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Commission agents operating out of the yard officially closed their operations in December 1967, leaving only local and direct sales to sustain the stockyard. The Ogden Livestock Show and auction continued for a few additional years but with only a fraction of attendees they had once known. The stockyard was officially closed by the Denver Union Stockyard Company on January 31, 1971.34 The nearby meat packing operation, which was then under the ownership of Swift and Company, shuttered its operations in 1970, shortly after the demise of the stockyard’s main operations. With these final closures, the once-bustling Ogden Union Stockyard slipped into the realm of memories. 1
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Donald Strack, “Ogden Stockyards and Meat Packing Industry,” Utah Rails, accessed February 2, 2017, at utahrails.net/industries/livestock-ogden.php; Miriam B. Murphy, “The Rise and Fall of Ogden’s Meat Packing Industry,” History Blazer, June 1996; Jalynn Olsen, Building by the Railyard: the Historic Commercial and Industrial Architecture of Ogden, Utah, Western Regional Architecture Publication no. 7 (Salt Lake City: Graduate School of Architecture, 1998). Lewis H. Haney, A Congressional History of Railways in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: Nobel Press, 1908). Swift and Company, The Meat Packing Industry in America (Chicago: Swift and Company, 1920). William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). “The Birth of the Chicago Union Stock Yards,” Chicago Historical Society, accessed August 6, 2014, chicagohs. org/history/stockyard/stock1.html. Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of Local Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 1992.
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We now have many studies of that exotic subject known as rural America, including J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (New York, 2016), George Packer’s The Unwinding (New York, 2014), Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas’s Hollowing out the Middle (Boston, 2009), and Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York, 2004). Each tries to explain Red America, but all are anecdotal and temporally shallow, especially Frank’s, whose title is more a rhetorical device than a discernment of people and place. Such shortcomings are emblematic. Americans have grown comfortable with not knowing each other, at least until presidential elections. Then, as November 8, 2016, illustrated yet again, a country full of strangers wallow in bewildered panic or drink from an ever-more toxic well of schadenfreude. The problem transcends ignorance: we no longer acknowledge the legitimacy of anyone who thinks or lives differently. This is why Leisl Carr Childers’s The Size of the Risk, along with Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment (Chicago, 2016), is necessary reading. The main difference between these books is that while Cramer gives voice to a Wisconsin demographic that matters in state and national elections, Carr Childers zeroes in on a people who almost no one sees. The Great Basin is not simply Flyover Country; for most Americans it is and ought to be terra incognita. Carr Childers explains how this came to be, and why our historical and geographical amnesia is integral to the cultural chasms that plague the West and the nation. The argument spans seven chapters on the local impact of grazing, military, recreational, and equine policies. The key issue is the rise and uneven consequences of multiple-use policy in federal land management. Carr Childers’s narrative is thinnest in terms of early settlement
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and grazing history. She foregrounds a set of settler tales to explain how several families arrived in the Great Basin in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The biographies are crucial for contextualizing the impact of later policies, but more could be done to link people to broader currents. Readers need to know how many people came, stayed, and left; why tensions emerged between settlers and distantly controlled railroad, mining, and grazing companies; and what they changed. The historical sweep is key to understanding why Great Basin residents distrusted concentrated power long before the BLM.
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Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin
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Amy J. Fitzgerald, “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications,” Human Ecology Review 17, no. 1, (June 2010): 58–69. These acts shaped the design and construction of subsequent stockyards, feed lots, and slaughterhouses across the nation to improve sanitation and animal welfare. J’Nell L. Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards: Livestock Hotels (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2005). “Big Packing Plant,” Ogden Standard Examiner, March 6, 1916. Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.” Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.” Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.” O. J. Stillwell, “O. J. Stillwell Reviews Ogden’s Development as a Livestock Center during the Past Four Years,” Ogden Standard Examiner, February 14, 1920; Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.” “Contracts Let for the Construction of Stock Yards across River,” Ogden Standard Examiner, October 28, 1916. Ibid. Ibid. Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.” “Latest Picture of Union Stock Yards and Ogden Packing Yards,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 12, 1917. See also, Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 146. “Latest Picture of Union Stock Yards,” May 12, 1917. Utah Industrial Commission, Report of the Utah Industrial Commission for the Period of July 1, 1917–June 30, 1918 (Salt Lake City: F. W. Gardiner, 1918). Stillwell, “O. J. Stillwell Reviews,” February 14, 1920. Ibid. Jesse S. Richards, “A History of Ogden Yards,” Ogden Standard Examiner, December 31, 1922; Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147; Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.” Donald Strack, “Major Rail-Served Industries in Ogden,” Utah Rails, accessed May 30, 2016, at utahrails. net/ogden/ogden-industry.php. Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 146; Wayne L. Balle, Ogden Union Stockyards, Historic Site Form, 1992, on file at the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, Salt Lake City, Utah. “Ogden’s New Livestock Show Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, January 2, 1926. “$15,000 Given for Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, September 29, 1925; “Grants $5,000 to Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, January 3, 1926. Balle, Ogden Union Stockyards; Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147. Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147. Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.” Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.” Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147. Ibid., 148.
The book develops a much sharper focus with the advent of federal regulation of grazing in the 1930s. As Carr Childers notes, rancher opinions divided on the Taylor Grazing Act and the Grazing Bureau. Some rushed to organize grazing districts while others resisted with all their might. District 6, Nevada’s last grazing district, is a poignant tale because ranchers accepted it in 1951 only because they thought it would prevent more intrusive regulation. They were mistaken. Beginning with World War II, the military appropriated great swaths of public and private rangeland to practice bombing and to test nuclear weapons. Carr Childers documents the impact of these takings and the legacy of radiation fallout, ably linking family experiences to the Downwinder scholarship. Local marginalization deepened across the decades as administrations, Congress, and agencies accommodated one recreational or aesthetic demand after another. This is how multiple use became a disruptive force. Reformulation of rancher-dominated grazing boards as advisory boards with recreational standing was another means of diminishing local ranchers’ access to lands they depended upon for their livelihoods. The most original contributions come in the last chapters on Great Basin National Park and feral horse and burro herds. Preserving basin and range country and protecting free-roaming equine herds were never policy slam dunks,
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ments in long-haul trucking minimized the need for centralized stockyards at a regional level and resulted in the dispersal of operations to a larger number of small yards located off the nation’s railroad system. Trucks had a much broader distribution range than rail cars since they were not limited to the routes of railroad lines. This flexibility made it possible for live animals to be trucked directly to local feedlots and slaughterhouses, bypassing grand, centralized facilities such as the Ogden Union Stockyard. It also took the distribution of meat products out of the control of railroad companies and livestock commissions—which had acted as brokers between buyers and sellers—and made it possible for ranchers to deal directly with buyers. By the mid-1960s, this fundamental shift in how meat products were distributed across the country relegated the Ogden Union Stockyard to local use, which proved insufficient to sustain the vast complex.
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