SHIPPING CATTLE AND THE LAST CATTLE DRIVE
by Eugene Hutchinson Mallory (EHM 2)

     This yearly event of shipping cattle needs more description to cover that
archaic and climatic event of those years of our lives. This was the payoff for
a year of labor and expense.

     Before the shipping day came, there were weeks of decision waiting for the
right market, and for the cattle to be ready. Father read the Drover Journal as
regularly as a broker reads the Wall Street Journal. There were columns of
prices for every midwest stockyard. Prices on every category, prime steers,
heifers, bologna bulls, canner and cutter cows, veal calves, butcher hogs,
packing sows, stags, boars, lambs, old ewes and on and on in all weight groups.

     There were also a few news stories and usually a fiction serial. I
remember my mother reading aloud the story of two adventurers who packed their
goods in a wheelbarrow on foot to join the Pikes Peak or Bust gold rush. I
think they busted, but it was a good story and even father listened.

     Nearly every mail delivery brought letters of news and advice from various
commission firms who actually sold the stock in the yards. Father looked them
over and usually evaluated them at their cost, which was zero. The same firms
sent a literal storm of calendars and almanacs at Christmas time. In the old
days, they even sent ornamented boxes like little cabinets full of exotic
soaps, etc.

     When the time and the cattle were right, another decision had to be made.
Local buyers, notably Knoll and Scantlebury were available to buy the cattle in
the local stockyards. You could take the local offer, or gamble that you could
do better after expenses on the next days Chicago market.

     It was always a difficult choice. It was a point of prestige among cattle
feeders to produce a lot of steers so shrewdly chosen and so expertly fed, that
they would top the market. That is, they would be the highest priced lot sold
that day in the Chicago market. Uncle Ed did it once as recorded in the diary.
Father did also, but, alas, he sold the cattle, in Hampton, to Knoll and
Scantlebury.

     Thereby hangs a tale. Ed Knoll was so impatient to enjoy his triumph, that
he came to the house to announce it before he could possibly have known about
it through regular channels. Mother asked him "How could you know so soon?" Ed
Knoll was a bit taken aback. He had an informant who kept him a few precious
hours ahead of the market movements by private wire from Chicago. He didn't
want to say so in so many words. He came up with an answer that was always
remembered, "Well Mam, we has ways." and said no more.

     Regardless of where the cattle were sold, they had to be delivered to
either the Rock Island or the Great Western stockyards. From there, they were
put on board the stock cars, those slat sided cars you don't see anymore. In
the 1920's, it was the Great Western stockyard because they had better
connections. it was essential to have the stock to market the next day. Also
mother's cousin, John Ferris, was agent for the Great Western. He was usually
able to get a cooperative train crew to shift the cars for loading. There was
only one loading chute, and moving about 6 or 7 of the old 36 foot slatted cars
was not easily done by man or horse power.

     However, using the Great Western meant a cattle drive for a mile on the
country road south of town and then clear through town on Bridge Street, later
Jefferson Highway. It was necessary to cross the main M&SL tracks, which had
many trains a day then. An inopportune train could scatter the herd, and
perhaps a few steers in a messier way. The front of an old steam locomotive was
not called the cow catcher for nothing, though I doubt that it caught any
alive.

     These were three year old cattle, raised on the range, and highly
suspicious of planked railroad crossings and bridges. After the M&SL planks and
tracks, the Squaw Creek bridge and the Great Western tracks had to be crossed.

     I well remember the last of these drives before loading was finally
shifted to the Rock Island yards. The Rock Island yards were much closer, and
there were almost no stretches of unfenced road.

     I was old enough to be left to guard a cross road or street and to be
picked up in a car and driven ahead to another. In town, I could run up the
alleys, behind the houses, to the next street. We had all help we could raise
on foot and two on horse back, a man from Uncle Ed's farm and Buck Jones. No,
not the movie star, but neighbor Charlie Jones' son.

     All went well enough as far as the cattle were concerned. All were safely
controlled in the stockyards and loaded aboard. There was, however, some public
reaction. We got most of the auto traffic diverted. Those that were caught, had
sense enough to stop and let the cattle flow around them. They were maybe
rubbed and jostled a bit, but those old cars were sturdy. The dry fed steers
had loaded up on green grass in the mile of country road, so the cars may have
needed a wash job. A few people, not used to stock, and who had never been at
arms length of a full grown steer, were slightly disturbed, I believe.

     Through the residential part of town, with no fences to confine them, the
tired cattle wanted to bunch up and slow down, all the time bawling their
unhappiness. We couldn't keep them in the street. I remember getting ahead and
seeing the block where Uncle Ben lived, lined with a wall of red and white from
door step to door step, steadily advancing over lawns and shrubbery, leaving
sufficient fertilizer behind to repair the damage, given time.

     At the yards, little Judson was perched on a fence top to be safe. He
managed to fall off into a pretty stinky puddle. So considering our back trail
and all, it could be said to be a stinky day, but I thought it to be a great
success. It was, however, the last time father drove his herd through town. I
don't know why, it was fun, for me at least.

     One thing I missed and do regret. I never got to go to Chicago to see the
sale with father. By the time I was old enough, he was too old. In the Early
days, he would ride the train in the caboose and watch his precious steers to
see that any that lay down were poked up with a cane before they were trampled.
After the sale, and a night at the Stockyard Inn, he would ride the Pullman
back. All this went with the freight bill on the steers. This would have been a
rather hard trip for an aging man and a small boy.

     Of course, I visited the yards many times in the later years of the truck
era. The old International Harvester I5 was the first truck tractor able to get
a trailer load of cattle to Chicago and consistently make the market the next
day. In a very few years, the local stockyards were gone. Now, even the
enormous yards in Chicago are gone. Nothing remains, but the ornate gateway.
The "new" Stockyard Inn is gone, burnt like the old one and never rebuilt.
Their big dining room served the best beef in Chicago. There was manure on the
terrazzo floor, but their clientele knew the best in beef and they got it.

     In the bar, they buyers and commission agents, who had been bargaining
fiercely, riding from pen to pen on horseback, would be downing a few or more
together.

     Nothing remains of the great marketing machine that turned out the money
for the good life. Even the rails that carried the steers to their destined
doom are rusting on rotten ties. Gone it may be, but that was shipping cattle
in those days.