In Meat We Trust Read online

  The cycle of extravagance spawned conflict, violence, and war. Grazing generated endless court cases and squabbling among neighbors as livestock owners tried to determine who owned which animals. Laws aimed at quelling disputes proliferated, and colonial legislators established mechanisms for ownership—branding was the most common—and penalties for theft, which of course could be applied only if a litigant proved he or she owned an animal. Livestock lust fractured once close-knit communities. William Bradford, Pilgrim leader at Plymouth, Massachusetts, complained that as his flock’s desire for cattle and hogs increased, “there was no longer any holding [settlers] together, but now they must . . . go to their great lots. They could not otherwise keep their cattle. . . . And no man now thought he could live except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep them.” As a result, his people “were scattered all over the Bay” and their original settlement lay “thin and . . . desolate.” Bradford feared such desire would “be the ruin of New England” and bring “the Lord’s displeasure” down on them.

  And not only the Lord’s. As whites migrated to accommodate their livestock, they collided with Native Americans. A member of the Narragansett tribe chanted a common lament: Once upon a time the tribe’s ancestors luxuriated in an abundance of “deer and skins.” No more. Now “the English” had stolen the land and allowed “their cows and horses [to] eat the grass; and their hogs [to] spoil [the] clam banks.” Cattle tromped through natives’ patches of beans and squash, and hogs rooted up caches of corn. Whites in search of fresh meadow and forest for their livestock commandeered land that natives regarded as theirs, encroachment that pushed Indians into territory held by other tribes and nations. More often than not, warfare ensued, especially once white settlers understood that they could use livestock to force Native American dispersion. “Your hogs & Cattle injure Us,” lamented one Indian in 1666. “You come too near Us to live & drive Us from place to place. We can fly no farther.” He begged the Maryland legislature to “let [his people] know where to live & how to be secured for the future from the Hogs & Cattle.” The answer? Nowhere. Courts refused to listen to natives’ complaints; assemblies ignored treaties; white settlers deliberately set animals loose in order to push Indians deeper into the frontier.

  Natives in their turn used whites’ desire for livestock against their enemy. A royal representative who investigated one conflict stripped the event down to its basics: the English settlers engaged in “Violent Intrusions” as a way to seize natives’ land; Indians sought “Revenge” by destroying “the Cattel and Hogs of the English.” In encounter after encounter, Indians stole, slaughtered, tortured, and mutilated livestock, because doing so struck at the heart of what it meant to be white and European. When a group of Narragansetts seized one white man, they forced him to watch as they killed five of his cattle. “[W]hat will Cattell now doe you good?” they asked. After staging a retaliatory raid, another group of Indians warned that they stood prepared to fight for “twenty one years.” “You must consider,” they told their foes, “the Indians lost nothing but their life; you must lose your fair houses and cattle.” During the ensuing two years of ambush, torching, and retribution, seven thousand Indians died as compared to three thousand whites. But the natives slaughtered eight thousand head of cattle.

  Other livestock-driven battles would follow, but whites had won the war: they would convert the wilderness, and large chunks of the continent, into a livestock trail epic in size and in its demands on the land and its people. Corn, rather than Bibles, served as the tool of conversion.

  As the decades passed, colonists gradually abandoned hands-off husbandry in favor of more deliberate livestock production, prodded in that direction by the growth of a lucrative international trade in meat. Thanks to the British imperial system, North Americans were linked to markets in England, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia, and they participated primarily by exporting raw materials. Grain was in demand everywhere in the world, but turning that field crop into coin proved difficult. Grain is relatively fragile, and during a market-bound trek of anywhere from one to two months by water or on crude paths and roads, spillage, rot, rain, and rats devoured much of the profit. So colonists learned early that the most efficient way to squeeze income from grain was by converting it into beef and pork (or alcohol, which was bulky but essentially imperishable). Cattle and pigs walked themselves to market, the cattle grazing or feasting on corn at stops along the route, the hogs trailing to feed on kernel-dotted manure. The corn was essential to the system: Cattle that fed on grass alone staggered into sale yards scrawny and exhausted. Corn-fed cattle, in contrast, arrived in better health and bearing more weight and returned greater profit. Once the animals arrived at urban ports, exporters slaughtered the stock and packed it in barrels, shipping most of it abroad. Hinterland farmers responded by paying more heed to their livestock and taking more care with feed and shelter.

  One of the most important colonial cattle-producing regions flourished in the valley of the Potomac South Branch in what is now the northeastern corner of West Virginia. There, settlers developed an especially systematic and profitable mode of combining cattle, corn, and hogs. The area consisted of fertile bottomlands suited for planting corn and hilly upland ill suited for crops but thick with forage grass. (That grass had once fed bison, but by the early eighteenth century, those beasts, and the Native Americans who had followed them, were long gone.) In summer, South Branch farmers tended fields of corn while their cattle grazed upland pastures. Come fall, they harvested the corn in the simplest manner possible: they left the ears intact, cut the stalks to the ground, and piled the harvest into “shocks” that they distributed throughout their fields. Every day, hands led the cattle to a collection of shocks. As the cattle fed, they deposited undigested corn (the cattle’s digestive systems processed the corn’s nutrients, but the kernels passed through intact) and manure, the fertilizer for the next year’s planting. When the cattle had devoured the shocks, hands led them to a new location stocked with fresh corn and herded hogs into the first field. Those beasts snuffled up the leavings, including the corn kernels, and deposited their own manure.

  This cattle-corn-hog complex was well established before the Revolution, but when that war ended, South Branch farmers joined a vast migration away from the coast and into the interior and the Ohio River valley. There they found ideal terrain in which to grow corn and raise cattle and hogs. For centuries, Native Americans had burned off trees along fertile bottomlands so they could plant corn, beans, and squash in the clearings. Migrating Americans swarmed onto these lush tracts, depositing not just themselves but their livestock. Out beyond the river, at the time the new nation’s primary waterway, lay acres of equally rich soil and pasture.

  By the early nineteenth century, cattle grazing and feeding operations spread for miles along both sides of the Ohio River and far inland, too. In summer and fall, drovers and herds of as many as a thousand head clogged the overland roads that connected the interior to the ports and markets of the eastern seaboard. The bovine multitude could be seen a mile away, wrote one drover, thanks to “long moving lines of rising dust.” The cattle parade marched two by two, each animal plodding through the track left by those ahead. Winter and spring rains turned the ruts into rivers of mud, and when the soil dried, the jagged path claimed wagon and carriage wheels that could not survive the jolt. Despite the bovines’ placid natures, keeping so many cattle in line and in motion was never easy, the task exacerbated by the hogs that trailed the drove, rooting through manure as they trotted to market. One drover nearly lost his herd when the crew of a passing steamboat eased their vessel alongside a trail and let loose with the boat’s whistle. The ear-piercing shriek sent the cattle “up the river as if the deuce was in them.” The drover galloped after his charges and rode for a mile and a half before he managed to make his way to the head of the line and calm the runaways. He’d no sooner restored order than the steamboat caught up with him and the herd, and the crew taunted
him with more whistle shrieks. “The name of the captain of the boat I knew not,” reported the angry drover, “but I wish to caution the public against a man of such mean and disgraceful conduct.”

  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?”