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The maze of livestock pens and walkways at the Union Stockyards, Chicago: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
The June air of the South Side of the enormous City of Big Shoulders, Killing Floor of the Plains, Butcher to the World, welled up hot and humid, thick with a sharp acrid aroma of adrenalin panic cut by the charged mean stench of animal blood.
The cattle, having been herded and packed into the big prison-like trucks in Kansas, offloaded after the long two-day road transit across the searing summertime prairies and now packed again into the tight plywood rectangles of the Union Stockyard pens, lowed dolorously, their great thirsty pink tongues drooping from their mouths, flags of open submission. The animals now visibly too exhausted to react in any way save by rubbing numbly up against one another, to what was coming -- that thing, in anticipation of which how could they but have been receiving ancient instinctive neural signals -- clouded warnings useless against the encroaching inevitability of the thing -- all this but dimly sensed from outside the pens, yet somehow eerily perceptible all the same, even, or perhaps especially, to the sensitive spiritual receptors of a child.
Assembly-line animal sacrifice may be the sort of transgression against which nature creates and projects its own helplessly protesting fore-echo, a vibrational field signalling imminent violation, released ahead of mechanized murder to fan out upon the windless air in an unseen inaudible fear-plume. No archives exist to help us understand the dark intimacies of the final stages of these routine ceremonies. The tremendous blood-spurting, groaning, eye-rolling climactic moment of the ritual was not kept on film, never described by secretarial accountants in the kind of detailed notation that historical suffering requires, if it is to be acknowledged.
But the dread-emanations of the doomed beasts in their cells, supposing these emanations in fact existed, could not but have been picked up by the men in the hired crews of the factory execution squad; to whom, realistically, such emanations, if they existed, would have been old news long ago. So let's get on with it. These handlers were hardened-looking cowboys, and in their tending not given to great shows of gentleness or kindness toward the frightened milling animals in the fenced communal waiting-stalls. There seemed, too, curiously -- again from the innocent perspective of a child's widening eyes -- a kind of cowboy heroism involved; as though the workings of this vast animal-death factory represented, not unlike the heroic labours of men at war, a form of brave world-saving activity, bringing meat to the tables of hungry people as far away as, for example, Germany.
And thus it was that, visiting this infernal station on a school expedition, one experienced one's original informative vision of the process of large-scale animal sacrifice in actu. The smell, impossible ever to forget that smell. One surmises a Swift (not the corporate slaughterer, but the earlier modest proposer) might conjure impressions of a similar sort of fateful odour arising to invade the senses, to linger in the hidden grey recesses of the brain, had the yards and pens and ramps and walkways been jammed not with frightened beasts en route to the killing chambers, but with people, while cows and pigs and horses and sheep and even perhaps the occasional helpful dog chivvied and herded them along the same baleful courses. But in that latter hypothetical case, one must speculate that the people, having souls, and being sensitive creatures, would at least have kept some brief but memorable notes, so that scholars of the future would be able to remember, and commemorate with reverence, their last feelings, as they went off terrified to die in puddles of their own spilt blood and viscera.
Not of course that gawking kids with goony crewcuts on school field trips were ever going to be conducted by the floor managers, the matter-of-fact priest cult of this infernal temple, into the inner sanctum of the killing-factory buildings -- where, one imagined or indeed knew with a deep certainty that had no rational explanation, the metallic secret heart of the Yards was kept, in the ark of the covenant, a weapon, an instrument, that hung, poised in the air, for a long terrible instant before the final falling of the blow. Over and over and over. There seemed no end to the numbers of animals, there among the waiting-stalls, that awful sultry summer's day.
Ramps, pens and railway track at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Truck full of cattle waiting to be unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Cattle being unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Cattle being unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Trucks parked after delivering a load of cattle, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Removing dead cow from pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Man on horseback and boy looking over cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Handler with cattle in pen at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Owner looking over cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Workman with prod starting to unload pigs from truck at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Workman with prod unloading pigs down ramp from truck at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Pigs in holding pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Pigs in walkway moving toward factory at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Pigs in walkway entering factory building, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Owners, handlers and guests inspecting pens, with transit ramp overhead, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Union Stockyards at mid-day, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Stockyard workers smoking and talking during lunchtime, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
