Photograph Courtesy of the Missouri State Archives
Lambs arriving at the East St. Louis stockyards trotted into a 500-foot-long building with “Hotel de Sheep” painted over the door. It was well-drained and offered its residents sweet hay suspended from a wooden spindle; at capacity, it held 10,000 head. This postcard—perhaps it is the animals’ mild faces, their jumbly configuration or the two Beau Brummells bending their jaunty canes against the feedlot floor—feels more like a snapshot of a society ball than a slaughterhouse. One is tempted for a moment to connect it to East St. Louis’ sparkling things: the soda- and glucose-works, the icehouses, the real society balls. In stockyards, of course, nothing sparkles, just glistens with metal or blood. These guys left the Hotel de Sheep through the canneries, the rendering plants and the carbon-works whose kiln reduced tons of animal bone to pounds of charcoal. Not even the smallest trace escaped: “Baugh’s Catch Basin,” a huge apparatus on the bank of Cahokia Creek, even strained away “the superfluous grease that escaped through the sewer from the packing houses.” But they couldn’t can the pig’s oink, or the sheep’s soul. We insist these fellows trotted gently to the other world, like the sheep painted on the walls of fourth-century catacombs wearing milk pails, suspended on a pastoral staff, over their unbreakable backs.
(Image from the Mary Alice Hansen Postcard Collection)
