26 NEBRASKA CATTLEMAN April/May 2024 structed an 8-foot-wide sewer that connected the yards to the Missouri River. You would never be able to build anything like it in today’s world.” Omaha’s stockyards were not only a marketplace but also a cultural and economic hub. The livestock industry’s prosperity had a ripple effect on the local economy, boosting businesses that supported the trade, from feed suppliers to transportation companies. During its time, the stockyards attracted tens of thousands of immigrant workers – Irish, Polish, Czech and others – and represented an American, cultural melting pot. “The stockyards built Omaha,” says publisher and writer Dan Green. Early Motivations Much of the initial motivation – and financing – for the stockyard’s construction came from Wyoming cattle baron Alexander Swan, a Scotsman who owned Swan Land and Cattle Company of Chugwater, Wyo. At one time, Swan and his partners grazed more than 100,000 head of cattle on more than 4.5 million acres of land, including ground near Ogallala. But they knew shipping cattle the extra 500 miles to Chicago meant their cattle lost weight during transport and paid less when they arrived. They needed a closer market for their cattle. “Swan was as hard as a coffin nail, industrious and visionary to pull millions of investment dollars together,” Green says. Swan worked with William Paxton, an Omaha politician and entrepreneur who was instrumental in the construction of railways in Nebraska and Colorado. He also operated ranches in western Nebraska and had built the smaller stockyards in Omaha and Council Bluffs in the 1870s. He encouraged Paxton to reorganize the company and build a new facility in south Omaha. He sent the first shipment of cattle to the facility in 1884. The convergence of cattle, trains and cash attracted meat packers, and their plants soon rose up on the south side of Omaha. By 1888, just five years after the formation of the stockyards, four packers were operating along the edge of the yards, processing more than 1 million head of livestock every year. In 1910, the stockyards received 20,000 animals a day for slaughter. Ranchers and farmers shipped livestock to Omaha from all across the West and, by 1955, Omaha supplanted Chicago as the world’s largest livestock and meat-packing center. The advent of refrigerated rail cars, invented by meat packer Gustavus Swift in the 1880s, meant fresh beef could be shipped to markets that were hundreds and even thousands of miles away. BOOMTOWN CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25 CONTINUED ON PAGE 28
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