remove the brains, and boil meat and organs until the flesh fell from the bone. She suggested serving it “plain” with vegetables; mixing it with salt pork, veal, and sage to make meatballs; or mincing it and returning it to the broth in which it had cooked, along with the brains, some fried pork, cloves, thyme, and marjoram, and boiling to make soup (one best served, she added, with some of the meatballs).

But the days of calf head soup were numbered. Time and abundance had solidified the cycle of extravagance and entitlement and Americans’ propensity for waste. An Englishman who had emigrated to the United States boasted to his former countrymen that no one but “free negroes”
would “think of eating . . .
head and pluck
.” He reported that urban slaughterhouses were known less by their odor than by the remains piled outside their doors: “hundreds of calves’ heads, large bits, and whole joints of meat,” unwanted and unused, except by “street hogs” that roamed the roads feeding on the leavings of a wasteful society. In “
any other country
” less accustomed to “superabundance,” he marveled, all of it “would be sold at some price or other.” He likely overstated the case, but there’s no doubt that as the century wore on, Americans in general and city people in particular lost interest in head, pluck, and brain thanks to their rising standard of living. The middle class had not yet become the political and economic powerhouse that it would be a century later, but thanks to the relentless growth of the nation’s economy, millions of people translated dollars into material comfort: upholstered furniture (the coverings often fashioned from cowhide), walls painted or wallpapered atop plaster (a substance strengthened by the addition of hog bristle), finer clothing, and, of course, improved diets. Given the surfeit of ham and roast beef, why eat pig’s feet or calf brains?

There is perhaps no better testament to abundance than the middle-class fondness for food faddery, especially fads focused on meat, a luxury those yoked to scarcity and want cannot afford. One popular school of thought linked salted meats to salacious behavior; avoid such foods and the masturbatory urge would trouble one no more. Sylvester Graham, food eccentric, graham cracker king, and a man obsessed with denying his (and everyone else’s) sexual urges, also linked meat, salted or otherwise, to masturbation, citing as evidence an oversexed young woman, the victim of her mother’s penchant for feeding her daughter “highly-seasoned flesh-meat.”
Graham favored meat abstinence, arguing that eating flesh encouraged the “hunger instinct” and over time, meat eaters developed a voracious nature more animal than human. Graham had the good sense to recognize that few Americans were willing to abandon meat altogether, and he urged his more carnivorous countrymen to stick to roasted or boiled meats (because those were less tasty than fried meats or because long cooking reduced the animality of flesh is not clear). The mid-nineteenth century also marked the onset of a prolonged crusade against alcohol, and many temperance reformers linked meat eating to insobriety. Meat “overload[ed] the stomach,”
explained one writer, an excess that only the “stimulant” of alcohol could alleviate. Eat less meat and sobriety would follow. “In countries where milk is the chief diet, there is no intemperance,” added the author, pointing out that “Arabs,” who favored dairy over flesh, were a highly “temperate” people. “Is it not better to be called a milk-sop than a drunkard?”

The reputation of that old colonial mainstay pork suffered from food faddery and from the abundance of beef. A physician writing in one of the era’s most popular women’s magazines described pork and bacon as “beyond all question
the most indigestible” of meats. As far as he was concerned, white Americans should stick to beef or poultry and leave pork to “negroes,” who, he explained, enjoyed a peculiar “congeniality” with hogs. As a result, he and others believed, pork and bacon were “peculiarly appropriate for negroes on account of their habits of life, and their defective heat-generating power.” But pork had also become associated with the backwardness of farm and frontier. The doctor told readers that Americans living in the southern and western United States, both of which were decidedly rural, were unhealthy in part because of their “excessive use of fat
bacon and salt pork.” With that last comment, the physician tapped into one of the most important social changes of the nineteenth century: the shift of population off the farm and into cities. That trend is central to our story because urban growth complicated and transformed the business of putting meat on the nation’s tables.

In 1820, only about 7 percent of the nation’s 9 million inhabitants lived in a town or city. But from the 1830s on, the percentage of urbanites soared, and by the 1860s about a quarter of the then 31 million Americans called the city home. But those averages obscure an important fact that would shape the geography and structure of livestock and meat production for the rest of that century and into the next: urbanization was skewed to the east. In Massachusetts, for example, 60 percent of residents lived in towns. Five percent of all Americans lived in just three eastern cities: New York, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia.

Why does this matter? An important characteristic of urban populations is so obvious that it’s easy to overlook: city people don’t produce their own food. The more of them there are, the harder farmers must work to feed them (and as a general rule, farmers’ numbers decline as urban populations grow). Put another way, cities complicate the task of making and delivering food, and that’s especially true of meat. By the late 1860s, the nearly 1 million inhabitants of Manhattan needed 1.1 million animals a year to satisfy their carnivorous appetites. Imagine the logistical complexity of moving that livestock from the countryside to the city’s slaughterhouses, transforming them into meat for distribution first to butchers and then to consumers, and disposing of the wastes that slaughter generated. (And that’s just meat. Those million people also needed bread and potatoes, onions and apples. In the late 1860s, New Yorkers devoured 126 million eggs a year; ten years later, they downed 442 million.) Cattle and hog farmers in the Ohio River valley, efficient though they were, could not keep pace, especially as new settlers and entrepreneurs bought up agricultural land and turned it into towns. Squeezed by urban growth and demand, farmers and livestock headed to what was then called “the west,” the relatively unpopulated states bordering the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, where rich soil supported the cattle-corn-hog complex. Americans invested millions of dollars in a transportation infrastructure so they could move foodstuffs from west to east. They dredged three thousand miles of canal in the 1820s and 1830s, but those wonders were overshadowed by the great marvel of the age, the railroad. Americans laid seven thousand miles of rail in the 1830s and 1840s, virtually all of it in the northeastern quadrant of the United States, and most of it devoted to moving raw goods, and especially food, to urban markets.

But it was difficult for farmers to keep pace, even with new agricultural technologies like the John Deere plow and McCormick reaper. In early 1852, a Pittsburgh newspaper reported that lumbermen in northwestern Pennsylvania had abandoned their posts, driven away by shortages of meat, potatoes, and even hay to feed teams of oxen. The
New York Times
informed readers that “Eastern demand”
had “drained the [western] country of beef cattle.” Butchers in Michigan and Wisconsin presided over shops devoid of meat, and in Minnesota, barrels of pork sold for $55 (that’s $1,600 today). But meat supplies in eastern markets ran short, too, and city folks cursed high prices and empty meat stalls, blaming, variously, greedy butchers, con men, hucksters, railroad crews, and selfish farmers.

Episodes like these were not uncommon, and not always because of shortfalls on the farm—winter storms often prevented wagon and train travel; drought led to grain shortages. In the early 1860s, the Civil War both highlighted and exacerbated the logistical difficulties of feeding an urban and geographically dispersed populace. Workers raced to lay more rail track in the northern United States, but much of the roads’ capacity was devoted to moving troops and materiel rather than food. Combatants destroyed crops and fields and commandeered whatever comestibles they came across, leaving city people to cope with empty shops and pantries. Cattle, whether for meat or dairy products, were in particularly short supply, warned a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA, an agency the Union Congress created in 1862). Prior to the war, explained a department analyst, southern states had teemed with cattle, but Confederates had either slaughtered and eaten those, or driven them to safer locations (presumably to Mexico). Geography complicated the deficit: most of the remaining cattle population was located in the northern reaches of the Mississippi River valley, but the bulk of the steak-eating humans lived along the eastern seaboard. Therefore, he concluded, the “
great law of the movement
of cattle is here plainly developed. Cattle must be moved eastward and capital westward to supply the pressing demands of our people
.” The department reiterated the point a year later in a second report. The “western”
prairies of Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois could no longer support the number of cattle needed to feed the nation. The solution? Turn the grassy plains of the “Far West,” as Americans then called the region west of the Missouri River, over to cattle. Thus began the project to transform the range into the westernmost outpost of a vast cattle trail that ran from south Texas and Wyoming all the way to New York and Philadelphia, using the railroads to move cattle and meat from west to east.