Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City

2 2 7 Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? —Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History (1947) Historians usually depict the nineteenth century as the age of the steam engine , but the giant cities created by the new railroad networks could never have functioned without equine labor, too, incongruous as that seems. Horseshauledthegoodsessentialforgrowthinthosecitiesfromdepottoworksite and to consumers. Horse-powered transit allowed burgeoning urban populationstodeconcentrate .Urbanhistorianshavepaidtoolittleattentiontothese four-legged workers, whether in the streets or on the docks, in construction or in factories. On average, cities required one horse for every twenty people. Some horse populations were huge: in 1900, approximately 130,000 horses worked in Manhattan; 74,000 in Chicago; and 51,000 in Philadelphia. Herds grew fastest during the period of rapid urban growth between the arrival of steam transport around 1850 and the electrification of trolleys around 1890. Census data, although imprecise, suggest that horses were urbanizing more rapidly than humans. The number of horses continued to grow after 1890, probably peaking around 1907 or 1908 and declining slowly thereafter.1 Not only did the number of horses rise dramatically between 1850 and 1890, but the weight of the typical urban draft horse increased by roughly The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City cl ay mcsh a n e A N D joe l a . ta r r c l a y mc s h a n e a n d joe l a . ta r r 2 28 50 percent. This was the product of importing very large Percheron stallions from France and shifting the centers of horse-rearing to the calcium-rich grasses of the Midwest. These changes in breeding and feeding reflected a greater economic value attached to horses as working machines, essential to the functioning of an urban, industrial economy. Animals seem antithetical to urbanization. Cities represent civilization and the conquest of nature. The city was and is supposed to be on the human side of the human/animal dichotomy. The presence of vast and growing herds of animals in increasingly “civilized” cities seems paradoxical. It occurred at exactly the time that urbanites, mostly because of health concerns , were becoming more sensitive to auditory or olfactory pollution by animals and when city dwellers were increasing protesting the “presence of livestock animals in cities.”2 These objections increased, especially after the 1890s, when mechanical alternatives such as motor vehicles and electric transit began to appear. Before then, nineteenth-century cities were built around the needs of horses, a fact that few urban historians have noticed. Asphalt pavements, romantically designed park drives, radial boulevards, gridiron street plans, sidewalks, and much wider streets were all, to a large extent, the consequences of equine technology. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century humans largely viewed the horse as a power-producing artifact and considerably improved them by careful breeding , by diets modified to the latest understanding of nutritional science, by castration, and by devices such as bits, blinders, and horseshoes. In many crucial respects, the horse was regarded more as a technology than as a living being. Most humans—especially those who profited from using the animal, such as teamsters, cab drivers, and street-tram owners—perceived horses as machines and compared them closely in terms of cost and efficiency to both other animals, including humans, as well as a variety of mechanical technologies .3 Everything that horses pulled through or hoisted in cities could have been powered by steam engines as early as 1855, but at a higher cost. Because of cost considerations, the animate triumphed over the inanimate. The distinguished Dutch scholar Gijs Mom notes: “These fleets [of horsepulled vehicles], became highly organized enterprises with scientific horse feed management (its composition being continuously adjusted to market prices of the various ingredients) and a modern personnel management no less impressive than the big railway companies.”4 So horses became “personnel .” Anne N. Green, a leading scholar of this subject, writes that such horses were “integral components of the most modern technological systems.”5 The environmental historian Edward Russell places animals among the “van- The Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City 2 2 9 guards of technology” and believes that “industrialization was a biological as well as a mechanical process.”6To be sure, horses were living beings, and this essay also tries to apply the methods of urban ethnography, thinking...