The next day being Saturday, and the mercury still standing at seven degrees above zero, I walked to Covington, and crossed the suspension-bridge to Cincinnati.  It was the season of the year when the vast pork-packing establishments were in full blast, and the amount of work done spoke well for western enterprise.

Pork-raising and pork-packing is one of the great industries of the Ohio valley, and the Cincinnati and Louisville merchants have control of the largest portion of the business growing out of it.

When a stranger visits the pork-packing establishments of Cincinnati he marvels at the immensity and celerity of the various manipulations, which commence with the killing of a squealing pig, and the transformation of his hogship, in a few minutes, into a well-cleaned animal, hanging up to cool in a store-room, from which he is taken a little later and immediately cut up and packed in barrels for market.  The reader may have a distaste for statistics, but I cannot impress upon him the magnitude of this great industry without giving a few reliable figures.

The number of hogs packed in Cincinnati during the past twenty-one years, from 1853 to 1875, was 9,242,972.  While Cincinnati was at work on one season’s crop of pork of 632,302 pigs, her rival, Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan, killed and packed in the same time her crop of 2,501,285 animals.

The “Twenty-ninth Annual Report of the Cincinnati Price Current,” published while the author has been writing this chapter, shows what our country can do in supplying meat for foreign as well as home markets.  The states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, contributed to the packing establishments between November 1, 1877, and March 1, 1878, during the winter season of six months, 6,505,446 hogs; and during the summer season, from March 1 to November 1, 2,543,120 animals,—­making a one year’s total of 9,048,566 pigs, which averaged a net weight, when dressed, of two hundred and twenty-six pounds.  Thus the weight of meat alone packed in one year was 2,044,975,916 pounds.  Add to this the crop of California, Oregon, and Canada of the same year, and the total swells to 12,301,589 hogs, duly registered as having been killed by the pork-packers, and there still remain uncounted all the pigs killed in thirty-eight states by farmers for their own and neighbors’ consumption.

This annual crop of pork a jocund professor once described as “a prodigious mass of heavy carburetted hydrogen gas and scrofula;” but the chemists of our day would more properly stigmatize it as a vast quantity of Luzic, Myristic, Palmitic, Margaric, and Stearic acids in combination with glycerine and fibre.