DECLENSION OF SHORT-HORN PRICES. IQI 



Kentucky. Pedigrees of their descendants are frequently recorded 

 in the pages of the American Herd Book. 



With the year 1840, under the continued depression of the finan- 

 cial interests of the country at large, the spirit so active during several 

 previous years in cultivating the Short-horns gradually waned, and 

 further importations ceased. For several succeeding years the prices 

 of meats were unprecedentedly low. Mess pork fell to $10, and 

 even less, per barrel, in our principal markets, and the dressed car- 

 casses of swine were dull of sale at $2.50 to $3.00 per hundred 

 pounds, while beef of good quality was worth even less, and a drug 

 throughout. As a consequence, there was little or no encouragement 

 for breeding Short-horns. Under this depressed condition of affairs 

 hundreds of well-bred bull calves were castrated for steers, and many 

 cow calves spayed and reared for the shambles. Prices for even the 

 best blooded animals were merely nominal ; public sales were scarcely 

 made at all as in past years, and private sales infrequent. Nor was 

 the depression for a few years only, but continuous down to nearly or 

 quite the year 1850. One hundred to two hundred dollars per head 

 would buy the choice of almost any herd, bull or cow, in the country. 

 As a specimen of the times, the writer received a commission from 

 the firm of A. B. Allen & Co., Agricultural Merchants in New York 

 city, in. October, 1850, to select fifteen or twenty good breeding Short- 

 horns, bulls and heifers, to fill an order for the Island of Cuba, where 

 an experiment was to be tried with them on the high ranges of coun- 

 try near its eastern coast. We went into the Scioto valley of Ohio, 

 and from the herds of some of its best breeders purchased several 

 beautiful (in calf) heifers, of two to three years old past, red, red and 

 white, and roan in color as all white was objected to for $50 to $100 

 each, and several bulls at like prices. Some of them were descend- 

 ants of the Kentucky importation of 1817, with several crosses of 

 the Ohio Company bulls and their descendants of the 1834 impor- 

 tation in their pedigrees, and others, pure descendants from the latter. 

 Every animal was of our own selection. We paid the full price 

 asked for them, and could have quadrupled the number, or even 

 more, at the same prices. In Kentucky, New York and New Eng- 

 land, Short-horn values were no better, and many breeders who had 

 begun rearing them but a few years before became disgusted with 

 their stock, turned their choice bred cows into the dairies, put them 

 to common bulls, and sold off their calves remorselessly to the butcher. 

 During this depressing period numerous good pedigrees were lost, as 

 not being worth preserving, and many valuable families of this lordly 



