Missouri Life June 2023

FROM THE BOTTOMS TO THE TOP Missouri still had a viable future in the cattle business, however. As impressive as was the volume of cattle that passed through Sedalia in her brief year as reigning queen of the trail drives, it paled in comparison to the stunning numbers of cattle that would ultimately be received and processed by the storied Kansas City Stockyards. As the first herds arrived at the railheads of the late 1860s, cowboys prodded them into the railroad’s cattle cars to be delivered to the slaughterhouses and process ing plants of Chicago. That city had built itself into the nation’s largest receiver and processor of livestock, but it would soon be sharing its business with an upstart oper ation in Kansas City, Missouri. As events would soon prove, Kansas City was ideally placed as a central location between the western and southwestern cattle ranches and the livestock markets of the east. In 1870, a small group of entrepreneurial eastern tycoons and railroad executives purchased and fenced off five acres near the Missouri River, in the section of Kansas City known as West Bottoms. They built a handful of livestock pens on the property. The following year, they added another 13 acres along the Kansas River. This was the humble beginning of the Kansas City Stockyards. Eastern investors gave the stockyards the incentive and the financing to expand, and over the next few years, the yards were penning a rapidly increasing number of animals. Then came the packing houses. With such mod ern developments as the refrigerator car, which enabled

It was not destined to last. By 1867, the Texas herds men had discovered the more easily passable Chisholm Trail, which took them directly to Abilene, Kansas, and the Kansas Pacific Railroad. The trailheads would soon move to other Kansas towns along the tracks, progressing from one to another—Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, Caldwell—as the railroad stretched ever farther west ward. Sedalia’s year as the main destination of the big trail herds was over. There was another reason the cows were diverted to Kansas. When the vast herds of cattle first reached Sedalia, they carried with them Texas Fever. This highly contagious disease, transmitted by ticks, posed a seri ous threat to the local livestock. The Missouri legislature passed a strict law setting up a Board of Cattle Inspectors in each county to control the movement of Texas cat tle. Ultimately, the herds were only allowed entry into Newton County, in the southwest corner of the state, and its railroad depot. The disease soon became Kansas’s problem, as the herds were driven to the railroad towns of Missouri’s more forgiving neighbor. Interestingly, although she lost her status as the pri mary railhead for the Texas herds, Sedalia would continue to grow and prosper and would soon acquire another, less enviable kind of reputation. The gambling houses and brothels didn’t disappear with the cattle drives, but rather grew in such profusion that within a decade, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would refer to Sedalia as the “Sodom and Gomorrah of the Nineteenth Century.”

For more than a century, the Kansas City stockyards penned, processed, and shipped millions of cows.

KANSAS CITY STOCKYARDS

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