Ohio History Journal

The Beef Cattle Industry in Ohio

Prior to the Civil War

By ROBERT LESLIE JONES*

 

I. Introduction

The beef cattle industry in Ohio prior to the Civil War could not

be described as the one most important branch of agriculture in the

state as a whole, though it was significant almost everywhere and

dominant in certain regions. Neither was it to be regarded as

unique in its methods, for these were in principle at least borrowed

from older parts of the country and were found in the neighboring

western states as they too developed. But Ohio was the first part

of the Old Northwest to be affected by the advance of the frontier.

So too, as the nearest to eastern markets, it was the first to be tied

in as a supplier to the Pennsylvania fattening centers, and in due

course was the first to become a finisher of the rough beeves of the

newer prairies farther west. As a nursery of cattle kings, it became

a leader in the techniques of animal husbandry. The activities of the

early Ohio cattlemen had, understandably enough, a romantic nim-

bus in the eyes of contemporaries. Now that this appeal has long

since faded, the industry can be assessed on its merits as a microcosm

of one phase of midwest farming.

Ohio had several advantages in the development of a cattle in-

dustry. It had even in the very beginning a sufficiency of forage,

and soon had an abundance. It had a reasonably favorable climate.

Throughout most of the state the winters never were extreme

enough to cause extensive cattle losses, however much a humani-

 

* Robert Leslie Jones is head of the department of history and political science at

Marietta College. He is an authority on the agricultural history of the Middle West

and eastern Canada.

168

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THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY                      169

 

tarian might lament the suffering sometimes occasioned. Moreover,

as most of the state was originally wooded, and the unglaciated

southern section was in addition highly dissected, there was no lack

of windbreaks. Ohio was, as developments were to prove, not un-

favorably located with reference to markets. Again, cattle raising in

Ohio was not in any sense a novel undertaking, for it was based

on practices which went back for centuries or even millenia in

northern Europe and which had been modified to meet American

conditions through almost two centuries of experience. The his-

torian who has become familiar with the cattle industry in the later

colonial period in the Cumberland and Shenandoah valleys, or for

that matter in New England or the back country of the Carolinas,

will find little to surprise him in its subsequent evolution in early

Ohio. Even the almost universally disparaged cattle brought into

Ohio from older regions were certainly better adapted to the con-

ditions found in pioneer settlements than any of the then popular

breeds obtainable from Europe, for they did represent a kind of

survival of the hardiest. Finally, the cattle industry attracted from

the beginning men of capital, or who were shortly able to obtain

capital, as from land speculation or merchandising. It was indeed

in the beef cattle industry that agricultural fortunes were to be

made. There were no Ohio dairymen or wheat farmers in the early

nineteenth century who could compare in wealth with the leading

cattlemen of the Scioto Valley.

 

II. The Pioneer Phase

Cattle began to appear in the Ohio Country in the third quarter

of the eighteenth century, or perhaps slightly earlier. The Indians

obtained some by barter in the French settlements at Detroit and

others by marauding expeditions against the Virginia and Pennsyl-

vania frontiers; missionaries and traders brought some with them;

and the squatters along the upper Ohio and its tributaries during

and after the Revolutionary War drove in enough for their needs.

After the establishment of organized government in the Old North-

west in 1788, and still more after the closing of the Indian War in

1795, the growth in the human population was paralleled by that of

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170        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

cattle. For two generations, whenever a family flitted from York

State or New England, Pennsylvania or Virginia, to a new home west

and north of the Ohio, it brought with it a cow or two and perhaps a

few young cattle. When the original stock died or was slaughtered, or

the time came when there was fodder enough for a larger herd, the

pioneer easily obtained others, in the beginning from the nearby

established settlements along the Monongahela, around Pittsburgh,

and in Kentucky, and at a later period from the surplus in his im-

mediate vicinity. The process continued in any given community till

it began to take on the aspects of "old settled country," by which

time cattle would be ordinarily on balance an article of export.1

Cattle raising in the pioneer settlements of Ohio was of a common

pattern with that prevailing in contemporaneous Kentucky or, at a

comparative stage of their existence, in the older communities in

the western parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The animals were

fenced out of the corn patch, but were otherwise allowed to wander

at will. The cows would return to be milked, and sooner or later a

craving for salt would bring the others back. In the meantime their

bells would give an indication of their whereabouts. If they wand-

ered too far, perhaps a neighbor who recognized their brands and

earmarks² would drive them home. It was rare for them to have any

shelter other than natural windbreaks, which were of no avail in the

wet. They foraged for themselves, according to season and locality,

on the white clover and bluegrass of the glades and bottoms, the

wild rye and other rank grasses of the prairies, and the sedges of the

swales. Along the Ohio River west of the Kentucky-Virginia border,

they had brakes of cane, which were so succulent that within a few

years they were pastured to extinction.³ When winter came, the

cattle would be fed corn blades and stalks, straw, wild hay, and per-

haps even pumpkins, but the supply seldom lasted till spring, and

 

1 For some details of the introduction of cattle into early Ohio, see Robert L. Jones,

"The Dairy Industry in Ohio Prior to the Civil War," Ohio State Archaeological and

Historical Quarterly, LVI (1947), 46-48.

2 Some of the first legislation of the Northwest Territory provided for the marking

of livestock and the registration of brands with the township clerk. Beverley W.

Bond, Jr., The Civilization of the Old Northwest (New York, 1934), 328.

3 On the natural pasturage of Ohio, see Percy W. Bidwell and John I. Falconer,

History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (Washington, 1925),

157, 159-161.

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THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY                 171

 

had to be supplemented by elm and beech browse. Sometimes,

indeed, this was their sole winter feed.⁴ By the time the new vegeta-

tion appeared, all but the most aggressive cattle were emaciated,

many of them were so weak as to be "lifting," and a few of them

were almost certain to be the victims of the barbarities which passed

as treatment for what their owners diagnosed as "hollow horn" or

"wolf-in-the-tail."⁵ In hard winters losses from exposure and mal-

nutrition ran high, but the pioneer accepted them as inevitable, just

as he did those from attacks by wild animals or poisonous snakes or

from milk sickness and bloody murrain (anthrax). He anticipated,

reasonably enough, that within a few years he would have shelter

for his livestock adequate for the latitude, good pasture on the

meadows and aftergrass, and a supply of corn fodder and tame hay

for the winter. Such was the pioneer round, repeated endlessly till

the last vacant lands in northwestern Ohio were occupied during

the 1850's.

Under ordinary conditions it was not long till the pioneer com-

munity ceased to be a deficiency area with respect to cattle, and

instead had a few animals to dispose of. If land was still being

taken up in the vicinity, or if an immigrant route passed near by,

there might be for a time a highly profitable "settlers' market" at

hand. Under optimum circumstances, as long as a shortage existed,

the price of a cow locally would be its cost at the nearest community

with a surplus, plus a kind of natural tariff in the form of the esti-

mated cost of driving it therefrom to the point of sale. Unfortun-

ately, within a few years at most, newer settlements would in their

 

4 James Flint, Letters from America (Edinburgh, 1822), 234; Narrative of John

S. Williams in the American Pioneer (Cincinnati), II (1843), 451; Charles Whit-

tlesey, Early History of Cleveland, Ohio (Cleveland, 1867), 264.

5 The real cause of "hollow horn" was simply malnutrition combined with ex-

cessive exposure, as was sometimes recognized (for example in the Marietta Gazette,

November 8, 1834), and the preventive was therefore better feed and shelter. Few

pioneers ever thought of this explanation, and accordingly resorted to "cures." A

common method, as practiced in New York in the early part of the century, and, it

would seem, throughout Ohio and the other midwestern states, was thus described:

"For the hollow horn, we always used from one to two tablespoonfuls of spirits of

turpentine, poured into the hollow on top of the head, between the horns; and cutting

off enough of the end of the tail to bleed, which may be done by turning the long

hair upwards, and cutting off a quarter of an inch or less. I have known some persons

to split the tail, put in salt, and bind it up." Prairie Farmer (Chicago), quoted in the

Western Farmer and Gardener (Cincinnati), IV (1843-44), 136.

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172     THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

turn enjoy the accident of favorable location. The value of a cow

would thereupon tend to fall to that at the nearest market minus

the estimated cost of driving it there. The possible alternatives to the

vanishing settlers' market were usually likewise disappointing. It

is true that whenever a village began to form, butchers appeared,

but because most of the inhabitants kept a cow and a few young

cattle of their own, the number of imported beeves slaughtered

would be only two or three a week. With a demand thus easily

satisfied, the butchers often enough were able to buy at distress

prices from the unfortunate farmer who had brought a drove a

considerable distance.⁶ If there were military activities going on or

in prospect, there would be for an interval an overwhelming de-

mand, as occurred in the Miami Valley (and northern Kentucky)

during the Indian War of 1791-95, and again in central Ohio during

the War of 1812.⁷ In peace time the western garrisons were small

and remote, and to drive cattle through an Ohio wilderness to them

was just as troublesome as to drive them over the mountains to the

eastward, as James B. Finley and his three partners found in 1800

when they managed somehow or other to take a herd from Chilli-

cothe to an army contractor at Detroit.⁸ For the reasons suggested,

markets for cattle ordinarily had to be sought outside the Ohio

Country, which meant in the eastern states. It is not too much to say

that the Ohio cattle industry, in so far as it was a commercial one,

was to evolve primarily in response to this situation.

The idea of disposing of western cattle in the eastern states was

an old one by the time the Ohio Country was settled. It had been

an inducement to the pioneers of western Pennsylvania in taking

 

6 Notice the following advertisement: "John Clark, Butcher in Marietta, advertises

that he will give a generous price for fat cattle--We beg leave to state, for the in-

terest of those who live at a distance from Marietta, and would drive cattle to him

by virtue of his advertisement--that he does not give a 'generous' price nor pay cash

for fat cattle, and that his advertisement is wholly unworthy of notice." American

Friend, (Marietta), August 29, 1817.

7 Beverley W. Bond, Jr., ed., "Memoirs of Benjamin Van Cleve," Historical and

Philosophical Society of Ohio Quarterly Publications, XVII (1922), 52-53; Randolph

C. Downes, "Trade in Frontier Ohio," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XVI

(1929-30), 474-475; Samuel Williams, Expedition of Captain Henry Brush, with

Supplies for General Hull, 1812 (Cincinnati, 1871), 17-18.

8 Autobiography of Rev. James B. Finley, or Pioneer Life in the West, edited by

W. P. Strickland (Cincinnati, 1872), 115-116.

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THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY                        173

 

up land in the preceding generation, but one productive of disil-

lusionment when it was found they could scarcely compete with

those driven up the valleys from the then back country of Virginia

and North Carolina. In spite of this experience, the idea was a

staple one among promoters, speculators in Ohio lands, and pam-

phleteers.⁹ "In a few years," wrote Imlay, "when grazing forms

the principal object of those settlers, they will always find a market

for their cattle at Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Alexandria."¹⁰ If

settlers discounted land-agent advice on account of its source, they

would nevertheless normally look on the exporting of cattle as a

reasonable speculation, as it had proved to be on earlier frontiers.

By the end of the Indian War it was moreover in all likelihood

common western knowledge that unfinished, or "stock," cattle were

being driven from Kentucky to fattening areas like that around

Winchester, Virginia, for there is mention of such activity as

early as 1793.11

When cattle reared in Ohio were first driven to an eastern market

cannot be determined with precision, at least if we are to count such

animals as were driven to farming areas in western Pennsylvania,

western Virginia, or Kentucky, and there kept for some time before

being sold on the other side of the mountains. In view of the fact

mentioned below that an early phase of the cattle industry in the

Scioto Valley was the pasturing there on a seasonal basis of animals

brought in from Kentucky, it is reasonable enough to infer that a

few local steers may well have been acquired by the cattlemen before

their departure in the autumn, and consequently have found their

way East as of Kentucky origin. If, as is the ordinary and reasonable

procedure, we are to count only those animals which were driven

direct from Ohio to some place in the East, then the date is 1800.

In that year Ephraim Cutler, a merchant and land speculator of

Amesville in Athens County, began to export eastward the cattle

 

9 Downes, "Trade in Frontier Ohio," 493-494.

10 Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North

America (3d ed., London, 1797), 61.

11 Harry Toulmin, The Western Country in 1793; Reports on Kentucky and Vir-

ginia, edited by Marion Tinling and Godfrey Davis (San Marino, Calif., 1948),

111-112.

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174        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

which he received on store bills or in exchange for land. Two years

later, likewise according to his own account, he took a drove to be

fattened on the South Branch of the Potomac. Jonathan Fowler of

Poland, near Youngstown, drove the first cattle from the Western

Reserve in the fall of 1804, taking them to Philadelphia, and George

Renick the first corn-fattened ones from           the Scioto Valley in the

spring of 1805 to Baltimore.¹² The author hazards the opinion that

at this date there already existed, and perhaps had for some time,

what may have been a worthwhile trade in stock cattle from the

Scioto Valley to the South Branch of the Potomac. This idea is not

founded on direct evidence, of which there is apparently none. It

is rather an inference drawn from a consideration of two facts, one

of these being that the Scioto Valley was only a few days' cattle

drive farther west than Athens County, and the other that there

was an intimate relationship between the early cattlemen of the

Scioto and those of the South Branch, as described more fully below.

Within a few years the cattle trade became general. Wherever the

traveler Melish went in the Western Reserve and the rest of eastern

Ohio in 1811, he found fat or stock cattle being exported.13 Some

of the southeastern Ohio dealers even had regular connections with

graziers or feeders along the South Branch of the Potomac. Prior

to the War of 1812, Ephraim Cutler, for example, had an agreement

with one of these Virginia graziers whereby he was to drive stock

cattle to the Glades in Allegany County, Maryland, near Cumber-

land, where they were to be grass fattened, and the supplier and the

grazier were to divide the profits when the animals were marketed.l⁴

The War of 1812, with its increased local military demand for

foodstuffs, reduced temporarily the number of cattle exported, but

within a few years of its ending, the mention of large droves on

12 Julia P. Cutler, Life and Times of Epbraim Cutler Prepared from His Journals

and Correspondence (Cincinnati, 1890), 69, 87; Memoirs, Correspondence and Rem-

iniscences of William Renick (Circleville, 1880),100; Ohio State Board of Agriculture,

Annual Report for the Year 1860 (Columbus, 1861), Part II, 466. Hereafter this

serial is cited as Ohio Agricultural Report.

13 John Melish, Travels Through the United States of America in the Years 1806 &

1807, and 1809, 1810 & 1811 (Philadelphia, 1816), 441, 443, 446, 459, 464-465,

481.

¹⁴Cutler, Life and Times of Ephraim Cutler, 103. For mention of another Ohioan

dealing around 1807 with the South Branch of the Potomac, see F. Cuming, Sketches

of a Tour to the Western Country (Pittsburgh, 1810), 117.

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THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY                 175

 

their way from Ohio to Baltimore or Philadelphia became a com-

monplace item in travel narratives.¹⁵

By this time the cattle industry in Ohio had ceased to be the

primitive one characteristic of the backwoods, and had actually

evolved into several distinct branches, each with the peculiar fea-

tures which were to last with little change till mid-century. These

branches were not completely separate, and were indeed interde-

pendent. Nevertheless, it was rare to find one man combining the

functions of grazing cattle as carried on in Madison County

with those of feeding them as carried on in the Scioto Valley.¹⁶ Even

William Renick of Circleville, the foremost authority on the feed-

ing industry of the Scioto Valley, admitted that he knew little or

nothing of the grazing industry.¹⁷ The graziers and feeders who

circulated among the small farmers to buy up cattle unquestionably

were well informed about their methods, but the small farmers out-

side the immediate vicinity of the grazing and feeding country knew

as little of what went on there as the graziers and feeders knew of

dairying as it was conducted on the Western Reserve. In any case,

because the branches were commonly thought of and discussed as

if they were separate, the historian must almost of necessity thus

deal with them. The divisions, then, were: (1) the range or grass-

fattening one which came to be more or less centered in Clark and

Madison counties, (2) the corn-fattening one of the lower Scioto

Valley, and (3) the one carried on as a by-industry with the dairy-

ing of the Western Reserve or in connection with grain growing or

general farming in other parts of the state.

 

III. The Grazing Industry "West of Scioto"

The first of these important branches of the cattle industry in

Ohio, that of raising animals on the open range, traces its origin,

through Kentucky, to the southern back country of the late colonial

15 For example, in David Thomas, Travels Through the Western Country in the

Summer of 1816 (Auburn, N. Y., 1819), 90, and Silas Chesebrough, "Journal of a

Journey to the Westward" (P. S. McGuire, ed.), American Historical Review,

XXXVII (1931-32), 76.

16 Cincinnati Atlas, quoted in the Spirit of the Times, XIX (1849-50), 316.

17 William Renick, "On the Cattle Trade of the Scioto Valley," in Ohio Agricul-

tural Report for 1848, 164.

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176        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

and early national periods. On the frontier from Pennsylvania to

Georgia, cattle (and other livestock) ran in the woods the year

round. There were annual roundups to brand the calves, drives of

several hundred miles to market at tidewater, attendants on the herds

called "cowboys," and a considerable degree of lawlessness, so that

the industry sometimes differed little from that later found west of

the Mississippi. The system in the "Old West" tended to disappear

with the advance of settlement, or rather, to keep moving along on its

westerly fringe.18

Settlers from Virginia naturally brought the techniques of the

industry into Kentucky, and from there extended them into southern

Ohio. Precisely when they first did so is not known, but it is not

likely to have been much, if at all, before the end of the Indian

War, and it was certainly before 1800, by which time some of them

were in the practice of clubbing together to send herdsmen with

the cattle for which they lacked grass at home to pasture them on

the bluegrass of the Darby Bottoms near Circleville from spring to

fall.¹⁹ Once started, the range industry in this region expanded so

rapidly that by 1811 it could be stated of the Pickaway and Walnut

plains that cattle "are here raised in such numbers as would be

almost incredible, could we tell them."²⁰ Moreover, it was spreading

out over the large prairie extending from the Scioto to the Little

Miami. Jervis Cutler, writing in 1812, mentioned the fact that big

droves were being brought from Kentucky to pasture on the

"barrens" of Clark and Madison counties, and Drake three years

later estimated the annual sales of grass-fattened cattle from Cham-

paign County to be about $100,000.21

A variety of factors contributed to the rapid expansion of the

grazing industry. One was that the land in the Virginia Military

 

18 Lyman Carrier, Beginnings of Agriculture in America (New York, 1923), 215;

Lewis C. Gray and Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern

United States to 1860 (Washington, 1933), I, 147-151; James W. Thompson, A

History of Livestock Raising in the United States, 1607-1860 (Washington, 1942),

62-63.

19 Memoirs of William Renick, 45-46.

20 Western Intelligencer (Worthington), September 11, 1811.

21 Jervis Cutler, A Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Ter-

ritory, and Louisiana (Boston, 1812), 38-39; Daniel Drake, Natural and Statistical

View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country (Cincinnati, 1815), 56.

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THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY              177

 

District, in which was comprised a large portion of the early graz-

ing area, was originally to be obtained for military-bounty war-

rants, and so almost inevitably came to be purchased by speculators

who could afford large blocks. The result was that the farms in

Madison County, for example, were as late as mid-century much

larger--and so more efficient for stock raising--than those in the

parts of Ohio outside the Virginia Military District, many being

upwards of a thousand acres.²² A second factor was that, at the

time of settlement, there were not only some small prairies, of which

that known as the Pickaway Plains was the most famous, but one

very large one already mentioned, which ran north and south for

about a hundred miles roughly between the Scioto and the Little

Miami. Actually, this prairie comprised a diversity of oak openings,

wet prairies, and dry prairies, or "barrens."²³ Covered though they

were with vegetation, the barrens with their scattered clumps of

trees repelled wheat-growing and corn-growing pioneers almost as

thoroughly as did the sandy wastes and the water-logged lands, so

that they, like the others, were left to the cattlemen, who were

therefore able to obtain them for a relatively small outlay. For

their purpose the natural forage could scarcely have been better.

It comprised, as was stated of the prairies of Marion County, "a

continuation of the most nutritious grasses from early spring until

the setting in of hard winter," including "Blue grass, June grass,

Timothy [?], Red and White Clover, Red top, &c., &c."²⁴ A third

factor was that the Virginia and Kentucky cattlemen who predom-

inated in the early settlement were, as a group, not only experienced

in the range industry, but some were fairly wealthy according to the

standards of the time, and so it seems reasonable to assume that

most of them had to some degree access to sources of credit in the

 

22 Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland and Erie Railroad Guide (Columbus, 1854), 44.

As late as 1918 there were forty-eight farms in Madison County of 2,000 acres or

more. Country Gentleman, LXXXIII, April 13, 1918, 13.

23 Cutler, Topographical Description, 38-39; Samuel P. Hildreth, "Ten Days in

Ohio: From the Diary of a Naturalist," American Journal of Arts and Sciences, XXV

(1834), 247-248; Paul B. Sears, "The Natural Vegetation of Ohio," Ohio Journal

of Science, XXVI (1926), 128-131.

24 Documents, Including Messages and Other Communications Made to the General

Assembly of the State of Ohio (Columbus), XVII (1853), Part II, No. 5, p. 393.

Hereafter this authority is cited as Ohio Executive Documents.

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178    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

communities from which they came. At a later period the cattlemen

were financed by the banks between Xenia and Columbus, which

found their business very profitable.²⁵ The cattlemen were thus able

to operate on a large scale, and so to accentuate their speculative

profits. Finally, the Ohio grazing industry soon ceased to be a mere

peripheral supplier of the eastern feeding regions. It gained a stra-

tegic marketing location adjacent to the corn-fattening counties of

the Scioto Valley and a favorable purchasing one astride the normal

eastward lines of stock-cattle movement from the newer western

states. At the same time, improvements in communications, notably

the Cumberland, or National, Road, made it possible for the Ohio

graziers to maintain and extend their sales of stock cattle and even

of grass-fattened beeves across the mountains.

The heart of the grazing region of Ohio in the first half of the

nineteenth century was in Clark and Madison counties, but the

industry was little less important in the nearby parts of Greene

and Fayette counties to the southward and in Champaign, Union,

and Marion counties to the northward. By the 1840's the territory

reached into Crawford and Hardin counties, that is, to the borders

of the Black Swamp.²⁶ It has been asserted recently that the village

of South Charleston in the southeastern corner of Clark County had

a good claim to consideration as the leading "cow town" of the

grazing country, indeed that it ranked (with a population of 413

in 1850) "second only to Chillicothe as the best known cattle town

of Ohio,"²⁷ but the present author knows of no contemporary evi-

dence to support such a statement, and for his part is convinced that

Springfield, Xenia, Columbus, London (beginning in the 1850's),

and perhaps even Marion were much more significant. As time

passed, the tendency of the grazing area was to shrink in size as the

value of land rose. In the lower Scioto Valley, for example, cattle-

grazing was early displaced either by wheat-growing or by corn-

growing for the swine and cattle fatteners. Again, by mid-century

 

25 Cincinnati Atlas, quoted in the Spirit of the Times, XIX (1849-50), 316.

26 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1846, 50-51; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1849,

72; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1859, 74; Ohio Cultivator (Columbus), I (1845),

117.

27 Paul C. Henlein, "Cattle Driving from the Ohio Country, 1800-1850," Agricul-

tural History, XXVIII (1954), 90.

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THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY              179

 

the grain growers were encroaching on the cattlemen in all of Clark

County except the eastern part.²⁸ Moreover, reports from the secre-

taries of the early agricultural societies and the returns of the census

and the township assessors make it plain that throughout most of

the grazing region the industry was not the sole branch of agricul-

ture, that in some sections it was confined to seasonally wet or

otherwise non-arable land, and that, even where it was dominant,

there might be a sharing of the pasturage with other kinds of live-

stock.

One aspect of the early grazing industry was the employment of

herdsmen, or, if one prefers, "cowboys." They appeared, as already

indicated, with the first herds sent in from Kentucky for seasonal

pasturing, and they did not disappear till the range began to be

enclosed. Sometimes, as was mentioned in the case of early Ross

County, a man did no more than visit the cattle twice a week to

give them salt.²⁹ On the barrens of Madison County, however, there

were regular herdsmen who attended the cattle from spring to fall.

The owners of the cattle, it was observed, "have boys on horse back

with their basket of provisions on their arms after them all day to

keep them together, and [at] knight pen them up."³⁰ As another

writer put it, "Here then, might be seen immense numbers of cattle

feeding on these plains, in herds of one, two and three hundred

under the charge of three or four shepherds; reminding him of those

remote pastoral ages which are so beautifully described by

GOLDSMITH and COLLINS."³1 Towards the end of the 1820's the

herdsmen tended to disappear from Madison County, because, on the

advance of settlement, the cattlemen began to enclose their grazing

lands, but they were still found in 1835 on the wet prairies of Craw-

ford County.³² After this date there appears to be no further men-

tion of them in Ohio, but it is worth noting that precisely this kind

 

28 Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland and Erie Railroad Guide, 43; Memorandums of

a Tour Made by Josiah Espy in the States of Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana Territory

in 1805 (Cincinnati, 1870), 19; Ohio Cultivator, VIII (1852), 221.

29 Henry B. Fearon, Sketches of America (2d ed., London, 1818), 217.

30 "Diary of Aaron Miller," Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly,

XXXIII (1924), 72.

31 Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe), August 5, 1829.

32 Ibid.; Hildreth, "Ten Days in Ohio," 248; George H. Twiss, "Journal of Cyrus

P. Bradley," Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, XV (1906), 246.

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180        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

of herding was still being practiced on the prairies of Indiana,

Illinois, and Missouri down to the early 1850's.³³

A single reference to "herds of one, two and three hundred"

might be discounted as an example of poetic license, but there is

other evidence that the grazing industry, whether in the Clark-

Madison heartland or along the upper reaches of the Scioto and the

Olentangy, was often conducted on a large-scale basis. In 1832 a

Mr. Gwynne had several fields along the Darby Bottoms, compris-

ing in all 4,000 or 5,000 acres, on which he had about 1,200 cattle.

Others in the vicinity had from 200 to 800 head grazing, and lands

adequate to support them.³⁴ Four years later the Ohio Farmer

stated that there were in Ohio fifty-eight graziers who owned in all

11,802 cattle. The abridged version of the Ohio Farmer account

printed in the Cultivator gives the names of only eight individuals

and partnerships. Seven of the eight, perhaps all of them, belonged,

as it happens, to Marion County. They were as follows, with the

addresses being the names of townships: C. Bradley & Co., Marion,

1,550 head; C. Halderman, Big Island, 700; Bushby & Welch, Grand

Prairie, 650; Messrs. Kirby, Grand Prairie, 600; John Halderman,

Big Island, 460; Messrs. Drake, Claridon, 450; Dan Fickle, Marion,

400; Ballantine & Baudelch, no address, 350.³⁵

The grazing industry of Madison, Clark, and adjacent counties

depended on outside sources for its supply of stock cattle, for the

cattlemen raised few calves. "Why don't you breed your cattle?"

an inquisitive individual asked one of them, as he reported long

afterwards. "He says, that don't pertain to my business. He says,

that is done by small farmers."36 Some stock cattle were obtained

from such nearby areas as predominantly swine-raising Warren

 

33 Mrs. Mary V. Harris, ed., "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Harris,"

Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1923 (Springfield,

1923), 77; Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1853, Part II, Senate

Executive Documents, 33 cong., 1 sess., No. 27, pp. 6, 11. Hereafter this authority is

cited as Patent Office Report.

34 Hildreth, "Ten Days in Ohio," 257.

5 Cultivator (Albany, N.Y.), III (1836), 32.

36 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1890, 143. There were some graziers, however,

who actually did keep a considerable number of cows, not for the dairy but merely to

produce calves. The same was true of some of the Scioto Valley feeders. Memoirs of

William Renick, 23.

• 13
 

THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY                181

 

County on the southwest³⁷ and many from the more accessible of

the grain-growing counties north of the National Road, but from an

early period most of them probably were driven in from beyond the

limits of the state. In reality this stocker movement began with the

driving of the first Kentucky cattle into the Virginia Military District.

Within a few years cheap cattle were obviously no longer readily

found immediately south of the Ohio, for in 1810 Thomas Worthing-

ton purchased 420 head and Felix Renick at least 100 from the Chick-

asaws in the western extremity of Tennessee to drive to the Scioto

Valley.³⁸ By 1816 stock cattle were being driven from as far west

as the Missouri Territory through Kentucky and Ohio to the eastern

markets,39 from which fact it is fair to deduce that many were

bought by the Ohio graziers along the route and pastured a year or

two. By 1850 Clark County alone was supposed to have 5,000 or

6,000 head of western cattle at grass.⁴⁰ About the same time a

visitor at Yellow Springs was informed that about 25,000 head of

western cattle passed through the village each year on their way

(from a turning-off point on the nearby National Road) "to the

grazing lands of Madison and Fayette."⁴1 Probably most of the out-

of-state animals purchased by the graziers during the second quarter

of the century came via the National Road from the prairies of

Indiana and Illinois, but some originated in Iowa and Wisconsin, and

a considerable number in Missouri.⁴² In 1846 a thousand head were

driven from Texas to Ohio, but the experiment was apparently not

successful, for it was not repeated.⁴³

The graziers commonly bought steers at two or three years, but

 

37 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 398.

38 Charles S. Plumb, "Felix Renick, Pioneer," Ohio State Archaeological and His-

torical Quarterly, XXXIII (1924), 10; William T. Utter, The Frontier State, 1803-

1825 (History of the State of Ohio, edited by Carl Wittke, II, Columbus, 1942), 158.

39 Thomas, Travels Through the Western Country in the Summer of 1816, 120.

40 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 96.

41 Cincinnati Atlas, quoted in the Spirit of the Times, XIX (1849-50), 316.

42 Salt River Journal (Bowling Green, Mo.), 1834, quoted in Clifford D. Car-

penter, "The Early Cattle Industry in Missouri," Missouri Historical Review, XLVII

(1952-53), 200; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1849, 196; Patent Office Report for

1853, pp. 6, 12; Remarks on the Western States of America or Valley of the Mississippi

(London, 1839), 22; Renick, "On the Cattle Trade of the Scioto Valley," 163.

43 Clarence W. Gordon, "Report on Cattle, Sheep and Swine Supplementary to

Enumeration of Live Stock on Farms in 1880," in U.S. Census, 1880, Vol. III:

Agriculture, 11.

• 14
 

182        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

sometimes as yearlings.⁴⁴ In Crawford County, probably because

there was a good deal of land too wet for other than summer pastur-

age, it was the practice as late as mid-century to drive western cattle

in during the spring and away the same fall.⁴⁵ Elsewhere the graziers

held their stock animals a year or two (a "year" being really from

the spring of one year to the fall of the next) and then sold them,

of course not on the basis of age entirely but of condition and

weight. During the summer the cattle in Madison County and its

neighbors were pastured on prairies, dry swamp land, oak openings,

and even seeded-down woodlands from which the underbrush had

been cleared, and in the fall sometimes on the stubble and aftergrass

of cleared fields. In the winter they were permitted to take advantage

of woods and other natural shelters, but were ordinarily kept on

what was left of the natural pasture. As a matter of fact, in this

region there was usually adequate herbage even when the northern

parts of the state were snow blanketed. Moreover, in Marion County

-and very likely in the others-some graziers had "winter pasture,"

that is, tracts from which the cattle were excluded from the first

of September to the first of December. Even when allowance was

made for the effects of occasional storms of snow or freezing rain,

it was calculated that it would not be necessary to provide more than

half a ton of hay for each steer as supplemental rations throughout

the average winter.⁴⁶ Losses from exposure were regarded as in-

significant. "Most growers [graziers]," it was said, "agree that

cattle thus tended thrive and appear better than when housed in

sheds and with straw yards to run in."⁴⁷ At the same time, losses

from other causes were sometimes heavy. Milk sickness, or "trem-

bles," a form of plant poisoning attributable to eating white snake-

root, was long prevalent, especially in the autumn, throughout the

grazing country.⁴⁸ Bloody murrain was much worse, for it was

 

44 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 398.

45Ibid., 120; Ohio Executive Documents, XVI (1852), Part II, No. 2, p. 415.

46 Cultivator, VIII (1841), 22; Ohio Executive Documents, XVII (1853), Part II,

No. 5, p. 393.

47 Cultivator, VIII (1841), 22.

48 "Diary of Aaron Miller," 72; Mad River Courant (Urbana), quoted in the

Farmer's Reporter (Cincinnati), I (1830-31), 55; Western Farmer and Gardener, II

(1840-41), 167.

• 15
 

THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY             183

 

customary to expect that it might carry off up to three or even five

percent of the stock.⁴⁹

However large the incidental losses in the industry, there is no

doubt that the profits tended to be substantial. The graziers of

Madison County, noted the shrewd Aaron Miller in 1832, "make

money fast at the business, from what I can learn they make about

fifty percent clear on their money annually."⁵⁰ This estimate, based

as it perhaps was on local tavern gossip, was probably high, but

nevertheless not as inflated as it might at first glance appear to be.

A Marion County stockman gave it as his opinion twenty years later

that profits could be around twenty-five to thirty-three percent.⁵1

By piecing together scattered items of information, one gets the

impression that he was not far from the mark. In 1849 and 1850

common-run two-year-old and three-year-old stock cattle could be

purchased in or adjacent to the grazing region for about $10

to $12 a head.⁵² It was commonly estimated that the cost of grazing

a steer at this time would be between $5 and $6 a calendar year.⁵³ If

a steer, therefore, was bought at $10, and grazed for a "year," that

is, fifteen or sixteen months, he would really have cost his owner

an additional $6 or more, and to return a profit of twenty-five per-

cent would have to sell for around $20. Similarly, one kept two

"years" would have cost around $21 and would have to sell for

over $26. At the time referred to, the cattle in the grazing region

bought a year or two earlier, and now ready for market, were bring-

ing from $20 to $30 or even $35, the precise amount being deter-

 

49 Memoirs of William Renick, 56.

50 "Diary of Aaron Miller," 72.

51 Ohio Executive Documents, XVII (1853), Part II, No. 5, p. 395.

52Crawford County (1849), about $10; Mercer County (1849), $10; Paulding

County (1849), $9 to $12; Van Wert County (1849), $10 average; Hardin County

(1850), $12; Richland County (1850), $11.50 average; Van Wert County (1850),

$12.50 average. Ohio Agricultural Report for 1849, 74, 169, 187, 212; Ohio Agri-

cultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 199, 355. Ten dollars had been a more or less

conventional price for stock cattle as far back as 1830. New York Farmer (New

York), III (1830), quoted in Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture in the

Northern United States, 179.

53 Memoirs of William Renick, 27-28; Patent Office Report for 1849, Part II, Senate

Executive Documents, 31 cong., 1 sess., No. 20, p. 179; Patent Office Report for

1852, Part II, Senate Executive Documents, 32 cong., 2 sess., No. 55, pp. 260, 263.

• 16
 

184        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

mined by their weight.⁵⁴ It is evident that there is nothing in these

selling figures to discredit the idea that profits of twenty-five percent

and upwards were possible, but the validity of the exercise depends

on the worth of the estimate of the cost of production, and this was

nothing more than informed guesswork.

An idea of the magnitude of the grazing industry at mid-century

may be gained from a few scattered statements. A Madison County

resident reported in 1848 that he had "ascertained from reliable

sources from every township in the county, there have been near

20,000 head of cattle, three years old and upwards sold and driven

from this county in the last seven months, at an average price of $20

per head, making in all $400,000.^"55 This estimate may be taken as

reasonably accurate, for the practice in Madison County and its

neighbors was to sell cattle by weight,⁵⁶ from which we may infer

that there were weighing stations at various points for the conveni-

ence of drovers and graziers⁵⁷ which would serve the convenience

of the gatherers of statistics. A "citizens' committee" put the number

of cattle driven from Marion County in 1845 at 7,000. In 1849, so

it was said, Marion County exported about 10,000, and Crawford

County 12,000 to 13,000.58

Since much of the grazing district was less than a hundred miles

from Cincinnati, the "Queen City of the West" absorbed some of

its fully grass-fattened cattle.⁵⁹ On account of the competition there,

two other outlets the graziers had were much more significant. They

disposed of a large proportion of their steers to the Scioto Valley

feeders to be corn-fattened in the manner hereafter to be described.

Drovers took the rest to the East, where they sold some in the

metropolitan markets as grass-fattened cattle, and the rest, ordinarily

 

54 Champaign County (1849), average $20, maximum $25; Clark County (1849),

average $3 per hundred, gross weight; Fayette County (1849), average $26, or $2.50

a hundred; Marion County (1849), average $23; Clark County (1850), $35; Craw-

ford County (1850), maximum $35. Ohio Agricultural Report for 1849, 63, 65, 93,

165; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 96, 120.

55 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1848, 92.

56 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 263. See also footnote 54, above.

57 This in spite of the fact that a few graziers had their own cattle scales. Madison

Reveille (London), November 15, 1851.

58 Buckeye Eagle (Marion), January 14, 1846; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1849,

74;0hio Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 301.

59 Ibid., 264; Ohio Executive Documents, XVI (1852), Part II, No. 2, p. 438.

• 17
 

THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY                    185

 

a very much larger number, among the feeders of eastern New York

and Pennsylvania.⁶⁰

The golden age (as it seemed in retrospect) of the cattle kingdom

of the graziers, characterized by an abundance of cheap land, advant-

ages in marketing over competing areas to the westward, and only a

relatively slow encroachment of other types of agriculture, came to

an end shortly after mid-century. The new problems which then

arose will be dealt with later.

IV. The Feeding Industry of the Scioto Valley

The second main division of the cattle industry in Ohio, the corn-

fattening one of the middle and lower Scioto Valley, had, like the

grazing one just described, an origin in the East. Specifically, it was

borrowed without change of technique from practices prevailing

along the South Branch of the Potomac. In this region, of which

Moorefield, (West) Virginia, might be considered the center, cattle

were corn-fattened during the late colonial and early national period

in a fashion characteristic of it and no other.⁶1 What it was will be

made clear shortly.

Many of the first settlers of the lower Scioto Valley were from

the South Branch, and so had first-hand knowledge of the cattle-

feeding method prevailing there. From the time of their arrival

they appear to have discussed among themselves the possibility

of transferring it to the West and thereafter driving their cattle east-

ward as fatted beeves and not mere stockers. The cautious ones

thought that such a project might be merely a way of wasting corn,

for they believed that, on arrival at Baltimore or Philadelphia, the

cattle would be so emaciated that they could be sold only to feeders.

This, too, was the opinion of their friends and relatives still living

along the South Branch. A few of the arguers contended that some-

time in the future the idea might prove successful. Only George

Renick, who had been engaged in merchandising at Moorefield, and

60 Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States,

394-395; Memoirs of William Renick, 14; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1848, 92;

Patent Office Report for 1849, Part II, Senate Executive Documents, 31 cong., 1 sess.,

No. 20, p. 179.

61 Renick, "On the Cattle Trade of the Scioto Valley," 162.

• 18
 

186        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

who removed to Chillicothe in 1802, where he opened a store, had

any confidence in its immediate practicality. After his friends and

customers all rejected his efforts to get them to invest their funds

in such a seemingly hazardous enterprise, he bought a farm just

outside Chillicothe, and in the autumn of 1804 began to fatten a

drove of cattle in the Virginia fashion. The next spring he drove

sixty-eight fat cattle to Baltimore.⁶² According to tradition, they

made a poor impression on their arrival. They showed the effects

of their long journey, and of their dependence on the wild hay along

the route, for the butchers would not buy them, even when the prices

were reduced. It was not till Renick had two or three of the poorest

of the cattle slaughtered at his own expense, with the butcher being

authorized to give the meat to his customers if they would not buy

it, that any interest was shown. The beef was found so satisfactory

on trial that Renick had no difficulty in getting rid of the rest of the

cattle.⁶³

The scoffers in the Scioto Valley would no doubt have rushed

into the business opened by this venture had it not been that they

were discouraged by the great Scioto River flood of 1805, which

caused them to have second thoughts on the wisdom of risking much

on bottom-land corn culture. As it was, the corn-fattening industry

did not really begin to flourish till after the War of 1812. In 1815

Felix Renick, brother of George, sold a drove of corn-fattened cattle

in Philadelphia, and three years later George Renick and Joseph

Harness one at New York. Others who have left no record imitated

their example, so that within a few years the cattle-feeding business

attained much of the extensive proportions it was to have in the

1840's.64

There were several fairly obvious reasons for the successful de-

velopment of the cattle-feeding industry of the lower Scioto Valley

in addition to the knowledge brought from the South Branch. One

was the abundance of corn. The agricultural expert A. B. Allen of

Buffalo, New York, in 1840 climbed a small hill near Lockbourne,

 

62 Ibid.; Memoirs of William Renick, 3, 99-100; Plumb, "Felix Renick, Pioneer," 20.

63 Country Gentleman, quoted in the Ohio Cultivator, IX (1853), 34.

64Henlein, "Cattle Driving from the Ohio Country, 1800-1850," 91; Memoirs

of William Renick, 97, 100.

• 19
 

THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY                  187

 

south of Columbus, and saw, as he wrote, "that in occasional bends

of the river, the views would extend from four to seven miles, and

perhaps more in length, and one to three in breadth, of almost un-

interrupted fields [of corn] as thick as grass, and in stalks far above

the reach of the arm of the tallest mountaineer."⁶⁵ Though much of

the corn was actually grown by tenants, this was on a share-cropping

basis,⁶⁶ so that its disposition could be controlled almost as thor-

oughly as that of the corn grown by the owner himself. Again, the

lower Scioto Valley and the Kentucky Bluegrass were closer to the

eastern cities than any other part of the Corn Belt. Ninety per-

cent of the western corn-fattened cattle sold in the East prior to the

railroad era were from these two regions, with the Scioto Valley con-

tributing throughout the lion's share.⁶⁷ Other factors were the avail-

ability of cattle for feeding and the great efficiency, especially in

labor, of the fattening method used.

The cattle feeders of the Scioto Valley, like the graziers of Mad-

ison County and its neighbors, depended on outside sources for their

stock. This is not to state that they bought none locally, for it was

their practice, then as later, to buy from their small-farmer neigh-

bors the two or three or half-dozen head each had available, 68 but

the supply was simply inadequate. The consequence was that in the

early days of the feeding industry-around 1825-the young Wil-

liam Renick was "picking up" cattle for his father over a very wide

area in Ohio and Kentucky. He ranged over the part of Ohio south

of the fortieth parallel, which is slightly above the National Road,

from the western border of the grazing country along the Little

Miami to the midst of the hill counties between the Scioto Valley

and the Ohio River. In Kentucky he bought not only in the Bluegrass,

but sometimes across it in the Green River section, which would be

 

65 Cultivator, VII (1840), 192. Cf. also: "From Columbus, ninety miles, to Ports-

mouth, on the bottom lands, a full mile wide opposite Columbus, and alternating on

either side, as the bed of the stream winds from the base of its general bluffs to the

other, lies almost one continuous Indian cornfield. A field of a hundred acres is not

uncommon-one of three to five hundred is not uncommon, and a single inclosure of a

thousand acres and upwards, all solid, growing Indian corn, is sometimes seen."

New York World, quoted in Ohio Agricultural Report for 1859, 544.

66 Cultivator, VIII (1841), 22; Thomas, Travels Through the Western Country in

the Summer of 1816, 100; Twiss, "Journal of Cyrus P. Bradley," 235.

67 Memoirs of William Renick, 14.

68 Cf. Ohio Agricultural Report for 1907, 333.

• 20
 

188        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

all of three hundred miles by trail from Pickaway County.⁶⁹ Even

at this time, or shortly thereafter, some of the Scioto feeders were

depending on Missouri and other western cattle.⁷⁰ In the 1840's a

few of the cattle fed had been raised on dairy farms in the Western

Reserve, and reached the Scioto Valley only after a year or two in

the possession of intermediaries in the Backbone Counties and the

grazing region. Only in one year, 1845, when there was a great

drought, were Western Reserve cattle driven in large numbers direct

to the Scioto.⁷¹ Others came from the small-farming borderlands

of the Scioto Valley-the wheat-growing region to the north; Adams,

Highland, and other counties south of the grazing country; and

Athens, Gallia, Hocking, Jackson, and other hill counties of south-

eastern Ohio.⁷² Of these last mentioned, Gallia was perhaps the

most important. It was said to be "the great theatre for gathering

cattle, to be taken to the valley of the Scioto,"⁷³ no doubt because

it lay astride the cattle and hog route-really mostly the latter-

which ran from Chillicothe to Gallipolis and then along the Kana-

wha River, with an ultimate destination in eastern Virginia. One

might venture the guess that Mason County, (West) Virginia,

furnished some of the cattle credited to Gallia County. It also seems

likely, even though there is no direct mention, that the counties of

northeastern Kentucky nearest the mouth of the Scioto, such as

Greenup and Lewis, always contributed a quota to the feeders north

of them. "A considerable portion" of the stock cattle was brought in

directly from Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri,⁷⁴ and would therefore

be identical in character with the cattle going to the Ohio grazing

country. The rest were purchased in the grazing country after a

"year" or two of the conditioning already described. The large

droves available here, and the consequent convenience to the feeders

 

69 Memoirs of William Renick, 55-57.

70 New York Farmer, III (1830), quoted in Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agri-

culture in the Northern United States, 179.

71 Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1849), 189; Memoirs

of William Renick, 23.

72 Memoirs of William Renick, 55; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1847, 26; Ohio

Agricultural Report for 1848, 52; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 213,

236.

73 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1848, 52.

74 Renick, "On the Cattle Trade of the Scioto Valley," 163.

• 21
 

THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY            189

 

in their purchasing, must have made this the most important single

source of supply.⁷⁵

The Scioto feeders held pronounced and no doubt conflicting

opinions about the merits of the cattle obtainable from these varied

sources. William Renick, for example, thought the best native cattle

he ever purchased for feeding were from Woodford and Jessamine

counties, just west of Lexington, Kentucky. He shared with others a

respect for the "Brush Creek" cattle of Adams and Highland

counties, which, though small, were hardy, disease resistant, and

easily fattened, and disagreed with them over the "hill," or "Hock-

ing," or "sassafras," cattle of the southeastern counties of Ohio. To

him, the latter were too small for profitable feeding; to others among

the feeders, they had the merits of the "Brush Creek" cattle. As a

young man Renick was prejudiced against the "Barren" cattle of

the grazing region as being rangy, hard to fatten, and disease prone;

later he admitted that, after a year of seasoning by a grazier, they

could be profitably fattened, and that they were actually preferred by

drovers to cattle of local origin because they would lose less weight

on the journey east.⁷⁶

While the Scioto Valley cattlemen made intermittent purchases any

time from early spring on, they bought or took delivery of most of

their prospective feeders in late summer or early autumn, for they

paid for them in cash borrowed from the Chillicothe and Columbus

banks on the basis of four-months notes secured on the animals when

sold. As the banks were said to make a profit in interest and ex-

change which might amount to ten or twelve percent, it was to the

advantage of the cattlemen to cut costs by keeping their period of

indebtedness as brief as possible.⁷⁷

The actual method of feeding, which, it will be recalled, was

borrowed without significant change from that prevailing along the

South Branch of the Potomac, was in general as follows, though

75 This seems to be implied in the Cincinnati Atlas, quoted in the Spirit of the

Times, XIX (1849-50), 316.

76 Memoirs of William Renick, 55-57; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1847, 26; Ohio

Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 236; Renick, "On the Cattle Trade of the

Scioto Valley," 163.

77 Cincinnati Atlas, quoted in the Spirit of the Times, XIX (1849-50), 316.

• 22
 

190    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

subject to variations in detail. After the feeder cattle, usually four-

year-olds, were bought up, they were kept for the time being on

whatever aftergrass or other good pasturage was available. Neither

then nor at any other time were they given any shelter except natural

windbreaks. During the feeding season, which lasted from about

the first of November to the middle of February for the first animals

driven and to the middle of April for the last ones, the feeders, in

herds of about a hundred, were turned into a succession of eight

or ten-acre feedlots, a "fresh" one at each feeding, morning and

evening. Every day the hired men would haul as much corn as would

be required on a big sled or low feed wagon, drawn in either case

by perhaps three or four yoke of oxen, and distribute it, not in feed

boxes which were a rarity till after the Civil War, but in small heaps

over the field. This was, in accordance with Virginia practice, un-

husked corn--not mere blades and stalks--which had been standing

in the shock since harvest time. When the feeders were put into their

next feedlot, their places in the first would be taken by an equal

number of stock cattle, who would eat what they could of what was

left on the ground. Then, when the feeders were moved on to a

third lot, and the stock cattle to the second, hogs would be turned

into the first, to consume what the cattle had trampled into the mud,

mangled, or failed to digest. As there were seldom many feedlots,

the first group of cattle would shortly be back to the original one,

following the hogs. The number of hogs would vary with the sever-

ity of the winter, their size, and whether or not they were intended

for driving. A writer in the Cultivator thought there would be or-

dinarily a hog to each feeder. William Renick was of the opinion

that, on the average, there might be 135 hogs for each hundred

feeders. If there were no stock cattle, there would be more hogs.

When a cattle feeder had plenty of first-class pasture at his disposal,

he could buy three-year-olds, corn-feed them as stockers following

feeders for one winter, graze them throughout the next growing

season and into the fall, and then fatten them in the feedlots. This

was how the best beef was produced.⁷⁸ A variant of the foregoing

78 Cultivator, New Series, IX (1852), 238; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1907, 351;

Memoirs of William Renick, 11, 15, 23; Renick, "On the Cattle Trade of the Scioto

Valley," 168.

• 23
 

THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY           191

 

general technique of cattle feeding was to turn the animals early

in the autumn into a field of standing corn, where they would con-

sume as much as they could, and leave the rest for the hogs which

would follow them.⁷⁹ It may be that this "hogging down" was con-

fined to corn growers in the Scioto Valley who were primarily

interested in swine feeding. It is significant that nowhere in his ex-

tensive writings on the cattle-feeding industry does William Renick

as much as refer to it.

The usual Scioto Valley system had obvious economic advantages.

The fixed investment in corn land was high, and there was some

in fencing, but that in buildings was next to nothing. Labor costs,

though high enough during the corn-growing season, were low dur-

ing the feeding one. A few hired hands could haul all the corn

needed, for they did not have to spend any time on such chores as

carting out manure. The practice of having hogs follow the cattle in

the feedlots meant that there was no wastage of fodder, and that of

keeping the cattle and hogs out of a conventional barnyard meant

that there was no wastage of manure. There were, it is true, losses

from exposure and disease--"at least three or four per cent. per

annum," according to William Renick^80--but these, like the interest

on the land and the use of borrowed capital, were regarded as part

of the overhead expense inseparable from the business.

It is difficult to estimate accurately the profits in the Scioto Valley

cattle-feeding business, because, as in the grazing industry, available

figures are fragmentary. An apparently careful accounting was,

however, given by an early feeder with 150 acres of cultivable land

near Chillicothe. One fall, seemingly in the late 1820's, he bought

400 stockers at $10 each and the next spring sold them in the East

at $15, thus making a profit of $1,700 after allowing $300 for the

cost of labor. In 1829, again, he bought 480 at $10, and sold them,

also in the eastern market, at $30. He put his profit that season

at $6,240, as it cost him $7 a head to drive the cattle east. His

labor and other expenses he considered were more than met by his

gains from his stock cattle and hogs.⁸¹ William Renick in 1848

 

⁷⁹ Cultivator, VIII (1841), 22; ibid., New Series, VIII (1851), 325.

80 Memoirs of William Renick, 28.

81 New York Farmer, III (1830), quoted in Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agri-

culture in the Northern United States, 179.

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192    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

worked out a somewhat disingenuous system of costs in a letter to

the editor of the American Courier, a Philadelphia paper which had

charged that the western cattle feeders and drovers were profiteering

at the expense of eastern consumers. According to Renick, the feeder

would have to pay $24 for a good four-year-old steer, which, as

shown above (page 183), was not an unreasonable figure. In five

months of fattening--a very long season--the steer would consume

the equivalent of at least seventy-five bushels of corn worth, at

twenty cents a bushel, $15, and if he was bought in the spring and

properly grazed through the growing season, two acres of pasture

worth $6 in addition. This would mean that, without making any

allowance for loss from disease or for interest on capital, the feeder

could not even clear expenses unless he got $39 or $45, as the case

might be, for his 900-pound beast at his own gate.⁸² A year earlier,

and in an entirely different connection, Renick stated that the 7,000

fat cattle driven each year from Pickaway County were worth

$280,000 or $40 per head at the time of sale; and $40 was also given

by another authority as the average value of those driven from Ross

County from 1846 to 1850 inclusive.⁸³ On the basis of Renick's

calculation, therefore, most of the cattlemen were steadily losing

money, and this "when the business of feeding cattle on the Scioto

river was at its height, say from 1840 to 1850."⁸⁴ Renick carefully

failed to mention that the stock cattle and the hogs which followed

the feeders got little or nothing except part of the corn charged to

the latter, and so were, except for their prime cost, almost clear

gain to their owner. Neither did he call attention to the fact that

cattlemen who took their own cattle eastward, or had agents do so,

sometimes made large profits, because often at the time the drove

was sold, the New York market was bare of competition. Perhaps

about all we can really say, then, is what Renick in his old age ad-

mitted of his own experiences in the feeding business--they were

"reasonably profitable."⁸⁵

 

82 Memoirs of William Renick, 27-28.

83 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1847, 83; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1850

(Scott ed.), 356.

84 Memoirs of William Renick, 15.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 98.

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THE BEEF CATTLE INDUSTRY              193

 

There are no reliable statistics of the number of cattle corn-fed in

the Scioto Valley in the 1820's and 1830's. One estimate, made by

two large stock drovers, was that in 1828 there were 6,000 such

cattle. Another estimate, given at the canal celebration at Chillicothe

in 1831, was that there were then about 10,000 in the valley. Two

years later 3,000 head were driven eastward from Ross County

alone.⁸⁶ Allen Trimble, first president of the Ohio State Board of

Agriculture, reported second-hand in the fall of 1846 that 25,000

were then being fattened along the Scioto and its tributaries between

Columbus and Portsmouth. William Renick, whose opinion should

carry more weight, put the number fattened in an average year at

from 15,000 to 16,000.87 From the reports of the agricultural societies

we get some additional figures, which are not to be taken too ser-

iously, but which do emphasize the concentration of the industry in

Pickaway and Ross counties. Pickaway County in the late 1840's had

around 7,000 or 7,500 head corn-fattening annually for the eastern

market and Ross County between 5,600 and 6,500 according to one

estimate and a minimum of 8,000 according to another, which figure

perhaps partook of local patriotism. As far as the other counties of

the lower Scioto Valley were concerned, it seems that the southern

part of Franklin County contributed substantially to the industry, but

precisely how much we do not know; that the western part of Fair-

field County had an apparent maximum of 2,000 head in its feedlots;

that Pike County had some, but not many, cattle feeders; and that

Scioto County had very few.⁸⁸ There is reason to suspect that the

Pickaway County estimates, which were made by William Renick or

his friends, were too low. In 1854, when conditions had not greatly

changed, the Circleville Herald listed the cattle feeders of Pickaway

 

86 R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815-1840 (Indianapolis,

1950), I, 528; Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe), quoted in the Western Tiller (Cincin-

nati), [New Series], I (1828-29), 185; Journal of the Senate of the State of Ohio,

32 general assembly, 1 sess., 1833-34, 417.

87 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1846, 6-7; Renick, "On the Cattle Trade of the

Scioto Valley," 162.

88 Ohio Agricultural Report for 1846, 60; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1847, 83;

Ohio Agricultural Report for 1848, 100-101; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1849,

95; Ohio Agricultural Report for 1850 (Scott ed.), 356, 449; Ohio Executive Docu-

ments, XVII (1853), Part II, No. 5, p. 301; ibid., XVIII (1854), Part II, No. 21,

p. 640; Ohio Cultivator, XIII (1857), 163.

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194    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

County with the number of cattle being fattened by each. The total

came to more than 12,500 head, and this without counting a con-

siderable number belonging to small-scale feeders.⁸⁹ If the figures

for Pickaway County are to be adjusted upwards, then of course

Renick's overall estimate for the Scioto Valley should be also.

Beginning in the middle 1840's a few hundred corn-fed cattle were

slaughtered at Chillicothe and packed for the British trade, but

otherwise the market was in the East. William Renick asserted that

New York was so much more profitable as an outlet than Philadel-

phia that seven-eighths of the Scioto Valley corn-fattened cattle went

to the former. Though he attributed this fact to the unwillingness

of the Philadelphia butchers to pay adequate prices, it is obvious

that the real explanation was to be found in the effective competition

of the feeders of eastern Pennsylvania. Occasionally, when the New

York market was overstocked, a Scioto Valley feeder might take his

drove the whole way to Boston, as Renick did in 1842.90 Few of the

cattle, if any, were sold at Cincinnati, which was apparently, as far

as corn-fed cattle were concerned, a kind of preserve for the feeders

of the Kentucky Bluegrass, centering on Bourbon County.⁹l

Developments in the Scioto Valley feeding industry during the

1850's will be dealt with in the final section.

 

89 Ohio Cultivator, X (1854), 248.

90 Memoirs of William Renick, 28-29, 58; Renick, "On the Cattle Trade of the

Scioto Valley," 162.

91 Charles Cist, The Cincinnati Miscellany, or Antiquities of the West, II (1845-

46), 140.

[The second and concluding part of this article will appear in the July issue.]

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