Transportation, for
freight and passengers, in a rapidly growing city of the late nineteenth
century relied heavily on horsepower supplied by . . . horses. In Chicago during this period it is estimated
that close to 75,000 horses were stabled within the city, there being 9 horses
for every 22 of the city’s inhabitants. [Tarr & McShane. The Horse as an Urban
Technology. www.tandfonline.com]
After about 1850 technology moved away from the horse drawn omnibus for transporting passengers in a city to trolleys
that rode on rails laid at street level.
It was an improvement for patrons who paid cheaper fares for faster and
more dependable transportation around town.
It was still an burden for the horses.
“The equipment
proved a nightmare to operate,” wrote Perry R. Duis in his Challenging Chicago. “The
weight of the car and the frequent stops and starts exhausted the animals after
traveling only a few miles of a route.
The company had no choice but to own and maintain a large herd—usually
seven horses for each car—which also required a lot of blacksmiths, grooms,
hostlers, and barn hands as well. Many
of the animals perished each year because of falls, rough handling, or other
urban hazards.”
Particularly hard
on a horse’s vulnerable legs was pulling the dead weight of the loaded trolley from a standing start, something that happened over and over again as
it plied the route. Horses could
generally work no more than five hours without being totally exhausted, and
they were usually kept on the transit routes no more than five years before
they were sold or put down.
There were times
when the price of horseflesh brought more for a carcass than one being sold
after retirement from the transit lines.
No insurance was paid to an owner who destroyed his own animal, so many
horses were worked until they dropped dead in the streets. Rendering companies bid on the rights to pick
up dead animals, guaranteeing their service within a few hours of the death of
the horse.
Consider this
account from Chicago, carried in The
Chicago Daily Tribune on this date, December 20, in 1871.
A cold rain had
been falling that day until 2:00 in the afternoon when it began to snow. At about that time a horse trolley left
Cottage Grove, drawn by an “emaciated, woe-begone-looking white horse, that
stumbled along as if on its way to a bone yard.” [Chicago
Daily Tribune, December 20, 1870]
Because of the snow
the car was crowded. The horse was
shoeless while “the cobblestones remained slippery. The horse “under this combination of adverse
circumstances” was “about as often down as up, slipping all the time.”
By the time the
trolley reached Harrison Street (probably having traveled four miles or more), there were two
inches of snow on the tracks. The cars
following this one began to stack up until there were 17 cars lined up looking
“for all the world like a funeral procession.”
“Every time the car
came to a halt, which was about every fifty yards, the horse would sink
together from sheer exhaustion, and there was a trembling in every limb. When encouraged to make a fresh start it
would be convulsed with spasm, sway from side to side, and fall on its knees,
but full of good pluck, somehow would manage to get started again.”
When it came to the
end of the line, there were 22 cars piled up behind the poor horse and the car
it was pulling.
Scenes like this
were commonplace in the wild days of growth just before and after the fire of
1871. Next time I am out in the cold,
waiting on the 151 and see two of them pull up to the stop, one after the
other, I’ll swipe my fare card, thinking of that poor exhausted nag, pulling its heavy load
of citizens through the Chicago snow.
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