American Cattle Marhets and the Dressed Beef Trade. 125 
the border, but the number imported is small and scarcely worth 
considering. 
It is in the United States that the live-stock industry has 
grown to leviathan proportions, and, though this article is headed 
" American Cattle Markets," it is proposed to treat entirely of 
the United States. While, of course, the cattle business must 
be incidentally mentioned in a general way, still the object of 
the paper is to lead up to the great cattle markets, more 
especially in the West, through whose gates the finished product 
of the feeder reaches the homes of the consumer. 
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the American 
people began to feel the pulsations of a new life. On J uly 4, 1 776, 
they had become an independent Eepublic. Their national life was 
confined mainly to the sea-board States, although the trappers and 
the pioneers had sailed over the mighty lakes of the interior and 
had worked their way up the great and seemingly never-ending 
rivei's, the Mississippi and Missouri. For three-quarters of a 
century the history of the cattle business is very short. It was 
confined to small local markets, and though some more pro- 
gressive farmers in Ohio and Kentucky had imported the blood 
of Booth and Bates, yet the years rolled on and every neighbour- 
hood supplied its own demands. The wide fields of the West were 
not open, and the South was dominant in politics. The energies 
of the country, as far as agriculture was concerned, were confined 
to working in the tobacco -plantations of Virginia, around the 
cotton-fields of Alabama, and among the forests of sugar-cane in 
Louisiana. Settlements had been gradually creeping westward ; 
the AUeghanies had been crossed, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana 
had been settled, and the country, certain of its rich heritage, was 
slowly and surely marching onwards. In 1830, or thereabouts, 
Chicago — the future Mecca of the cattle-man — had come into 
existence, and it struggled along almost unnoticed for several 
years. The era of railroads followed, and Sutter, peering down 
into the " tail race," as we would call it, which carried the waters 
away from his flouring mill, saw the gold sparkle under the 
brilliant sun of California. That was in 1818. The new dis- 
covery led to great results. There came a wild rush from all 
parts of the world to the bonanzas which lay hid among the 
gulches of the Sierra Nevadas. The spirit of adventure was 
abroad, and as the long trains of " prairie schooners " made their 
way slowly across the plains, the American people began to 
realise the value of their " Western Desert." Ten years later 
Colorado became the ai'ena of another mining excitement. 
Out of all this turmoil there was evolved the fact, and a 
fact which American enterprise was not slow to grasp, that the 
