"Why is it," he asked in a bored and irritated tone, "that every one who comes out here has to go to the stockyards?"
"Are you aware," I returned, "that half the bank clearings of Chicago are traceable to the stockyards?"
He answered with a noncommittal grunt.
His was not the attitude of the Detroit man who wants you to know that Detroit does something more than make automobiles, or of the Grand Rapids man who says: "We make lots of things here besides furniture." He was really ashamed of the stockyards, as a man may, perhaps, be ashamed of the fact that his father made his money in some business with a smell to it. And because he felt so deeply on the subject, I had the half idea of not touching on the stockyards in this chapter.
However the news that my companion and myself were there to "do" Chicago was printed in the papers, and presently the stockyards began to call us up. It didn't even ask if we were coming. It just asked when. And as I hesitated, it settled the whole matter then and there by saying it would call for us in its motor car, at once.
I may say at the outset that, to quote the phrase of Mr. Freer of Detroit, the stockyards "has no esthetic value." It is a place of mud, and railroad tracks, and cattle cars, and cattle pens, and overhead runways, and great ugly brick buildings, and men on ponies, and raucous grunts, and squeals, and smells—a place which causes the heart to sink with a sickening heaviness.
Our first call was at the Welfare Building, where we were shown some of the things which are being done to benefit employees of the packing houses. It was noon-time. The enormous lunch room was well occupied. A girl was playing ragtime at a piano on a platform. The room was clean and airy. The women wore aprons and white caps. A good lunch cost six cents. There were iron lockers in the locker room—lockers such as one sees in an athletic club. There were marble shower baths for the men and for the women. There were two manicures who did nothing but see to the hands of the women working in the plant. There were notices of classes in housekeeping, cooking, washing, house furnishing, the preparation of food for the sick—signs printed in English, Russian, Slovak, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Croatian, Italian, and Greek. Obviously, the company was doing things to help these people. Obviously it was proud of what it was doing. Obviously I should have rejoiced, saying to myself: "See how these poor, ignorant foreigners who come over here to our beautiful and somewhat free country are being elevated!" But all I could think of was: "What a horrible place the stockyards is! How I loathe it here!"
On the North Side of Chicago there is an old and exclusive club, dating from before the days of motor cars, which is known as the Saddle and Cycle Club. The lunch club for the various packing-house officials, at the stockyards, has a name bearing perhaps some satirical relation to that of the other club. It is called the Saddle and Sirloin Club, and in that club I ate a piece of sirloin the memory of which will always remain with me as something sacred.
After lunching and visiting the offices of a packing company where, we were told, an average daily business of $1,300,000 is done—and the place looks it—we visited the Stockyards Inn, which is really an astonishing establishment. The astonishing quality about it is that it is a thing of beauty which has grown up in a place as far removed from beauty as any that I ever looked upon outside a mining camp. A charming, low, half-timbered building, the Inn is like something at Stratford-on-Avon; and by some strange freak of chance the man who runs it has a taste for the antique in furniture and chinaware. Inside it is almost like a fine old country house—pleasant cretonnes, grate fires, old Chippendale chairs, mahogany tables, grandfather's clocks, pewter, and luster ware. All this for cattlemen who bring their flocks and herds into the yards! The only thing to spoil it is the all-pervasive smell of animals.
From there we went to the place of death.