THE MARKET SYSTEMS OF THE COUNTRY. 251 
service the drover pays 50 cents for each bullock sold and perhaps one- 
uth of that sum for each hog or sheep, and 25 cents each as stock- 
yard fees on cattle, and 8 cents on hogs and sheep. The buyer pays 
for the cattle before they leave the yard. They are then driven through 
the chutes into the cars for transportation to their destination. 
In 1870 the total number of each class received was: Cattle, 532,964 ; 
hogs, 1,693,158; sheep, 349,855; horses, 3,537, a large proportion of 
which remained but two or three days before reshipment. Only a part 
of these animals, especially the beeves, are fit for the butcher when they 
leave Chicago. Many are taken to the great corn-growing regions of 
Iiinois and Indiana, and fed for several months. Ohio fattens a large 
number. Many of these animals come back to Chicago when they are 
in conidition, and are taken to the eastern consumers by cattle trains. 
The abuses on these eattle trains have arrested the attention of public- 
spirited men and humanitarians, and much has been urged in journals 
and before the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, but with 
little effect that meat in the markets of the great eastern cities has not 
aterially improved either in quality, wholesomeness, or cheapness. 
Whenua beef is driven up a chute and forced into a cattle car, Lis worry 
begins. He is jammed against other beeves, he is alarmed and irritated, 
Sometimes his temper is soured, and he begins to gore right and left in the 
hope of fighting bis way to freedom. Then begins the strange alarming 
motion of the car, the jostle and the roar. From protracted fear and 
apprehension, the condition of the heart changes; the system becomes 
feverish ; he loses appetite; and sometimes, though consumed with thirst, 
he is too much alarmed to drink. The result is, that a thousand miles’ 
ride takes 100 to 500 pounds of flesh from an animal ; and he is in a jaded, 
sore, aud feverish state when the butcher’s mallet puts an end to his long 
misery. 
A law has been proposed requiring the cattle trains to stop and let the 
animals have rest and pasturage two or three times on their way from 
Chicago to the sea-board cities. This would not amend the mischief. 
_ When an animal bas suffered from this fright and fever of rail car tran- 
Sit, a rest of 24 hours does him little or no good. He is dull and lump- 
ish for a week. He is turned into a strange pasture where he meets 
new grasses, and at first he does not relish them so well as the prairie 
growth. It will be three weeks or a month before he begins to gain in 
flesh, and then he fattens very slowly. In addition to the loss by ema 
ciation, a third, and often a half, of the cattle that reach New York, 
especially those coming by the Erie railroad, are badly bruised. When a 
car is uarrow, and some care is taken, the animals pack with greater 
comfort to themselves than in a wider inclosure. Erie is broad-gauge, 
and the animals, taken at furious speed down heavy grades and around 
sharp turns, are jammed against each other, and those on the 
outside are dashed against the sides of the car with such force that a 
large bruise will be found to extend quite through the flesh between 
the ribs, and the meat looks yellow and livid, and is quite unfit for food ; 
yet bruised quarters are sold every day by the hundred in Washington 
market. It retails at two or three cents below the price of sound meat, 
. aud the loss from this source falls mainly on the wholesale butcher, 
because no examination of the bullock will disclose the condition of the 
flesh beneath the skin. In the summerof 1870 these and similar abuses 
in New York stock-yards were the subject of investigation by a ¢com- 
mittee of the Farmers’ Club of New York, and their report thus recites 
a series of neglects and brutalities: 
‘There is great indifference on the part of drovers and proprietors of the yards to the 
