Speaker tells about beef industry's history

Carter said because Nebraska is blessed with outstanding grasses, lots of water and a favorable climate for the raising cattle, it produces more beef per square mile than any other state. He also said Nebraska produces the best beef in the world and exports more beef that any other state.

However, cattle weren’t the first animals to roam the Nebraska prairies in great numbers.

Carter said that in the 1850s, the Great Plains was the home of at least 25 to 30 million bison and perhaps as many as 60 to 65 million. But during a six-year period beginning in 1869, buffalo hunters slaughtered most of them, largely for their hides. Carter added that many of the hides were converted into belts that helped turn the wheels and pulleys for the Industrial Revolution.

Even Indians became involved in the slaughter, Carter said. He reported that during a brief period in the 1870s, Indians ate just four out of every 100 buffalo they killed and saved only the hides of the remainder to trade for metal products.

Buffalo bones also were a coveted item that were gathered up and converted into bone meal for fertilizers, the speaker said.

The demise of the buffalo herds “brought the Indians to their knees,” Carter said, because the tribes no longer had the sustenance to hold off the United States cavalry. But since the government had promised to supply the Indians with food, it paved the way for the development of the beef industry in Nebraska and other Plains states.

Trail herds were driven north from Texas, fattened on the rich prairie grasses and sold to the government, which turned them over to the Indians that by then were forced to live on reservations. Carter said frontier towns such as Chadron, Rushville, Gordon and Valentine played an important role in supplying beef to the Indians.

Herds also were driven north to the transcontinental railroad and shipped to packing plants in Chicago soon after the Civil War ended, Carter said.

He credited a Wyoming rancher, Alexander Swan, with encouraging Omaha interests to open packing plants in that city because his cattle had lost too much weight by the time they rode in stock cars all the way to Chicago. Carter said it took a while for Swan’s crusade to take hold, but Omaha eventually became the world’s largest meat packer. He added that Omaha’s proximity to both good grass and good corn made the cattle readily available.

Carter noted that two Irish brothers who were pioneers in the Omaha packing business, Michael and Edward Cudahy, did much to increase the popularity of beef in America. He said they perfected refrigerated railroad cars so sides of beef could be shipped to the populous East Coast, and were among the first to grind beef into hamburger, greatly increasing consumption.

He said the hamburger was a rage at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904, and joked that if it hadn’t been for the Cudahys, McDonald’s would still be waiting to sell its first hamburger.

On a more serious note, Carter pointed out that prior to refrigeration, there was no way to keep beef from spoiling after it had been butchered except when the temperatures were freezing. Thus beef was something of a luxury that was primarily eaten only in the winter.

The Homestead Act of 1862 had a major impact on the cattle industry, forcing so-called cattle barons who had taken great risks to build huge herds to reduce them because the public lands where their cattle once roamed were gone.

The speaker also related that in the 1870s Herefords, Angus and other British breeds were imported to replace the wily Longhorns.

During the 1960s as the highways improved and trucks took over more of the transportation of both livestock and processed meat, Carter said Omaha lost its famous stockyards and packing plants.

But with modern packing plants scattered throughout eastern Nebraska, dozens of feedlots all over the state and ranchers out west continuing to raise outstanding cattle Nebraska can still proudly call itself “The Beef State.”