-Caveat Lector-
from
Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"
"Bubbly Creek" is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the southern
boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the square mile of packing
houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred
or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth stays there
forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured into it
undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the cause of its
name; it is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or
great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles of carbonic
acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three
feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the
creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and
many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished
temporarily. The packers used to leave the creek that way, till every now
and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and the fire
department would have to come and put it out. Once, however, an ingenious
stranger came and started to gather this filth in scows, to make lard out
of; then the packers took the cue, and got an injunction to stop him, and
afterward gathered it themselves. The banks of "Bubbly Creek" are
plastered thick with hairs, and this also the packers gather and clean.
Theere were the men in the picklerooms for instance....scarce a one to
these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much
as scrape his finger pucshing a truck in the pickerooms and he might have
a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers
might be eaten by the acid, one by one. 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 lumpof flesh against
which the man pressed the knife to hold it. THe hands of these men would
be crisscrossed with cuts, untilyou could no longer pretend to count them
or to trace them. They would have no nails--they had worn them off
pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread
out like a fan.
There were men who 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 a few
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 the 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 the
tins for the canned meat; and their hands too, were a maze of cuts, and
each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning.
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