It seems like a lot of Omaha's history involves city leaders trying to convince the rest of the nation that Omaha isn't a cow town.

Even though for much of its history it's been the ultimate cow town.

(wistful bluegrass music) (wistful bluegrass music) [Narrator] The cattle industry began planting its roots in Nebraska as early as the 1860s.

Texas ranchers were bringing their Longhorns to Omaha's Union Pacific Railroad to get them to Eastern markets.

As more livestock made their way through the state, locals figured out there was money to be made.

And in 1882 the process to create the South Omaha Stockyards began.

(wistful bluegrass music) [Gary] It started by Alexander Hamilton Swan.

it was his idea.

He was a cattle baron from Wyoming and all his main purpose was to bring cattle in there to feed.

[David] There wasn't really a lot of money to be made doing that.

And so it didn't take very long before the investors in the stock yards started trying to draw meat packing companies to South Omaha, and they started with smaller operations.

And by the 1890s they had major meat packing plants, and four of the biggest companies were operating at the stockyards.

[Narrator] The rapid growth of the industry in South Omaha meant the population was growing too.

[David] So you go from, in 1884, South Omaha doesn't exist.

By the time they incorporated the city, it was its own city.

At first, they had about 1,500 people.

By 1890, there were 8,000 people living in South Omaha.

[Gary] More and more people came here.

And so you had the Polish, the Irish who really built South Omaha.

You had the Bohemians, the Croatians the Serbians, the Hungarians, the Russians the African Americans, the Mexican Americans.

What people don't realize is it's just not the stockyards.

It's just not the packing house.

It's also transportation where they had their own train the communication, you know, banks; all the banks were Packers National Bank Livestock National Bank; the truck washes, the hide sellers, the rendering plants.

I mean, it's a giant industry.

(piano music) [Narrator] The Omaha Stockyards were the third largest of its kind by the year 1900.

(piano music) It only continued to get bigger and by the time the 1950s came around, it was the biggest in the country.

The size of the operation was unlike anything else.

[Gary] In the 1950s, in its heyday when it became the world's largest, it was at times pulling in $1.7 million a day from all the activity that was going on.

(jazz music) Sunday nights was when the cattle would start and sheep and hogs would start coming on the trucks and they would line up all the way, maybe to 84th Street to 72nd Street, and they'd be hauling their cattle in.

So it was almost like every Sunday we would have this mass integration of these people in, and that's where the money came too because all these people were coming in, you know putting their cattle in the stock yards and having the commission firm sell them for them.

[David] You had an enormous number of stock pens and that continued to grow into the 1950s.

It just became absolutely vast.

(jazz music) You had raised walkways that went over the pens and so you would see a network of these walkways.

And of course, they're moving the cattle in and out and not just cattle, but also hogs and sheep.

Among the stockyards were, of course, the meat packing plants that processed the meat.

There was the Livestock Exchange Building, which did banking, had restaurants, had other associated businesses, and the city of South Omaha where the workers lived grew up all around this.

And so without the stockyards, there's no South Omaha.

[Narrator] The stockyards really built the town of South Omaha.

However, the comradery made it a town like no other.

(old western music) [Gary] At one time South Omaha was in the Guinness Book of World Records; more taverns per capita than any place in the world.

As a young man with a father who was a bartender, which made him royalty in South Omaha.

And I remember I would bring him supper at night after he would work all day, make more money at the bars.

And you'd see guys with no fingers and those were people who were butchers.

And then you'd see people with all this arthritis who were in the cold storage, where you could only be in there 20 minutes and you had to come out, get warm, get back in, and haul that stuff.

(old western music) You saw the people with blood up to here.

They'd be on the kill floor.

You can imagine being on the top floor of the Swift packing house, which was 13 floors high in 101 degrees up there, standing in that, cutting these cattle open as they're going one after another after another; very dangerous jobs.

And then we became connoisseurs of poop.

By that I mean is that you knew when they walked into that bar, if they were a hog man, a sheep man, or a cattleman by the smell.

And we all knew that the hogs were the worst.

So it became kind of an interesting dark humor.

But the fascinating part was, that it was very segregated in the neighborhoods.

You know, you had your Polish area, your Bohemian area your African area, your Mexican area, your Croatian area you know, had all these different groups but around the packing houses where the bars were and everything else, no one was denied a drink because of the work.

You know, people became kind of like, we're in this together.

[Narrator] As the late 1960s came around the livestock industry was starting to change.

South Omaha followed.

(soft guitar music) [David] A company, Iowa Beef Packers, IBP, as they were later known, decided that it would be more cost effective to build smaller plants closer to where the cattle were being raised.

And they also figured out that it was really inefficient to ship whole sides of beef which don't fit very conveniently into rail cars but to cut it up on site and box it and, and ship it.

(soft guitar music) By the late sixties, a lot of people are being laid off at the plants in South Omaha.

At the same time that new plants are being opened in smaller towns around the Midwest.

(soft guitar music) [Narrator] The stockyards and meat packing plants may have left the town of South Omaha (piano music) but the diversity it brought into the community remains.

[David] The lasting impact; one is ethnicity.

With Polish last names, Irish names, Czech names, et cetera, in Nebraska trace their family's history through South Omaha.

That's also true of many Latino people today.

(piano music) [Gary] When the packing houses closed in the sixties and the seventies and people started moving out, it became a ghost town.

All these restaurants and stores and clothing stores and all that were closing and it became a ghost town.

(piano music) Thank God that we had these new entrepreneur people coming in from the south and from Africa and all that.

They were creating and reestablishing these stores and these venues and everything else.

(soft music) I really believe that it set South Omaha up as our Ellis Island.

(soft music) (soft music) (soft music)