The Sioux City Stockyards: A River Valley Playground (A Remembrance)

“I sat and contemplated the solitude and stillness of this tenanted mound; and beheld from its top the windings infinite of the Missouri, its thousand hills and domes of green vanishing into blue in the distance—” George Catlin, artist and adventurer, 1832.



About half a mile from the old Floyd River (now a dry canal lined with concrete), a hill close to the present-day Sergeant Floyd Monument in Sioux City, Iowa, gave vision to an artist and poet who, according to Sioux City: A Pictorial History, sketched it on a return trip from upriver. The steamboat, Yellowstone, which had gone to Fort Benton, Montana, had proven the Missouri River's navigability. It stopped for a respite there on its way back down the river.

The Floyd River, named for the only man who died on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Sergeant Charles Floyd, carved its own bluffs east of Catlin’s view in current-day Greenville, a suburb of Sioux City.  The bluffs are there to this day and look out on some of the same windings Catlin saw northward along the main river in 1832.

Below those bluffs, the valley ¹ once housed one of the largest stockyards and meat packing regions in the country, and the Floyd River, a tributary of the Missouri, helped make it all work.

As the packing industry grew, Swift & Company houses were built up and over the bluffs for the workers and their children, who played on the cliffs overlooking the region. Much shared here comes from the experience of those boys, who looked down from the bluffs and wanted to explore the river, packing plants, and stockyards that housed the animals the industry needed for survival.

The grimy area wasn't dirty or messy to the boys, it was a place of adventure and wonder. The Floyd River alone was a powerful tributary that flooded the Greenville area relentlessly. In fact, its waters, during the quiet of late spring, summer, and fall, flushed the packing plants free of a lot of their liquid waste, waste that rushed down the concrete canal to the Missouri.

Before regulations stopped river pollution, near the mouth of the Floyd River, a tram-like structure breached the water to skim the fat from the kill before it reached the Missouri. From the earliest days, the fat was skimmed off the water's surface and sold to make soap, according to one of the boy's fathers, an employee at Swift and Company. All the plants dumped their waste in the river, and Swift and Company was the first in line. To this day, the pipes that poured their muck into the canal are still visible.

The river was a mess, but collecting the floating stuff made money. The old “interceptor,” hidden from view in later years by a bridge on Interstate Highway 29, looked weird and puzzling, an apparatus that the boys often played on. Cities downstream began complaining long before then, of course. Omaha used the Missouri River for its water, and when the packing plants found new ways to get rid of waste, the contraption became a lifeless relic, an odd wood structure abandoned and falling apart until it disappeared one day.

But for all the plants' shortcomings, the area they created in the valley below was wondrous—a cornucopia of adventure that called to the boys, and especially when stuck in Sunday School or the classrooms of steam-heated, squared-bricked grammar schools. All who lived and breathed, especially the boys, wanted to be an explorer. We all studied and read about wild buffalo hunts and other adventures from days past, all down in the river valley somewhere.

The Floyd River Valley had become a portal in time for the boys. A place where Don, Dennis, Cliff, Rick, Ludwig, Ed, Bill, Bob, and others, dreamed of far-off places, and the adventures that were once available, in one form or another, simply by walking down the hill (or, in some cases, up the street) to look for them.

We walked past the place playing hooky and stopped to stare at a burly man in a blood-soaked apron laboring over stacks of raw cow hides.

Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle had become a playground, and I still remember walking with Donnie near the “tanning shed—” an odd-looking building sitting somewhere between Armour and Swift on an access road.

We walked past the tannery playing hooky and stopped to stare at a burly man in a blood-soaked apron laboring over stacks of raw cow hides.  I had been there before, but even after the old Armour plant went to rubble, the huge glass "drums" of blood, protected by wooden crates, still littered the area. It was nothing compared to the man though, who raced to the door to chase us away when we stopped to watch for too long.

Of course, much was off limits down there.  Armour and Company stood like a fortress, for example, and the stories we heard of hungry men were haunting: how they waited outside the walls in the rain and cold (or snow), and especially during the depression, waiting for a potential job.  And how the foremen came out from the citadel to select the chosen few for work.

We avoided Armour and Company and often played around the stockyards instead, where the doomed animals awaited their death.

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he Yards sprawled out over 80 acres, and feed three huge packing plants. The hogs (further down the river), were stacked one on top of the other in a parking ramp-like structure several stories high. Hogs had their own bridge over the Floyd River to the Armour and Company kill floor.² But the lights never went out in the Hog Hotel, and farmers unloaded hogs all night.  The trucks bringing hogs and cattle to market would stretch sometimes for more than a mile.  It was a tense, exciting time to wander down there.

There were walkways, too, mainly over the cattle, where farmers and traders viewed the animals and made deals — and a lot of money selling and buying. The catwalks were where they bartered, but we couldn't get out there (the men would stop us long before we could get to the animals). We could walk around in the Hog Hotel, okay, but it wasn't much fun. Between the Hog Hotel and the sprawling pens for the cattle, a Livestock Exchange Building served the area in the middle. It was a hub for everything related to the yards, and the building stayed open all night.

An internet search found little about the goings-on there, but the smell of cow manure, stale cigars, and money was ever-present, for there was a bank there, too. The odd mixture of aromas drifted endlessly through the drafty marble hallways. The place housed a restaurant, always open, and a Cattleman's Lounge bar.

Oh, and a bunch of boys wandering around.

Later, the building became a self-contained ghost town as the packing plants closed and the ranchers and farmers left. Ultimately, the restaurant and bank closed.
 

Still, the Yards were once profitable, and Henry Anderson, a cattle buyer, seller, and cousin, talked about it often. He passed away recently, but his favorite tale was about John F. Kennedy and the mule he sat on outside in a small livestock pen of the famed White Horse Mounted Patrol. Henry showed the photo whenever people visited him at Morningside’s Sunset Manor. He had a private, live-in apartment there and regularly brought out the photo of Kennedy sitting on a mule. I can’t remember, to be honest, if it was a mule or a donkey, but it was not a horse and played on the symbolism of the Democrat’s mascot.

Henry said they never released the photo because Kennedy's public relations people rejected it. The future president smiles as he sits on the animal as jocular men, some in the stable door and others out in the livestock pen, watch. The image is gritty, a guy moment at the Sioux City Stockyards. The official press release is shared here under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 legal code. The Yard's catwalks are visible in the photo as people watch Mr. Kennedy ride a horse:

 

As the industry moved away from the Floyd River valley, the trucks disappeared, and the stockyards grew quiet and empty.  Today, even the Swift and Company building is gone. But before it was destroyed, a huge boiler called a Corliss stream engine was removed from the plant and, according to the Sioux City Journal,  is now housed in the Roundhouse of the Milwaukee Railroad Historic District.

Armour Meatpacking Plant Ruins

The steam engine ran an ammonia compressor unit for the plant’s cooling system and sported a 20,000-ton flywheel to help get the job done. The steam engine, it was estimated, was installed in 1911.  This compressor is from an old Armour and Company packing plant in East St. Louis and was seen at lightrainproductions.com.

Another picture, found on Wikipedia, could have been taken in Sioux City.  (It is published here in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 legal code.)

None of us ever saw the Corliss steam engine though (it was impossible to get into the plant!), but if we could have found a way inside the Swift and Company building, we would have wandered around in there.

For years, even into young adulthood, many of us went to the bluffs to look into the valley below. In later years, the spot became a popular place to park.  It was a beautiful view.

One day, the rubble of the Armour and Company plant was hauled away, and all that remained was a huge smokestack that once vented the power plant. Swift and Company remained for a while, its smokestack illuminated in the night for years, but it too is now gone. For a brief while its glow brought back memories of a bar and restaurant buried in a building that never slept, cattle bawling in the night and the endless blocks of trucks waiting to unload the food that fed a nation. The entire world lived in the Floyd River Valley. It was magic.

We explored the ruins of Armour and Company too.  I remember trying to decipher the mysteries while hunting pigeons, often with Dennis, and later with Ed and his younger brother Bill (this is a photo from East St. Louis).

Armour Meatpacking Plant Ruins

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he last packing plant, John Morrell and Company, closed on April 20, 2010.  And that place was a source of adventure as well.   We use to hunt "hog worms" there when we went fishing.  Donnie and I would go to the back of the plant to renderings before heading to the Missouri to fish.  The "worms" came down a metal hopper.  But the most interesting part of the adventure came with the unsavory worms, a parasite.  They caused blindness (it was rumored) if hooked wrong.  They squirted stuff you couldn't get into your eyes.  

At the Swift and Company old building, a retail center flourished for a while, and a bowling alley was built on the third floor.  At Halloween, the boy scouts had a haunted house, and a restaurant served food in an old meat locker.  It was interesting wandering the halls (the only time many of us made it into the Swift and Company building), but it wasn't the same. No longer a working packing plant, the dank atmosphere of slaughtered cattle just didn't work very well as a shopping center.

The ”KD Station" closed, and one of the last visual memories of adventure disappeared forever. 

Editor’s Note: Our thanks, to the folks at Ancestry.com for the photo of the bank, and lightrainproductions for the photos that so beautifully capture the excitement of meatpacking plant ruins.

Footnotes
 ¹ The Sioux City Journal has reported the valley was called "Hoeven."  We never called it Hoeven Valley.

 ² The Chicago Tribune article, in the link shared, reported the Hog Hotel walkway was underground. That was a modernization. The original went over the road like a covered bridge. Although I remember this from my childhood, the stockyards tore it down when it became unsafe. The supports for the structure stood standing for years after its destruction.