TENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART IV 11,1 



the civil war or the period immediately following. There are no records 

 extant of what railroad first adopted them. No man's name is written 

 in history as having invented the stock car as a means of transporting 

 animals to market. Necessity is regarded as the mother of invention, 

 but no one stands sponsor for the stock car. The earliest reports on the 

 equipment of railroads are now the property of a museum in Chicago and 

 are in the handwriting of the early auditors. In 1866 the Dubuque & Sioux 

 City road, now a part of the Illinois Central system, reported twenty stock 

 cars in its equipment. The Sandusky, Mansfield & Newark the following 

 year reported twenty cars also, also the Louisville, Cincinnati & Lexing- 

 ton seventy stock cars. 



It is indisputable that in those pioneer days of live stock transportation 

 shippers encountered great difficulties. The science of railroading was 

 yet comparatively undeveloped and much of the country was in the same 

 condition. The railroads were poor, very poor. Their building was hazard- 

 ous and costly, their equipment meagre, limited, primitive and the service 

 incompetent. Accommodations for both live stock and people were crude 

 and uncomfortable. Freight rates were high, often more than double those 

 of the present time and charged by carload rate instead of cents per 

 pound. Cattle were wild and so were many of the men who handled them. 

 Stock cars were equipped with hand brakes and old rubber springs that 

 soon became hard. Trains were coupled with link and pins, the great 

 amount of slack in freight trains causing a tremendous impact at every 

 movement of the journey. Old wood-burning engines on the western roads, 

 also equipped with link and pin couplings and hand brakes, slowly dragged 

 along their trains, usually starting them with a jerk and stopping them 

 with reverse steam that caused everything not nailed down to go up into 

 a heap at one end of the car. The average schedule for trains, including 

 stops, on the five leading western railroads in 1873 was ten miles an 

 hour, with the highest time allowed twelve to fifteen. These trains on 

 short, light iron rails, joined by old iron "rail chairs" spiked into wooden 

 ties, forming a single-track road, with side switches at each station to 

 permit the passing of trains. The roadbeds were rough and poorly bala- 

 asted, with excessive grades, wooden bridges and trestle work and every- 

 thing in a poor state of repairs, while being in the hands of a receiver 

 was a very common situation. 



The high arbitrary carload rates then charged for the transportation 

 of stock induced overloading as a measure of enonomy, which constantly 

 resulted in many dead and crippled animals, while the remainder were 

 generally more or less bruised from the overcrowding and continual jerk- 

 ing, jolting and swaying of heavy trains having link and pin couplings, 

 hand brakes, rough track, heavy, uneven grades, numerous stops and 

 startings, frequent switching with engines too light to do the work with- 

 out bumping and jerking the daylight out of the poor animals when 

 inside the cars. The result was that the weaker animals when knocked 

 down were piled on by the others and trampled until either helpless or 

 dead, or if they were able to rise were frequently so injured that they 

 afterward died. In hot weather their suffering was intense. This added 

 to the death toll and the loss to the shipper. It was therefore the inva- 



