Beef Moves to Nebraska
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The Civil War & Texas Beef
Soldiers eating outside at a tent camp
Source: Library of Congress.
The Civil War caused two phenomena that would later grow into the American beef industry:
  1. the development of industrial meat processing, and

  2. the Union’s blockage of Texas trade from the rest of the U.S. as well as other markets.

Birth of Industrial Meat Processing

Gustavus Swift
Source: U.S. Public Domain, Courtesy Wikipedia Commons		 The Union had a huge army, one that needed food. To meet this demand, innovative butchers in Chicago with names like Gustavus Swift and P. D. Armour acquired large buildings, hired every butcher they could find, and bought every head of livestock in the region that was available to them.
P. D. Armour
Source: U.S. Public Domain, Courtesy Wikipedia Commons



Disassembly plant where meat was packed into barrels —
the government used the meat to feed the army
Source: Library of Congress
These two meat-processing industrialists created what they called "disassembly plants", in which a steer would enter the plant, be slaughtered, processed, and emerge at the end canned or packed in barrels. This meat was then sold to the government to feed the army.

Cattle Stuck in Texas
Click the Magnifying Glass icon or the map for a closer look.

Mag Me! During the Civil War, the Mississippi River
was blockaded by the Union forces
Source: Library of Congress Geography & Map Division
In Texas, a southern state, many of the men who worked the ranches went off to war. And by 1862, the Union’s naval embargo and hold on the Mississippi River cut Texas off from the traditional markets for its cattle: the other southern states and Great Britain.

When the war ended, Texans, as with other Confederate states, returned to find their state’s economy in ruins. But during the War, the cattle on the Texas plains continued to breed and multiply. So at the end of the Civil War, there were cattle in the south and a demand in the north.

In the video, Civil War & Texas Beef, national events set the scene for beef moving to Nebraska.