Where is packingtown in the jungle

Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it.

The hands of these men would be crisscrossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or trace them.

There were men who had worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator cars, a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in two years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism, the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years.

There were the wool pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off.

There were those who made tile tins for the canned meat, and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Upton Sinclair. Previous Next. Maynard Mikolas "Pat" Murphy Mrs. What's Up With the Ending? Tired of ads? Join today and never see them again. Get started. The development of the refrigerated rail car in the s prompted exponential growth in the industry.

By , more than 30 large packing houses had been established to the west of the yards. Well into the 20th century, immigrants arriving in Chicago found jobs in the slaughter houses and packing plants and took up residence in the surrounding community.

The Chicago packing industry began its slide into decline in the s. In , the Union Stockyard closed its doors entirely. For directions using public transportation visit www. Skip to content.