Fresh beef was shipped from Chicago to New York, and arrived in perfect order. To ship live cattle long distances, he knew was unwise. And he then declared that Omaha, Kansas City, Saint Paul and various other cities of the West would yet have great slaughter-houses, where livestock could be received after a very short haul. The product could then be passed along in refrigerator-cars, and the expense of ice would not be so much as to unload and feed the stock. But better than all, the product would be more wholesome.
Armour began to manufacture refrigerator-cars. He offered to sell these to railroad-companies. A few railroads bought cars, and after a few months proposed to sell them back to Armour—the expense and work of operating them required too much care and attention. Shippers would not ship unless it was guaranteed that the car would be re-iced, and that it would arrive at its destination within a certain time.
In the Fall, fresh peaches were being shipped across the lake to Chicago from Michigan. If the peaches were one night on the way they arrived in good order.
This gave Armour an idea—he sent a couple of refrigerator-cars around to Saint Joseph, loaded them with fresh peaches, and shipped them to Boston. He sent a man with the cars who personally attended to icing the cars, just as we used to travel in the caboose to look after the livestock. The peaches reached Boston, cool and fresh, and were sold in an hour at a good profit. At once there was a demand for refrigerator-cars from Michigan: the new way opened the markets of America to the producer of fruits and vegetables. There was a clamorous demand for refrigerator-cars.
The reason a railroad can not afford to have its own refrigerator-cars is because the fruit or berry season in any one place is short. For instance, six weeks covers the grape period of the Lake Erie grape-belt; one month is about the limit on Michigan peaches; strawberries from Southern Illinois are gone in two or three weeks.
Therefore, to handle the cars advantageously, the railroads find it much better to rent them, or simply to haul them on a mileage. The business is a specialty in itself, and requires most astute generalship to make it pay. Cars have to be sent to Alabama in February and March; North Carolina a little later; then West Virginia. These same cars then do service in the Fall in Michigan. It naturally follows that much of the time cars have to be hauled empty, and this is a fact that few people figure on when computing receipts from tonnage. Now, instead of the good old way of sending a man in charge, there are icing-stations, where the car is looked for, thoroughly examined and cared for as a woman would look after a baby. In order to bring apples from Utah to Colorado, and oranges from California to Arizona, icehouses have to be built on the desert at vast expense. And this in a climate where frost is unknown.
To work the miracle of modern industrialism requires the help of bespectacled scientists from Germany, and a fine army of artists, poets, painters, plumbers, doctors, lawyers, beside the workers in wood and metals.
The whole business is a creation, and a beneficent one. It has opened up vast territories to the farmer, gardener and stock-raiser, where before cactus and sagebrush were supreme; and the prairie-dog and his chum, the rattlesnake, held undisputed sway.
To the wealth of the world it has added untold millions, not to mention the matters of health, hygiene and happiness for the people.