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  • Livestock Hotels: America's Historic Stockyards
  • Jahue Anderson
Livestock Hotels: America's Historic Stockyards. By J'Nell L. Pate. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2005. Pp. 240. Preface, illustrations, appendices, acknowledgments, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. ISBN 0875653049. $24.95, cloth.)

Chicago, Fort Worth, "Porkopolis" (Cincinnati), and other stockyard cities across the United States competed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for expanding meat markets. A consortium of railroad interests, slaughterhouse–meat packers, stockyard companies, and other related businesses made up a stockyard. A stockyard company facilitated the buying and selling of livestock. J'Nell L. Pate in Livestock Hotel focuses on stockyard companies. Pate received a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Texas and her first monograph, Livestock Legacy: The Fort Worth Stockyards 1887–1987 (Texas A&M University Press, 1992) added greatly to Texas economic and agricultural historiography. Livestock Hotels is another welcome addition to the historiography because it surveys the economic history of twenty-four American stockyard companies that played major roles in the agricultural economy.

The work is organized in two parts. The first part offers a chronological treatment of livestock marketing in America, developing an overview of stockyard activities from the colonial era to the present. Stockyard companies first emerged in the 1860s and by the late nineteenth century, the livestock industry centralized and became more organized as stockyards came under the control of an oligopoly of the Big Four meatpackers—Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, Nelson Morris, and Edward [End Page 301] Cudahy. The packers created vertical monopolies, exerting enormous control over stockyard companies. The federal government did not regulate livestock companies until the early 1900s when it broke up the meatpacking and stockyard companies. Because of interlocking directorates and boards, the government found it difficult to regulate meat industry owners. Despite government interference, stockyard companies thrived from the 1860s to the 1960s. By the 1950s video marketing, direct sales, new meatpacking practices, and interstate trucking began to alter the livestock industry but overall occupancy dwindled and the stockyard era came to an end by the late 1990s.

In the second part, Pate surveys twenty-four major stockyard companies, giving two to three page synopses of each. She covers early markets, such as St. Louis, Missouri, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Midwestern markets, such as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and South St. Paul, Minnesota; and later stockyards, such as Ogden, Utah, and Joplin, Missouri. This section represents the work's most positive and negative qualities. The short synopses leave the reader wanting more information on individual stockyards. For example, Pate alludes to hundreds of years of San Antonio livestock history in the first paragraph of the synopsis, but does not provide much detail. On the other hand, the short histories allow the reader to see general trends and similarities in meat markets across the United States.

Livestock Hotels offers a new interpretation of agricultural history but in many ways it is celebratory history, describing the economic success and heyday of stockyards. Despite small criticisms, Pate's work offers agricultural and business scholars, and historians of the United States, a concise monograph of the meat industry, a monograph they will find useful as a reference for many years. Interesting additions include thorough appendices and a glossary of common livestock industry terms. Pate uses business proceedings and reports, government documents, interviews, letters, and pamphlets, alongside an extensive number of secondary sources to weave an interesting history of America's meat industry.

Jahue Anderson
Texas Christian University
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