The Birth of South Omaha and the Stockyards In 1882 Alexander Swan, a Wyoming rancher who had emigrated from Scotland, urged Omaha business leaders to consider creating a stockyard. He and other ranchers, including C. R. Schaller, an English imigrant, argued that shipping cattle the additional 500 miles to Chicago caused them to lose weight and lowered profits.

Visit the Omaha Stockyards Photo Gallery

They noted that Omaha was a transportation center served by both the Union Pacific Railroad and Missouri River freighting. The Missouri also provided the water and drainage needed for a stockyard, and they also praised the Omaha area’s abundant corn and grass. The city, they contended, could supply everything needed to care for and fatten cattle.

In 1884 a group of investors built cattle pens on ten acres south of the city. Soon meatpackers, starting with G. H. Hammond in 1885, began building processing plants adjacent to the yards, and the Omaha stockyards grew quickly as the number of animals processed there increased.

In 1886 the investor group built the Livestock Exchange building, and more meatpacking companies set up shop, including the Fowler Brothers in 1886 and Armour-Cudahy and Swift in 1887. By 1890 South Omaha was the hub of a burgeoning western meat industry.

Exploding Stockyards and Packing Houses
In the first quarter of the 20th century new technology dramatically changed the beef industry. Refrigerated railroad cars ended the days of shipping live cattle, a change the railroads initially resisted in order to protect their large investments in the yards where they fed and watered cattle in transit.
 
But live cattle took up a lot of space in a rail car, and shipping a live animal meant transporting the low value and waste parts as well as the meat: hides, bones, hooves, horns, and guts. Moreover, live cattle lost weight in transit and occasionally injured each other. Shipping refrigerated carcasses made better economic sense.
 
The introduction of gasoline-powered engines made some of the most radical changes in beef production. A farmer with a tractor could raise more corn and deliver it to a cattle feeder more efficiently. As farming became more mechanized, more feedlots appeared throughout the state.

As roads improved and trucks grew larger and more efficient, they began to compete with the railroads as a means to ship livestock to the stockyards. As more cattle arrived in South Omaha, the stockyards continued to grow, eventually covering more than 200 acres.
 
Meat packing changed and grew as well. In 1906 Upton Sinclair’s “muckraking” novel, The Jungle, stirred a public outcry against unsanitary condition and labor abuses in the packing industry. Beef sales and exports declined, and in response, and with support from large packing houses stung by the market losses, the federal government passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. This legislation created a system for independent meat inspection. Today’s Food and Drug Administration—the FDA—is rooted in that 1906 legislation.