A RANCHMAN^S RECOLLECTIONS 



esting at this time, when bills in Congress are seek- 

 ing to take them away from the packers, and yet it 

 is a fair deduction that without private initiative 

 the beef industry must have dragged on for years 

 without markets. In 1881 I was with a produce 

 house in Denver. Hundreds of cars of apples and 

 potatoes were shipped in the winter from the Mis- 

 souri River, there being stoves in the cars. It is a 

 fair deduction, too, that the development of meat 

 refrigerator cars brought the same service for prod- 

 uce, fish and fruit, most of it under private initiative, 

 years before it would have come from the slow 

 process of railroad development. 



It is not my thought to follow the development 

 of the Kansas City market for cattle through any 

 tedious process of dates and figures, but rather to 

 sketch epochs of vital bearing. 



The hog industry does not call for any special 

 mention of its advent, except that refrigerator cars 

 began the movement for the sale of fresh pork cuts, 

 with limited natural ice refrigeration for curing, a 

 gradual increase In summer killing, the time-honored 

 term "winter-cured," as applied to hams and bacon, 

 becoming obsolete as mechanical refrigeration be- 

 came definite. 



Artificial, or, more properly speaking, mechanical 

 refrigeration, meaning the use of the ammonia 

 process, was first used by Kingan & Co., Indianapolis, 

 in 1885. Its use in Chicago and Kansas City oc- 



[20] 



