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a number of establishments in operation, and it is claimed. that eighty-five thousand hogs were slaughtered during that winter.

This industry grew in the river towns in southern Ohio and small plants became numerous. The products were transported by water to the south and east. Pork was the only product. The slaughtering was done by the farmers, who sent the meat they did not need to some neighboring packer or storekeeper, who cured it. Much of the pork was sent down the Mississippi to New Orleans after the break-up of the ice in the spring, and was exchanged there for the products of the southern States. It was reshipped from New Orleans and reached the eastern seaport cities.

Packing plants were established at Columbus, Chillicothe, and Hamilton in Ohio and in some places in Indiana and Illinois. In the packing season of 1848-1849, four hundred and seventy-five thousand hogs were packed at Cincinnati. This city maintained its preeminence in the business till 1861-1862, when Chicago took the lead which it has since held. The reasons for this change in leadership is evident. With the continued westward movement of population, Cincinnati ceased to be in the centre of the population, and Chicago took its place.

Meat packing has been largely a western industry and has increased with phenomenal rapidity. In the fifty years from 1850-1900, the number of establishments increased from one hundred and eighty-five to nine hundred and twenty-one; the capital invested from $3,482,500 to $189,198,264; the number of wage earners from three thousand two hundred and seventy-six to sixty-eight thousand five hundred and thirty-four, and the value of the product from $11,981,642 to $785,562,433. There has been a westward movement in the meat industry. In the decade, 1850-1860, the centre was at Cincinnati and in the valley of Ohio River. The greatest increase in the industry came in the period between 1860-1870. There was a new development in this decade when the dressed

beef trade began. The refrigerator car was invented, and in September, 1869, the first cargo of dressed beef was shipped from Chicago to Boston. In the decade from 1870 to 1880 the various refrigerating processes were greatly improved, and much more work was done in the summer. Up to 1872 nearly all the slaughtering was done in the winter, but in the packing year of 1872-1873 five hundred and five thousand hogs were killed during the summer season. Winter packing increased during this decade twenty-eight and five-tenths per cent, while summer packing increased seven hundred and one and six-tenths per cent, due to improvement in refrigerating processes. The export of fresh beef began in 1876. Canning beef was attempted in Chicago in the sixties, but not taken up on a large scale till 1879.

The decade 1880-1890 is the period in which the byproducts were utilized. The packers began to use what had been formerly thrown away. In the early days of beef packing none of the by-products were saved. There have been various inventions, so that what was once a waste has become a source of profit, and the entire animal is utilized. The blood is dried and sold for clarifying purposes, the entrails are cleaned and made into sausage casings, the hoofs are turned into neatsfoot oil, the parings of the hoofs, hides, and bones are converted into glue, the finest of the fats are turned into butterine, lard, oils, and the finest tallow, the cruder fats are made into soap grease, the hides are marketed for the manufacture of leather, the horns are sold to comb makers, the larger bones are used for the making of knife handles and for other purposes, the switches and tail ends are sold to hair mattress makers, and the short hair which cannot be dried and curled for sale is sold to felt works.

The period 1890-1900 is marked by the concentration of the industry in large places. In 1900, there were nine hundred and twenty-one establishments against one thousand one hundred and eighteen ten years before, but with the decrease in the number of concerns there had been an

increase in the capital invested from $116,887,504 to $189,198,264.

In this industry Illinois is far in the lead and is constantly gaining on the other States. In 1900, it furnished more than one-third of the entire output of the country. There has been a large decline in the work of the eastern houses and in those of the extreme West, showing an increasing concentration at Chicago and cities farther south in the Mississippi valley.

CHAPTER XXIV

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

IN the westward movement the American people met and solved problems which have been of peculiar difficulty. The government of the original thirteen States made no provision except in a vague and general way for any addition of territory, and nothing was said in the Constitution as to how new territory should be governed. A part of the question was answered in the Ordinance of 1787, which told how the territory belonging to the United States should be administered. Another and greater problem had to be faced when Louisiana was added to the national domain. The question whether the nation had power to acquire new territory was answered in the affirmative, and it was also decided that the new lands should be divided into States which should have an equal share with the older States in the conduct of national life. In a way which is unique in history, the nation brought the new possessions from a position in which they were without any part in their own government to equality with the existent States. We have traced the process by which this has been accomplished, by giving the people of the new Territories as much power as they could use presently to advantage, and then increasing this power as they were better able to use it.

Another danger which the nation had to face in its early days was that of division, with the Alleghany Mountains as the boundary between the two nations. This was met in

ways which clearly showed the statesmanlike qualities of the lawmakers of the period.

Another question which has not yet been fully settled is that of the treatment of the emigrant from Europe. Should he have full rights as a citizen of a State, and if so, on what conditions, and after how long a period of waiting? The equally difficult question of the assimilation of the foreign element has been more nearly solved in the United States than in any other part of the world, though there still remains much to be accomplished.

The period of westward expansion was not one in which a few great men were leaders and all the others humble followers, the machinery of government was so well understood, and the men who made the early settlements so skilled in the principles of government that few great figures stand before us. There was, as a rule, no occasion for them; the people did not need them. But there were some men who did important work. The man who comes the nearest to being indispensable is George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Northwest. It is not clear what would have happened if he had not made his wild but successful campaign; possibly the future of the Northwest would have been a different one.

There were men in abundance in the westward movement who should have an abiding place in the nation's history. Boone, Shelby, Sevier, and Robertson, south of the Ohio, represent the heroic age when the man to be a leader must be an Indian fighter. Cutler, Putnam, and St. Clair represent a company of equally good men who were the pioneers north of the Ohio. They were business men and administrators, who believed that they were doing work of permanent value.

Another man who ought to be remembered is Lewis Cass, Governor of Michigan, who was perhaps the most successful of the early administrators of the Northwest. But taken as a whole, individual men do not figure largely in the westward movement. Not but that there were leaders

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