He found an unexpected state of affairs--for the girl's father had died,
and his estate was tied up with creditors; Jurgis' heart leaped as he
realized that now the prize was within his reach. There was Elzbieta
Lukoszaite, Teta, or Aunt, as they called her, Ona's stepmother, and
there were her six children, of all ages. There was also her brother
Jonas, a dried-up little man who had worked upon the farm. They were
people of great consequence, as it seemed to Jurgis, fresh out of the
woods; Ona knew how to read, and knew many other things that he did
not know, and now the farm had been sold, and the whole family was
adrift--all they owned in the world being about seven hundred rubles
which is half as many dollars. They would have had three times that, but
it had gone to court, and the judge had decided against them, and it had
cost the balance to get him to change his decision.

Ona might have married and left them, but she would not, for she loved
Teta Elzbieta. It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America,
where a friend of his had gotten rich. He would work, for his part, and
the women would work, and some of the children, doubtless--they would
live somehow. Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That was a country
where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day; and Jurgis
figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices as they were
where he lived, and decided forthwith that he would go to America and
marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country, rich or poor,
a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he did
not have to pay out his money to rascally officials--he might do as he
pleased, and count himself as good as any other man. So America was a
place of which lovers and young people dreamed. If one could only manage
to get the price of a passage, he could count his troubles at an end.

It was arranged that they should leave the following spring, and
meantime Jurgis sold himself to a contractor for a certain time, and
tramped nearly four hundred miles from home with a gang of men to work
upon a railroad in Smolensk. This was a fearful experience, with filth
and bad food and cruelty and overwork; but Jurgis stood it and came out
in fine trim, and with eighty rubles sewed up in his coat. He did not
drink or fight, because he was thinking all the time of Ona; and for the
rest, he was a quiet, steady man, who did what he was told to, did not
lose his temper often, and when he did lose it made the offender anxious
that he should not lose it again. When they paid him off he dodged the
company gamblers and dramshops, and so they tried to kill him; but he
escaped, and tramped it home, working at odd jobs, and sleeping always
with one eye open.

So in the summer time they had all set out for America. At the last
moment there joined them Marija Berczynskas, who was a cousin of Ona's.
Marija was an orphan, and had worked since childhood for a rich farmer
of Vilna, who beat her regularly. It was only at the age of twenty that
it had occurred to Marija to try her strength, when she had risen up and
nearly murdered the man, and then come away.

There were twelve in all in the party, five adults and six children--and
Ona, who was a little of both. They had a hard time on the passage;
there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and got
them into a trap with some officials, and cost them a good deal of
their precious money, which they clung to with such horrible fear. This
happened to them again in New York--for, of course, they knew nothing
about the country, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a
man in a blue uniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel and
keep them there, and make them pay enormous charges to get away. The law
says that the rate card shall be on the door of a hotel, but it does not
say that it shall be in Lithuanian.


It was in the stockyards that Jonas' friend had gotten rich, and so to
Chicago the party was bound. They knew that one word, Chicago and that
was all they needed to know, at least, until they reached the city.
Then, tumbled out of the cars without ceremony, they were no better off
than before; they stood staring down the vista of Dearborn Street, with
its big black buildings towering in the distance, unable to realize that
they had arrived, and why, when they said "Chicago," people no longer
pointed in some direction, but instead looked perplexed, or laughed,
or went on without paying any attention. They were pitiable in their
helplessness; above all things they stood in deadly terror of any sort
of person in official uniform, and so whenever they saw a policeman they
would cross the street and hurry by. For the whole of the first day they
wandered about in the midst of deafening confusion, utterly lost; and
it was only at night that, cowering in the doorway of a house, they
were finally discovered and taken by a policeman to the station. In the
morning an interpreter was found, and they were taken and put upon a
car, and taught a new word--"stockyards." Their delight at discovering
that they were to get out of this adventure without losing another share
of their possessions it would not be possible to describe.

They sat and stared out of the window. They were on a street which
seemed to run on forever, mile after mile--thirty-four of them, if they
had known it--and each side of it one uninterrupted row of wretched
little two-story frame buildings. Down every side street they could see,
it was the same--never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same
endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. Here and there
would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud shores
and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a railroad
crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing, and
rattling freight cars filing by; here and there would be a great
factory, a dingy building with innumerable windows in it, and immense
volumes of smoke pouring from the chimneys, darkening the air above and
making filthy the earth beneath. But after each of these interruptions,
the desolate procession would begin again--the procession of dreary
little buildings.

A full hour before the party reached the city they had begun to note the
perplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time, and
upon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute, as
the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were
grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. And along
with the thickening smoke they began to notice another circumstance, a
strange, pungent odor. They were not sure that it was unpleasant, this
odor; some might have called it sickening, but their taste in odors was
not developed, and they were only sure that it was curious. Now, sitting
in the trolley car, they realized that they were on their way to the
home of it--that they had traveled all the way from Lithuania to it.
It was now no longer something far off and faint, that you caught in
whiffs; you could literally taste it, as well as smell it--you could
take hold of it, almost, and examine it at your leisure. They were
divided in their opinions about it. It was an elemental odor, raw and
crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong. There were some
who drank it in as if it were an intoxicant; there were others who put
their handkerchiefs to their faces. The new emigrants were still tasting
it, lost in wonder, when suddenly the car came to a halt, and the door
was flung open, and a voice shouted--"Stockyards!"

They were left standing upon the corner, staring; down a side street
there were two rows of brick houses, and between them a vista: half
a dozen chimneys, tall as the tallest of buildings, touching the very
sky--and leaping from them half a dozen columns of smoke, thick, oily,
and black as night. It might have come from the center of the world,
this smoke, where the fires of the ages still smolder. It came as if
self-impelled, driving all before it, a perpetual explosion. It was
inexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the great
streams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing,
curling; then, uniting in one giant river, they streamed away down the
sky, stretching a black pall as far as the eye could reach.

Then the party became aware of another strange thing. This, too, like
the color, was a thing elemental; it was a sound, a sound made up of ten
thousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first--it sunk into
your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like the
murmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest; it
suggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion. It was
only by an effort that one could realize that it was made by animals,
that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the distant
grunting of ten thousand swine.

They would have liked to follow it up, but, alas, they had no time for
adventures just then. The policeman on the corner was beginning to watch
them; and so, as usual, they started up the street. Scarcely had they
gone a block, however, before Jonas was heard to give a cry, and began
pointing excitedly across the street. Before they could gather the
meaning of his breathless ejaculations he had bounded away, and they saw
him enter a shop, over which was a sign: "J. Szedvilas, Delicatessen."
When he came out again it was in company with a very stout gentleman in
shirt sleeves and an apron, clasping Jonas by both hands and laughing
hilariously. Then Teta Elzbieta recollected suddenly that Szedvilas
had been the name of the mythical friend who had made his fortune in
America. To find that he had been making it in the delicatessen business
was an extraordinary piece of good fortune at this juncture; though it
was well on in the morning, they had not breakfasted, and the children
were beginning to whimper.

Thus was the happy ending to a woeful voyage. The two families literally
fell upon each other's necks--for it had been years since Jokubas
Szedvilas had met a man from his part of Lithuania. Before half the day
they were lifelong friends. Jokubas understood all the pitfalls of this
new world, and could explain all of its mysteries; he could tell them
the things they ought to have done in the different emergencies--and
what was still more to the point, he could tell them what to do now. He
would take them to poni Aniele, who kept a boardinghouse the other side
of the yards; old Mrs. Jukniene, he explained, had not what one would
call choice accommodations, but they might do for the moment. To this
Teta Elzbieta hastened to respond that nothing could be too cheap to
suit them just then; for they were quite terrified over the sums they
had had to expend. A very few days of practical experience in this land
of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact
that it was also a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man
was almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there
vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been
haunting Jurgis. What had made the discovery all the more painful was
that they were spending, at American prices, money which they had earned
at home rates of wages--and so were really being cheated by the world!
The last two days they had all but starved themselves--it made them
quite sick to pay the prices that the railroad people asked them for
food.

Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not but
recoil, even so, in all their journey they had seen nothing so bad as
this. Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness of
two-story frame tenements that lie "back of the yards." There were four
such flats in each building, and each of the four was a "boardinghouse"
for the occupancy of foreigners--Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or
Bohemians. Some of these places were kept by private persons, some were
cooperative. There would be an average of half a dozen boarders to each
room--sometimes there were thirteen or fourteen to one room, fifty
or sixty to a flat. Each one of the occupants furnished his own
accommodations--that is, a mattress and some bedding. The mattresses
would be spread upon the floor in rows--and there would be nothing else
in the place except a stove. It was by no means unusual for two men
to own the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by
night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Very
frequently a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double
shifts of men.

Mrs. Jukniene was a wizened-up little woman, with a wrinkled face. Her
home was unthinkably filthy; you could not enter by the front door at
all, owing to the mattresses, and when you tried to go up the backstairs
you found that she had walled up most of the porch with old boards
to make a place to keep her chickens. It was a standing jest of the
boarders that Aniele cleaned house by letting the chickens loose in
the rooms. Undoubtedly this did keep down the vermin, but it seemed
probable, in view of all the circumstances, that the old lady regarded
it rather as feeding the chickens than as cleaning the rooms. The truth
was that she had definitely given up the idea of cleaning anything,
under pressure of an attack of rheumatism, which had kept her doubled up
in one corner of her room for over a week; during which time eleven of
her boarders, heavily in her debt, had concluded to try their chances of
employment in Kansas City. This was July, and the fields were green. One
never saw the fields, nor any green thing whatever, in Packingtown; but
one could go out on the road and "hobo it," as the men phrased it, and
see the country, and have a long rest, and an easy time riding on the
freight cars.


Such was the home to which the new arrivals were welcomed. There was
nothing better to be had--they might not do so well by looking further,
for Mrs. Jukniene had at least kept one room for herself and her three
little children, and now offered to share this with the women and the
girls of the party. They could get bedding at a secondhand store,
she explained; and they would not need any, while the weather was so
hot--doubtless they would all sleep on the sidewalk such nights as this,
as did nearly all of her guests. "Tomorrow," Jurgis said, when they were
left alone, "tomorrow I will get a job, and perhaps Jonas will get one
also; and then we can get a place of our own."

Later that afternoon he and Ona went out to take a walk and look about
them, to see more of this district which was to be their home. In back
of the yards the dreary two-story frame houses were scattered farther
apart, and there were great spaces bare--that seemingly had been
overlooked by the great sore of a city as it spread itself over the
surface of the prairie. These bare places were grown up with dingy,
yellow weeds, hiding innumerable tomato cans; innumerable children
played upon them, chasing one another here and there, screaming and
fighting. The most uncanny thing about this neighborhood was the number
of the children; you thought there must be a school just out, and it was
only after long acquaintance that you were able to realize that
there was no school, but that these were the children of the
neighborhood--that there were so many children to the block in
Packingtown that nowhere on its streets could a horse and buggy move
faster than a walk!

It could not move faster anyhow, on account of the state of the streets.
Those through which Jurgis and Ona were walking resembled streets less
than they did a miniature topographical map. The roadway was commonly
several feet lower than the level of the houses, which were sometimes
joined by high board walks; there were no pavements--there were
mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and ditches, and great hollows
full of stinking green water. In these pools the children played, and
rolled about in the mud of the streets; here and there one noticed them
digging in it, after trophies which they had stumbled on. One wondered
about this, as also about the swarms of flies which hung about the
scene, literally blackening the air, and the strange, fetid odor which
assailed one's nostrils, a ghastly odor, of all the dead things of the
universe. It impelled the visitor to questions and then the residents
would explain, quietly, that all this was "made" land, and that it had
been "made" by using it as a dumping ground for the city garbage. After
a few years the unpleasant effect of this would pass away, it was said;
but meantime, in hot weather--and especially when it rained--the flies
were apt to be annoying. Was it not unhealthful? the stranger would ask,
and the residents would answer, "Perhaps; but there is no telling."

A little way farther on, and Jurgis and Ona, staring open-eyed and
wondering, came to the place where this "made" ground was in process of
making. Here was a great hole, perhaps two city blocks square, and with
long files of garbage wagons creeping into it. The place had an odor
for which there are no polite words; and it was sprinkled over with
children, who raked in it from dawn till dark. Sometimes visitors from
the packing houses would wander out to see this "dump," and they would
stand by and debate as to whether the children were eating the food they
got, or merely collecting it for the chickens at home. Apparently none
of them ever went down to find out.

Beyond this dump there stood a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys.
First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it
up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous
arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America. A
little way beyond was another great hole, which they had emptied and not
yet filled up. This held water, and all summer it stood there, with the
near-by soil draining into it, festering and stewing in the sun; and
then, when winter came, somebody cut the ice on it, and sold it to the
people of the city. This, too, seemed to the newcomers an economical
arrangement; for they did not read the newspapers, and their heads were
not full of troublesome thoughts about "germs."

They stood there while the sun went down upon this scene, and the sky in
the west turned blood-red, and the tops of the houses shone like fire.
Jurgis and Ona were not thinking of the sunset, however--their backs
were turned to it, and all their thoughts were of Packingtown, which
they could see so plainly in the distance. The line of the buildings
stood clear-cut and black against the sky; here and there out of the
mass rose the great chimneys, with the river of smoke streaming away to
the end of the world. It was a study in colors now, this smoke; in the
sunset light it was black and brown and gray and purple. All the sordid
suggestions of the place were gone--in the twilight it was a vision of
power. To the two who stood watching while the darkness swallowed it up,
it seemed a dream of wonder, with its talc of human energy, of things
being done, of employment for thousands upon thousands of men, of
opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy. When they came away,
arm in arm, Jurgis was saying, "Tomorrow I shall go there and get a
job!"



Chapter 3


In his capacity as delicatessen vender, Jokubas Szedvilas had many
acquaintances. Among these was one of the special policemen employed
by Durham, whose duty it frequently was to pick out men for employment.
Jokubas had never tried it, but he expressed a certainty that he could
get some of his friends a job through this man. It was agreed, after
consultation, that he should make the effort with old Antanas and with
Jonas. Jurgis was confident of his ability to get work for himself,
unassisted by any one. As we have said before, he was not mistaken in
this. He had gone to Brown's and stood there not more than half an hour
before one of the bosses noticed his form towering above the rest, and
signaled to him. The colloquy which followed was brief and to the point:

"Speak English?"

"No; Lit-uanian." (Jurgis had studied this word carefully.)

"Job?"

"Je." (A nod.)

"Worked here before?"

"No 'stand."

(Signals and gesticulations on the part of the boss. Vigorous shakes of
the head by Jurgis.)

"Shovel guts?"

"No 'stand." (More shakes of the head.)

"Zarnos. Pagaiksztis. Szluofa!" (Imitative motions.)

"Je."

"See door. Durys?" (Pointing.)

"Je."

"To-morrow, seven o'clock. Understand? Rytoj! Prieszpietys! Septyni!"

"Dekui, tamistai!" (Thank you, sir.) And that was all. Jurgis turned
away, and then in a sudden rush the full realization of his triumph
swept over him, and he gave a yell and a jump, and started off on a
run. He had a job! He had a job! And he went all the way home as if
upon wings, and burst into the house like a cyclone, to the rage of the
numerous lodgers who had just turned in for their daily sleep.

Meantime Jokubas had been to see his friend the policeman, and received
encouragement, so it was a happy party. There being no more to be done
that day, the shop was left under the care of Lucija, and her husband
sallied forth to show his friends the sights of Packingtown. Jokubas did
this with the air of a country gentleman escorting a party of visitors
over his estate; he was an old-time resident, and all these wonders
had grown up under his eyes, and he had a personal pride in them. The
packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape, and there was
no one to say nay to this.


They passed down the busy street that led to the yards. It was still
early morning, and everything was at its high tide of activity. A steady
stream of employees was pouring through the gate--employees of the
higher sort, at this hour, clerks and stenographers and such. For the
women there were waiting big two-horse wagons, which set off at a gallop
as fast as they were filled. In the distance there was heard again
the lowing of the cattle, a sound as of a far-off ocean calling. They
followed it, this time, as eager as children in sight of a circus
menagerie--which, indeed, the scene a good deal resembled. They crossed
the railroad tracks, and then on each side of the street were the pens
full of cattle; they would have stopped to look, but Jokubas hurried
them on, to where there was a stairway and a raised gallery, from which
everything could be seen. Here they stood, staring, breathless with
wonder.

There is over a square mile of space in the yards, and more than half
of it is occupied by cattle pens; north and south as far as the eye can
reach there stretches a sea of pens. And they were all filled--so many
cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world. Red cattle, black,
white, and yellow cattle; old cattle and young cattle; great bellowing
bulls and little calves not an hour born; meek-eyed milch cows and
fierce, long-horned Texas steers. The sound of them here was as of all
the barnyards of the universe; and as for counting them--it would have
taken all day simply to count the pens. Here and there ran long alleys,
blocked at intervals by gates; and Jokubas told them that the number of
these gates was twenty-five thousand. Jokubas had recently been reading
a newspaper article which was full of statistics such as that, and he
was very proud as he repeated them and made his guests cry out with
wonder. Jurgis too had a little of this sense of pride. Had he not just
gotten a job, and become a sharer in all this activity, a cog in this
marvelous machine? Here and there about the alleys galloped men upon
horseback, booted, and carrying long whips; they were very busy, calling
to each other, and to those who were driving the cattle. They were
drovers and stock raisers, who had come from far states, and brokers and
commission merchants, and buyers for all the big packing houses.

Here and there they would stop to inspect a bunch of cattle, and there
would be a parley, brief and businesslike. The buyer would nod or drop
his whip, and that would mean a bargain; and he would note it in his
little book, along with hundreds of others he had made that morning.
Then Jokubas pointed out the place where the cattle were driven to be
weighed, upon a great scale that would weigh a hundred thousand pounds
at once and record it automatically. It was near to the east entrance
that they stood, and all along this east side of the yards ran the
railroad tracks, into which the cars were run, loaded with cattle.
All night long this had been going on, and now the pens were full; by
tonight they would all be empty, and the same thing would be done again.

"And what will become of all these creatures?" cried Teta Elzbieta.

"By tonight," Jokubas answered, "they will all be killed and cut up;
and over there on the other side of the packing houses are more railroad
tracks, where the cars come to take them away."

There were two hundred and fifty miles of track within the yards, their
guide went on to tell them. They brought about ten thousand head of
cattle every day, and as many hogs, and half as many sheep--which meant
some eight or ten million live creatures turned into food every year.
One stood and watched, and little by little caught the drift of the
tide, as it set in the direction of the packing houses. There were
groups of cattle being driven to the chutes, which were roadways about
fifteen feet wide, raised high above the pens. In these chutes the
stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them,
pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our
friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors
of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it
all. The chutes into which the hogs went climbed high up--to the very
top of the distant buildings; and Jokubas explained that the hogs went
up by the power of their own legs, and then their weight carried them
back through all the processes necessary to make them into pork.

"They don't waste anything here," said the guide, and then he laughed
and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated
friends should take to be his own: "They use everything about the hog
except the squeal." In front of Brown's General Office building there
grows a tiny plot of grass, and this, you may learn, is the only bit
of green thing in Packingtown; likewise this jest about the hog and his
squeal, the stock in trade of all the guides, is the one gleam of humor
that you will find there.

After they had seen enough of the pens, the party went up the street,
to the mass of buildings which occupy the center of the yards. These
buildings, made of brick and stained with innumerable layers of
Packingtown smoke, were painted all over with advertising signs, from
which the visitor realized suddenly that he had come to the home of many
of the torments of his life. It was here that they made those products
with the wonders of which they pestered him so--by placards that defaced
the landscape when he traveled, and by staring advertisements in the
newspapers and magazines--by silly little jingles that he could not get
out of his mind, and gaudy pictures that lurked for him around every
street corner. Here was where they made Brown's Imperial Hams and
Bacon, Brown's Dressed Beef, Brown's Excelsior Sausages! Here was the
headquarters of Durham's Pure Leaf Lard, of Durham's Breakfast Bacon,
Durham's Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Deviled Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer!

Entering one of the Durham buildings, they found a number of other
visitors waiting; and before long there came a guide, to escort them
through the place. They make a great feature of showing strangers
through the packing plants, for it is a good advertisement. But Ponas
Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more
than the packers wanted them to. They climbed a long series of stairways
outside of the building, to the top of its five or six stories. Here was
the chute, with its river of hogs, all patiently toiling upward; there
was a place for them to rest to cool off, and then through another
passageway they went into a room from which there is no returning for
hogs.

It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At the
head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference,
with rings here and there along its edge. Upon both sides of this wheel
there was a narrow space, into which came the hogs at the end of their
journey; in the midst of them stood a great burly Negro, bare-armed and
bare-chested. He was resting for the moment, for the wheel had stopped
while men were cleaning up. In a minute or two, however, it began slowly
to revolve, and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work. They
had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the
other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel.
So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and
borne aloft.

At the same instant the car was assailed by a most terrifying shriek;
the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back.
The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing--for
once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of
the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the
room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another,
until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and
kicking in frenzy--and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous
to the eardrums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to
hold--that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high
squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a
momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up
to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors--the men
would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand
with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears
starting in their eyes.

Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were
going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors
made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and
one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long
line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together; until at
last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of
boiling water.

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was
porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And yet
somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the
hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were
so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights!
They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury,
as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded,
impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without the homage of
a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering
machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime
committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and
of memory.

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical,
without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog
squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was
nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where
they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was
a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were
brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and
lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his
own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full
of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And
trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a
black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway.
Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg.
Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were
nothing to it--it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his
feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched
him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere
a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these
hog squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his
arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him
the meaning of his sacrifice? Perhaps some glimpse of all this was in
the thoughts of our humble-minded Jurgis, as he turned to go on with the
rest of the party, and muttered: "Dieve--but I'm glad I'm not a hog!"

The carcass hog was scooped out of the vat by machinery, and then it
fell to the second floor, passing on the way through a wonderful machine
with numerous scrapers, which adjusted themselves to the size and shape
of the animal, and sent it out at the other end with nearly all of its
bristles removed. It was then again strung up by machinery, and sent
upon another trolley ride; this time passing between two lines of men,
who sat upon a raised platform, each doing a certain single thing to
the carcass as it came to him. One scraped the outside of a leg; another
scraped the inside of the same leg. One with a swift stroke cut the
throat; another with two swift strokes severed the head, which fell
to the floor and vanished through a hole. Another made a slit down
the body; a second opened the body wider; a third with a saw cut the
breastbone; a fourth loosened the entrails; a fifth pulled them out--and
they also slid through a hole in the floor. There were men to scrape
each side and men to scrape the back; there were men to clean the
carcass inside, to trim it and wash it. Looking down this room, one saw,
creeping slowly, a line of dangling hogs a hundred yards in length; and
for every yard there was a man, working as if a demon were after him. At
the end of this hog's progress every inch of the carcass had been gone
over several times; and then it was rolled into the chilling room, where
it stayed for twenty-four hours, and where a stranger might lose himself
in a forest of freezing hogs.

Before the carcass was admitted here, however, it had to pass a
government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in
the neck for tuberculosis. This government inspector did not have the
manner of a man who was worked to death; he was apparently not haunted
by a fear that the hog might get by him before he had finished his
testing. If you were a sociable person, he was quite willing to enter
into conversation with you, and to explain to you the deadly nature
of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was
talking with you you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a
dozen carcasses were passing him untouched. This inspector wore a blue
uniform, with brass buttons, and he gave an atmosphere of authority to
the scene, and, as it were, put the stamp of official approval upon the
things which were done in Durham's.

Jurgis went down the line with the rest of the visitors, staring
openmouthed, lost in wonder. He had dressed hogs himself in the forest
of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed
by several hundred men. It was like a wonderful poem to him, and he
took it all in guilelessly--even to the conspicuous signs demanding
immaculate cleanliness of the employees. Jurgis was vexed when the
cynical Jokubas translated these signs with sarcastic comments, offering
to take them to the secret rooms where the spoiled meats went to be
doctored.

The party descended to the next floor, where the various waste materials
were treated. Here came the entrails, to be scraped and washed clean for
sausage casings; men and women worked here in the midst of a sickening
stench, which caused the visitors to hasten by, gasping. To another room
came all the scraps to be "tanked," which meant boiling and pumping off
the grease to make soap and lard; below they took out the refuse, and
this, too, was a region in which the visitors did not linger. In still
other places men were engaged in cutting up the carcasses that had been
through the chilling rooms. First there were the "splitters," the most
expert workmen in the plant, who earned as high as fifty cents an hour,
and did not a thing all day except chop hogs down the middle. Then there
were "cleaver men," great giants with muscles of iron; each had two men
to attend him--to slide the half carcass in front of him on the table,
and hold it while he chopped it, and then turn each piece so that he
might chop it once more. His cleaver had a blade about two feet long,
and he never made but one cut; he made it so neatly, too, that his
implement did not smite through and dull itself--there was just enough
force for a perfect cut, and no more. So through various yawning
holes there slipped to the floor below--to one room hams, to another
forequarters, to another sides of pork. One might go down to this floor
and see the pickling rooms, where the hams were put into vats, and the
great smoke rooms, with their airtight iron doors. In other rooms they
prepared salt pork--there were whole cellars full of it, built up in
great towers to the ceiling. In yet other rooms they were putting up
meats in boxes and barrels, and wrapping hams and bacon in oiled paper,
sealing and labeling and sewing them. From the doors of these rooms went
men with loaded trucks, to the platform where freight cars were waiting
to be filled; and one went out there and realized with a start that he
had come at last to the ground floor of this enormous building.

Then the party went across the street to where they did the killing
of beef--where every hour they turned four or five hundred cattle into
meat. Unlike the place they had left, all this work was done on one
floor; and instead of there being one line of carcasses which moved to
the workmen, there were fifteen or twenty lines, and the men moved
from one to another of these. This made a scene of intense activity, a
picture of human power wonderful to watch. It was all in one great room,
like a circus amphitheater, with a gallery for visitors running over the
center.

Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few feet from the
floor; into which gallery the cattle were driven by men with goads which
gave them electric shocks. Once crowded in here, the creatures were
prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no
room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging, over
the top of the pen there leaned one of the "knockers," armed with a
sledge hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room echoed
with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking of the
steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the "knocker" passed on to
another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the pen was
raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out to
the "killing bed." Here a man put shackles about one leg, and pressed
another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air. There were
fifteen or twenty such pens, and it was a matter of only a couple of
minutes to knock fifteen or twenty cattle and roll them out. Then once
more the gates were opened, and another lot rushed in; and so out of
each pen there rolled a steady stream of carcasses, which the men upon
the killing beds had to get out of the way.

The manner in which they did this was something to be seen and never
forgotten. They worked with furious intensity, literally upon the
run--at a pace with which there is nothing to be compared except a
football game. It was all highly specialized labor, each man having his
task to do; generally this would consist of only two or three specific
cuts, and he would pass down the line of fifteen or twenty carcasses,
making these cuts upon each. First there came the "butcher," to bleed
them; this meant one swift stroke, so swift that you could not see
it--only the flash of the knife; and before you could realize it, the
man had darted on to the next line, and a stream of bright red was
pouring out upon the floor. This floor was half an inch deep with blood,
in spite of the best efforts of men who kept shoveling it through holes;
it must have made the floor slippery, but no one could have guessed this
by watching the men at work.

The carcass hung for a few minutes to bleed; there was no time lost,
however, for there were several hanging in each line, and one was always
ready. It was let down to the ground, and there came the "headsman,"
whose task it was to sever the head, with two or three swift strokes.
Then came the "floorsman," to make the first cut in the skin; and then
another to finish ripping the skin down the center; and then half a
dozen more in swift succession, to finish the skinning. After they were
through, the carcass was again swung up; and while a man with a stick
examined the skin, to make sure that it had not been cut, and another
rolled it tip and tumbled it through one of the inevitable holes in the
floor, the beef proceeded on its journey. There were men to cut it, and
men to split it, and men to gut it and scrape it clean inside. There
were some with hose which threw jets of boiling water upon it, and
others who removed the feet and added the final touches. In the end, as
with the hogs, the finished beef was run into the chilling room, to hang
its appointed time.

The visitors were taken there and shown them, all neatly hung in rows,
labeled conspicuously with the tags of the government inspectors--and
some, which had been killed by a special process, marked with the
sign of the kosher rabbi, certifying that it was fit for sale to the
orthodox. And then the visitors were taken to the other parts of the
building, to see what became of each particle of the waste material
that had vanished through the floor; and to the pickling rooms, and the
salting rooms, the canning rooms, and the packing rooms, where choice
meat was prepared for shipping in refrigerator cars, destined to be
eaten in all the four corners of civilization. Afterward they went
outside, wandering about among the mazes of buildings in which was done
the work auxiliary to this great industry. There was scarcely a
thing needed in the business that Durham and Company did not make for
themselves. There was a great steam power plant and an electricity
plant. There was a barrel factory, and a boiler-repair shop. There was a
building to which the grease was piped, and made into soap and lard; and
then there was a factory for making lard cans, and another for making
soap boxes. There was a building in which the bristles were cleaned
and dried, for the making of hair cushions and such things; there was a
building where the skins were dried and tanned, there was another where
heads and feet were made into glue, and another where bones were made
into fertilizer. No tiniest particle of organic matter was wasted in
Durham's. Out of the horns of the cattle they made combs, buttons,
hairpins, and imitation ivory; out of the shinbones and other big bones
they cut knife and toothbrush handles, and mouthpieces for pipes; out of
the hoofs they cut hairpins and buttons, before they made the rest into
glue. From such things as feet, knuckles, hide clippings, and sinews
came such strange and unlikely products as gelatin, isinglass,
and phosphorus, bone black, shoe blacking, and bone oil. They had
curled-hair works for the cattle tails, and a "wool pullery" for the
sheepskins; they made pepsin from the stomachs of the pigs, and albumen
from the blood, and violin strings from the ill-smelling entrails. When
there was nothing else to be done with a thing, they first put it into a
tank and got out of it all the tallow and grease, and then they made it
into fertilizer. All these industries were gathered into buildings near
by, connected by galleries and railroads with the main establishment;
and it was estimated that they had handled nearly a quarter of a
billion of animals since the founding of the plant by the elder Durham
a generation and more ago. If you counted with it the other big
plants--and they were now really all one--it was, so Jokubas informed
them, the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in
one place. It employed thirty thousand men; it supported directly two
hundred and fifty thousand people in its neighborhood, and indirectly it
supported half a million. It sent its products to every country in
the civilized world, and it furnished the food for no less than thirty
million people!

To all of these things our friends would listen openmouthed--it seemed
to them impossible of belief that anything so stupendous could have been
devised by mortal man. That was why to Jurgis it seemed almost profanity
to speak about the place as did Jokubas, skeptically; it was a thing
as tremendous as the universe--the laws and ways of its working no more
than the universe to be questioned or understood. All that a mere man
could do, it seemed to Jurgis, was to take a thing like this as he found
it, and do as he was told; to be given a place in it and a share in
its wonderful activities was a blessing to be grateful for, as one was
grateful for the sunshine and the rain. Jurgis was even glad that he had
not seen the place before meeting with his triumph, for he felt that the
size of it would have overwhelmed him. But now he had been admitted--he
was a part of it all! He had the feeling that this whole huge
establishment had taken him under its protection, and had become
responsible for his welfare. So guileless was he, and ignorant of the
nature of business, that he did not even realize that he had become an
employee of Brown's, and that Brown and Durham were supposed by all the
world to be deadly rivals--were even required to be deadly rivals by the
law of the land, and ordered to try to ruin each other under penalty of
fine and imprisonment!



Chapter 4


Promptly at seven the next morning Jurgis reported for work. He came
to the door that had been pointed out to him, and there he waited for
nearly two hours. The boss had meant for him to enter, but had not said
this, and so it was only when on his way out to hire another man that
he came upon Jurgis. He gave him a good cursing, but as Jurgis did not
understand a word of it he did not object. He followed the boss, who
showed him where to put his street clothes, and waited while he donned
the working clothes he had bought in a secondhand shop and brought with
him in a bundle; then he led him to the "killing beds." The work which
Jurgis was to do here was very simple, and it took him but a few minutes
to learn it. He was provided with a stiff besom, such as is used by
street sweepers, and it was his place to follow down the line the man
who drew out the smoking entrails from the carcass of the steer; this
mass was to be swept into a trap, which was then closed, so that no one
might slip into it. As Jurgis came in, the first cattle of the morning
were just making their appearance; and so, with scarcely time to look
about him, and none to speak to any one, he fell to work. It was a
sweltering day in July, and the place ran with steaming hot blood--one
waded in it on the floor. The stench was almost overpowering, but to
Jurgis it was nothing. His whole soul was dancing with joy--he was at
work at last! He was at work and earning money! All day long he was
figuring to himself. He was paid the fabulous sum of seventeen and a
half cents an hour; and as it proved a rush day and he worked until
nearly seven o'clock in the evening, he went home to the family with
the tidings that he had earned more than a dollar and a half in a single
day!

At home, also, there was more good news; so much of it at once that
there was quite a celebration in Aniele's hall bedroom. Jonas had been
to have an interview with the special policeman to whom Szedvilas had
introduced him, and had been taken to see several of the bosses, with
the result that one had promised him a job the beginning of the next
week. And then there was Marija Berczynskas, who, fired with jealousy by
the success of Jurgis, had set out upon her own responsibility to get a
place. Marija had nothing to take with her save her two brawny arms
and the word "job," laboriously learned; but with these she had marched
about Packingtown all day, entering every door where there were signs of
activity. Out of some she had been ordered with curses; but Marija was
not afraid of man or devil, and asked every one she saw--visitors and
strangers, or workpeople like herself, and once or twice even high and
lofty office personages, who stared at her as if they thought she was
crazy. In the end, however, she had reaped her reward. In one of the
smaller plants she had stumbled upon a room where scores of women and
girls were sitting at long tables preparing smoked beef in cans; and
wandering through room after room, Marija came at last to the place
where the sealed cans were being painted and labeled, and here she had
the good fortune to encounter the "forelady." Marija did not understand
then, as she was destined to understand later, what there was attractive
to a "forelady" about the combination of a face full of boundless good
nature and the muscles of a dray horse; but the woman had told her to
come the next day and she would perhaps give her a chance to learn the
trade of painting cans. The painting of cans being skilled piecework,
and paying as much as two dollars a day, Marija burst in upon the family
with the yell of a Comanche Indian, and fell to capering about the room
so as to frighten the baby almost into convulsions.