Turning up our noses at 'packinghouse perfume.'

 

For decades, "the river ran red" with packinghouse waste 

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

When you live most of your days out in the middle of nowhere, (otherwise known as a remote ranch out on Morapos Creek, between Craig and Meeker) you appreciate the chance to ‘go to town’ once in a while. My Granddad liked to ride the train into the stockyards at Denver with the product when he sold cattle. By most accounts, he looked forward to it all year.

“For most of a century, Denver's stockyards teemed with cows and other critters all year long - not just when the annual stock show rolled into town.

From the 1880s through the 1960s, Denver was the region's go-to bazaar for buying and selling livestock,” wrote Joanne Kelley in a 2006 article in the Rocky Mountain News.

For decades, "the river ran red" with packinghouse waste until rendering plants began processing it, according to Colorado historian Tom Noel's book, “Riding High.”
"Though they cleaned up the river, rendering plants fouled the air with pungent odors that downwind Denverites sniffed about," according to Noel.

But with better roads and the growth of the trucking industry, the stockyards and the packing plants dispersed into local ‘sale barns’ and the big plants moved away from the city. By 1980, the big yards in Denver were all but shut down as a year-round concern and only memories remained of its former prominence.

“I was born in Chicago about the time of the Spanish-American War. My father, Ralph C. Edwards, had been employed by Stafford Brothers in the Chicago Stockyards. He got a position at $40 a month with Clay, Robinson & Co, at the Denver Union Stockyards,” wrote Mrs. Avery Edwards Abbott in an article titled “I Remember Denver,” in the September, 1962 edition of the Denver Westerners Monthly Roundup. “Our first home in Denver was at 36th and Williams, near old Chutes Park (which terrified the daylights out of me).”

“I recall the old Denver Carnivals, held in the fall, I think. These were a kind of Mardi Gras, with parades and so on, to which my mother took me. Carfare was a nickel, and so was a loaf of bread. We could buy enough beef for supper for a dime, and the butcher gave you a piece of liverwurst free and threw in enough liver for the cat,” wrote Abbott.

She and her family later moved to Elyria, which was a village in Denver County with a population of 1384 in 1900. It was also called Pullman by the railroad and boasted 26 saloons.

“I remember the torchlight parades, to which Father took me when McKinley was assassinated,” she said. “Father took me for a walk every afternoon and often the walk ended at the Stockyards. I was terrified beyond voice when we took the catwalks above the waving heads of the longhorns in the corrals. The hogs fascinated me, as did the sheep. (Such smelly tastes!”

Abbott tells of Mr. Fine and Mr. Gill at the Stockyards Bank and walking back and forth from home and there for her mother when she was only 6 years old.

“It never occurred to anyone that there was any danger or my purse being snatched or my being molested. The stockmen, many of them knew who I was and stopped to inquire about Mother and my baby brother. They had been faithful in coming to see Father during his last illness.”

She describes taking the Stout Street cars, one which was marked “Stockyards,” when going down town to Hurlbut’s Grocery, in the Loop, where bananas were ten cents a dozen.

“In the winter, Hurlbut’s smelled of hot coffee, buttered popcorn, cupcakes, overshoes and wet clothing. In summer, large glass jars of lemonade were on display, and cookies, candies, magazines and other penny-catchers.”

Butter was 15 cents a pound. Lion and Arbuckle were the popular brands for coffee.
“I remember the day when three Polish workmen at the Omaha and Grant Smelter (the shadow of whose smokestack almost fell across our house, and whose smoke was said to kill all our germs) were sitting on kegs of dynamite while eating their lunch. They had the bad judgment to strike matches on the kegs to light their pipes. Parts of the men were picked up all over town and windows were shattered for several blocks around. It was quite an occasion!”

Of course the perfume of the packinghouses blended with the smelter smoke, she said.

“Some of Mother’s friends turned their noses pretty high when they came to see us. But this was not so they could sniff the perfume to greater advantage.”

With all the different sights, and sounds, and smells and events, it is no wonder that my own grandfather looked forward to ‘going to town’ every year on his trips to the stockyards in Denver.

###

Photo Information: Photos by Marion Post Walcott and Arthur Rothstein from Farm Security Administration, taken at Denver Stockyards, andin Craig, Colorado, stockyard, in 1939 and 1941.

Spain gets a 'bad rap' for 1918 flu

Origins may have been closer to home

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

A virulent strain of influenza, called the Spanish flu because it was incorrectly believed to have started in Spain, spread throughout the globe beginning in the spring of 1918.
Its origins may have been much closer to home.

By early October, it had resulted in shutdowns in Denver, mandated by progressive health officials, who closed the city for three weeks.

"The closing of Denver depends wholly of the spread of the disease," said Dr. (William H.) Sharpley. (Sharpley was the city's manager of health.) "It will be, naturally, absolutely necessary for the city to be closed while there is any danger. The main danger now menacing Denver is from outside towns and strangers arriving in the city from various sections of the country where the scourge is prevailing," according to Rocky Mountain News of Oct. 10, 1918.

Headlines in the Rocky, for that date read:

CITY TO BE SHUT
THREE WEEKS TO
CHECK EPIDEMIC
Five Additional Deaths Reported Yesterday
Scourge Believed To Be Under Control

"There were approximately 500 cases in the city reported to Dr. Sharpley yesterday and he says that the death rate shows the disease is well in hand in Denver, but that in Denver and in towns thruout the state will be closed for the full three weeks, the run of the disease."

The newspaper outlined other cities in the state where public meeting places, including schools, churches, theaters, pool halls and lodge rooms  were suspended: Colorado Springs, Boulder, Golden, Pueblo, Sterling, Fort Morgan, Delta, La Junta, Rocky Ford, Florence, Gunnison, Walsenburg

Scientists still cannot say for sure where the Spanish Flu originated, though theories point to France, China, Britain, or the United States, where the first known case was reported at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas, in March of 1918. Many American scientists believe infected soldiers spread the disease to other military camps across the country, then brought it overseas. In March 1918, 84,000 American soldiers headed across the Atlantic and were followed by 118,000 more the following month.

According to the History channel:
"The Spanish Flu did not originate in Spain, though news coverage of it did. During World War I, Spain was a neutral country with a free media that covered the outbreak from the start, first reporting on it in Madrid in late May of 1918. Meanwhile, Allied countries and the Central Powers had wartime censors who covered up news of the flu to keep morale high. Because Spanish news sources were the only ones reporting on the flu, many believed it originated there (the Spanish, meanwhile, believed the virus came from France and called it the “French Flu.)"

Just before breakfast on the morning of March 4, Private Albert Gitchell of the U.S. Army reported to the hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of the cold-like symptoms of sore throat, fever and headache. By noon, over 100 of his fellow soldiers had reported similar symptoms, marking what are believed to be the first cases in the historic influenza pandemic of 1918, later known as Spanish flu. The flu would eventually kill 675,000 Americans and an estimated 20 million to 50 million people around the world, proving to be a far deadlier force than even the war those troops were sent to fight..

"Spanish Flu” was first reported in Colorado on September 21, 1918, among the Student Army Training Corp stationed at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Hundreds of soldiers were sickened and 19 later died, according to Katie Randolph, of the Denver Public Library On September 27, 1918, a young Denver University student named Blanche Kennedy, died of pneumonia a few days after returning from a trip to Chicago, according to University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine. It was Denver’s first influenza-related death.

The initial outbreak of the disease, reported at Fort Riley in March, was followed by similar outbreaks in army camps and prisons in various regions of the country. The disease soon traveled to Europe with the American soldiers heading to aid the Allies on the battlefields of France. (In March 1918 alone, 84,000 American soldiers headed across the Atlantic; another 118,000 followed them the next month.) Once it arrived on a second continent, the flu showed no signs of abating: 31,000 cases were reported in June in Great Britain. The disease was soon dubbed the Spanish flu due to the shockingly high number of deaths in Spain (some 8 million, it was reported) after the initial outbreak there in May 1918.

Photo Info:
1. Nurses and patients are treated in the makeshift hospital at the Sopris mining camp in 1918.
2. Canon City High School students wear masks during the 1918 pandemic. History Colorado.
3. Doctors at that time knew little about the prevention or cure for the virus.

Denver's Auto Bandit Chaser helps local police tackle advanced criminal elements

Unit designed to counter an epidemic of bank robberies

No major technological change has ever been instituted by mankind without an array of negative consequences. The motor car has meant liberation for millions, but it has also caused congestion, environmental damage, and a disturbing death toll on the roads. Theo Paphitis
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/technological

No major technological change has ever been instituted by mankind without an array of negative consequences. The motor car has meant liberation for millions, but it has also caused congestion, environmental damage, and a disturbing death toll on the roads. Theo Paphitis
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/technological

"No major technological change has ever been instituted by without an array of negative consequences. The motor car had meant liberation for millions, but it has also caused congestion, environmental damage, and a disturbing death toll on the roads." __ Theo Paphitis


By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

If you are a police officer, or even a private crime fighter, it can be hell trying to keep up with the crooks. Evidence: the Batmobile, Starsky and Hutch's Gran Torino, Scooby Doo's Mystery Machine, or even Magnum P.I.'s Ferrari GTS 308. Nothing illustrated that idea more that advent of Denver's Auto Bandit Chaser.
 "With the widespread use of the automobile, the motor bandit has come into existence as the modern successor of the old-time Knight of the road. The auto bandit is the most daring, ingenious, and swiftly moving hold up of all time, and payroll messengers, banks and trains are his prey," says the February, 1921, edition of Popular Mechanics in an article by E.C MacMechen.
"The city of Denver has made special provision for the construction of an auto bandit chaser, a 90-hp, armored car with racing ability. The car is under construction now. The manager of safety procured a standard chassis and engine, and the special body is being built by city shops."
Listed as features of the car were as follows:
• It has no windshield.
• Three tiers of seats, holding officers armed with trench guns.
• On the wide running boards, just in front of the rear fenders, are single chairs with shoulder rests, each holding an officer with a trench gun.
• The wheels are protected by armor-plated fenders, reaching well around the axle, so that the bandit chaser may run against a fleeing car and force it into the ditch.
• The radiator is guarded with steel plates, and the car has a steel ram, capable of knocking down a board fence, or breaking through a barbed wire fence, if the bandits take to the open prairies to the east of Denver.
• The tiers of seats — each enabling its occupants to shoot over the heads of those in the seat before them —and side seats , allow eight officer to shoot at the car ahead with high-power rifles.
• The car has no top to obstruct vision.
MacMechen writes that, "The idea of the car germinated after numerous auto bandits had escaped pursuing officers because the latter had to lean around the windshield to shoot."
According to MacMechen:
"The car will come into the greatest use after robberies of unusual magnitude, the bandits in such cases usually leaving the city in high-power cars and taking to the prairie or mountain roads. Nearly always it is possible to get trace of their route from filing stations."
Other publications also weighed in, at the time.
"Crime in varying phases, which has recently swept over the country, is tasking the resourcefulness of the several police departments to frustrate the lawless element and to capture the criminals. New methods employed by the law breakers are being met by new methods of detection and arrest, one of the latest being the auto bandit chaser which the city of Denver intends to install as a unit of its police equipment," said a 1921 edition of The Modern City.
"Police methods of apprehending criminals must change with the times. Instead of the mounted highway men of the cross roads and bands of desperate horsemen that held up trains a dozen years ago, police officers are now called upon to check a type of bandit more resourceful and swifter in flight than the world has ever known. The automobile is responsible for the development of the motor bandit. Not only have highwaymen taken to automobiles, but the whiskey runner, who has started operations in all parts of the country since the advent of prohibition, is as daring an outlaw as the train bandit and will shoot to kill just as quickly," noted The Modern City.
Kansas Banker noted also the changes in the supposed demographic makeup of the the new outlaws.
"The modern bandit appears to mostly young men in their early twenties, of the wise-'cracking' 'gun-flashing' silk-shirted, cake-eater type, each the proud possessor of a supposed-to-be smart 'Broad.'
According to Elizabeth Victoria Wallace in her book Hidden History of Denver at least some parts of the elaborate plan of an Auto Bandit Chaser to wreak havoc on crime was a bit of a pipe dream.
"It is reported that when a policeman fired the machine gun during a demonstration, it rocked loose from its base and was ineffective," she wrote.

Photo Information: Denver police officers pose with Denver's Auto Bandit Chaser in Civic Center Park in the Civic Center Neighborhood of Denver, Colorado. The car is a Cadillac modified by the Izett Auto Body Company to include bullet-proof armor plate, a bullet-proof windshield, spot lights, and a machine gun. Captain George Merritt aims the machine gun from the front passenger seat. Men of the riot squad occupy the other seats and hold bayonets, trench guns, and high powered rifles. Officials from city government and the police department stand nearby. Prominent individuals include from left to right: Manager of Safety and Excise, Frank M. Downer; Chief of Police, Herbert R. Williams; and Acting Deputy Chief, Robert Carter. The Voorhies Memorial is in the distance.

Western History and Genealogy Dept., Denver Public Library

Turning up your nose at the stockyards

For decades, "the river ran red" with packinghouse waste 

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

When you live most of your days out in the middle of nowhere, (otherwise known as a remote ranch out on Morapos Creek, between Craig and Meeker) you appreciate the chance to ‘go to town’ once in a while. My Granddad liked to ride the train into the stockyards at Denver with the product when he sold cattle. By most accounts, he looked forward to it all year.
“For most of a century, Denver's stockyards teemed with cows and other critters all year long - not just when the annual stock show rolled into town.
From the 1880s through the 1960s, Denver was the region's go-to bazaar for buying and selling livestock,” wrote Joanne Kelley in a 2006 article in the Rocky Mountain News.
For decades, "the river ran red" with packinghouse waste until rendering plants began processing it, according to Colorado historian Tom Noel's book, “Riding High.”
"Though they cleaned up the river, rendering plants fouled the air with pungent odors that downwind Denverites sniffed about," according to Noel.
But with better roads and the growth of the trucking industry, the stockyards and the packing plants dispersed into local ‘sale barns’ and the big plants moved away from the city. By 1980, the big yards in Denver were all but shut down as a year-round concern and only memories remained of its former prominence.
“I was born in Chicago about the time of the Spanish-American War. My father, Ralph C. Edwards, had been employed by Stafford Brothers in the Chicago Stockyards. He got a position at $40 a month with Clay, Robinson & Co, at the Denver Union Stockyards,” wrote Mrs. Avery Edwards Abbott in an article titled “I Remember Denver,” in the September, 1962 edition of the Denver Westerners Monthly Roundup. “Our first home in Denver was at 36th and Williams, near old Chutes Park (which terrified the daylights out of me).”
“I recall the old Denver Carnivals, held in the fall, I think. These were a kind of Mardi Gras, with parades and so on, to which my mother took me. Carfare was a nickel, and so was a loaf of bread. We could buy enough beef for supper for a dime, and the butcher gave you a piece of liverwurst free and threw in enough liver for the cat,” wrote Abbott.
She and her family later moved to Elyria, which was a village in Denver County with a population of 1384 in 1900. It was also called Pullman by the railroad and boasted 26 saloons.
“I remember the torchlight parades, to which Father took me when McKinley was assassinated,” she said. “Father took me for a walk every afternoon and often the walk ended at the Stockyards. I was terrified beyond voice when we took the catwalks above the waving heads of the longhorns in the corrals. The hogs fascinated me, as did the sheep. (Such smelly tastes!”
Abbott tells of Mr. Fine and Mr. Gill at the Stockyards Bank and walking back and forth from home and there for her mother when she was only 6 years old.
“It never occurred to anyone that there was any danger or my purse being snatched or my being molested. The stockmen, many of them knew who I was and stopped to inquire about Mother and my baby brother. They had been faithful in coming to see Father during his last illness.”
She describes taking the Stout Street cars, one which was marked “Stockyards,” when going down town to Hurlbut’s Grocery, in the Loop, where bananas were ten cents a dozen.
“In the winter, Hurlbut’s smelled of hot coffee, buttered popcorn, cupcakes, overshoes and wet clothing. In summer, large glass jars of lemonade were on display, and cookies, candies, magazines and other penny-catchers.”
Butter was 15 cents a pound. Lion and Arbuckle were the popular brands for coffee.
“I remember the day when three Polish workmen at the Omaha and Grant Smelter (the shadow of whose smokestack almost fell across our house, and whose smoke was said to kill all our germs) were sitting on kegs of dynamite while eating their lunch. They had the bad judgment to strike matches on the kegs to light their pipes. Parts of the men were picked up all over town and windows were shattered for several blocks around. It was quite an occasion!”
Of course the perfume of the packinghouses blended with the smelter smoke, she said.
“Some of Mother’s friends turned their noses pretty high when they came to see us. But this was not so they could sniff the perfume to greater advantage.”
With all the different sights, and sounds, and smells and events, it is no wonder that my own grandfather looked forward to ‘going to town’ every year on his trips to the stockyards in Denver.
###