There are still all sorts of reasons towns were originated but perhaps livestock isn’t one of them. Livestock. An article nearly two decades old in the Dixon Telegraph by Jim Dunn mentions that livestock was the reason John Dixon came north to settle at the crossing of the Rock River. As with all stories there’s a beginning before the beginning. And this one opens in New York City in 1820 where Charles Boyd and John Dixon are partners in a merchant tailoring business.

You’d hardly think that two of our adventuresome pioneers were tailors but frontiersmen came in all varieties. Tailors sat quietly, we think, legs folded peacefully sewing a seam or wielding the huge scissors over a piece of wool to make a suit coat. Yes, American frontiersmen came in all categories.

Dixon and Boyd were double brothers-in-law; that is they’d married the others’ sister. Their lives and ideas thus were closely entwined ... And they were young in a nation trying out its wings after serious issues had been won through the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They were helping in making new rules for a country. Go West was a main theme. To Illinois.

Interesting stories have been written about these two, Dixon, age 36 and Boyd, 26; but this idea of livestock might not have occurred to everyone. When they did come to Illinois Boyd settled near Springfield while Dixon went up on the Illinois River to Ft. Clark, now Peoria, where he quickly became circuit and county clerk and a county judge as he tailored. For a couple of energetic guys, times were good. Their energies were noteworthy even among the wilderness individualist.

Cash money was very scarce on the frontier so barter or trade goods was used to pay bills. Boyd received several cattle in exchange for tailoring. As they accumulated, Boyd got to thinking who and where was there a market for fresh beef? Galena lead mines, that’s where. So he rounded up more beef on the hoof to set out for the Far North. He’d decided not to take the traditional centuries-old route parallel to the Mississippi River, the Indian and Military Trail, which went through hostile native American territory. But up through the center of the state which was just being blazed and/or talked about (it was 1827). It eventually would be called the “Sucker” or Peoria/Galena Trail as time passed.

We can’t imagine now just how rough it was to travel then, especially when there were no bridges, taverns or inns for food and shelter and an unyielding landscape. There weren’t even roads!

Finally, on arriving at the mines, cattle were converted into cash (mostly in silver) and then the way home had to be taken. Mud and mire, hunger and thirst and if any profit was made, reference doesn’t say but the trip was among the first of the livestock drives made as an example of those to follow.

Back in 1986 PDQ Me—The Book, tells lengthily about the “pig drives” undertaken by the Funk family of McLean County, known yet today for their quantity and quality of hogs! There are three articles full of interesting details concerning those livestock drives, their first also taking place in 1827. (The Book sells for $25.00 and gives the anecdotes we’re unable to include here!)

Pork was the most used of the meats because it could be selected, cured, preserved in many ways for future use. While cattle went in herds of two to three hundred with three to four men on horseback herding them. Pigs, however, numbered eight to twelve hundred in a herd. Eight to ten men on foot would attempt to keep them together. The boss would be on horseback to gallop after the wanderers.

And there were wanderers that escaped into the timbers to be “discovered” years afterward as “wild boars” and about which lies and fables would be told!! Daybreak to sunset was the work schedule. Cattle might travel twelve to fourteen miles a day, hots not that far. Cattle could graze along the way (usually in October) but feed had to be carried for the hogs. Perhaps, three wagons led the way one of which filled with the corn lured the stragglers; another to carry those who’d “broke down” and gear.

Those drives were widely undertaken throughout the Northwest. Alvin Humphrey, for instance, an early settler in Elkhorn Grove, went several times to central Illinois to buy hogs. We assume probably to McLean County! Humphrey was a noted “wag,” a jokester so perhaps his humor helped make the terrible trips more light-hearted.

If snow came early, livestock would freeze to death, men would suffer frostbite and many a story was told of those incidents.

Many ancillary businesses rose because of the livestock drives such as at Eagle Point in Ogle County or Portland Township in Whiteside, where large factories for making barrels suppled the mines in Galena or droves going to Missouri with containers in which to pack tons of pork. Substantial fortunes were made in this way. Yes, livestock was big business in many ways.

On his way home from his first trip with cattle to the lead mines, Charles Boyd stopped in Peoria to see his sister and regale John Dixon with positive aspects of the far northern landscapes ... Rolling prairie, timbers, streams, land waiting to be developed. This niggled at Dixon’s brain so he went out scouting.

Resigning his governmental jobs, he claimed some land north of Ft. Clark in what is now Milo Township in southeast Bureau County. The autumn of 1827 the Dixon family moved there, staying for about three years as Dixon continued to scout the area. He was taken with a rundown ferry crossing on the Rock River haphazardly kept by Joe Ogee who drank up whatever profits he accumulated. In 1830, then, Dixon took over the ferry, updating it to a reliable service and became known as “Father” Dixon for his kindly but shrewd character and whose reputation succeeds him to this day.

We do have to recognize that Dixon might have another reason besides a cattle drive as recommendation for moving north. It could have been because he’d won the contract in 1828 for delivering mail between Peoria and Galena. Dixon Crossing on the Rock would put him about in the middle between the two posts making it easier for he and his sons to deliver the mail between posts. Living in about the center at Dixon’s Crossing would have made it more efficient to go up or down mileage-wise.

Description from Boyd’s cattle drive might have been incentive to take up the mail contract. Boyd and his family, by the way, moved to the Bureau County site that Dixon had left. With an inn he kept known as “Boyd’s Grove,” it remains to this day.

We like the idea of a cattle drive as reason for Dixon’s move north.

Droving cattle, hogs, sheep, even horses in a little recognized chapter in the progress of our Northwest. They weren’t the romantic events we recall from Rowdy Yates films. There was bad food, frostbite and loss of limbs from it, drowning and frozen animals in deep snow or crossing rivers, starvation, disease and more. But there was the interesting talent of Isaac Funk who could “weight” a line of running hogs up a chute with his eye as the scale, a talent never known to be repeated. What tales could be told. Herding was a little known chapter in our development.

Only a few decades later the railroad took on the job of moving livestock. That’s why the tracks threaded their way across the prairies, as market for grain and animals, goods and produce. Bawling basts were loaded on crude freight cars to be sent to Chicago to the Stockyards. Cattle, perhaps had come from the West, fattened, then moved on. Though the Stockyards are no more, the site is still icon of the city’s history.

In the twentieth century then, motorized vehicles came into use ... Wooden slatted carriers were a common sight, sound and odor. Animals could efficiently be loaded from farmyard or stockyard. Every depot-market had a stockyard. Lanark even had a “Livestock Street,” a name we’ve only recently come across. It was Carroll Street, parallel to the railroad.

The late Kathryn Cook Bornback told of driving animals to town from south on Benson Road and channeled to Livestock Street where “cowboys” on horseback, corralled by the hundreds that wold bawl and cry, pee and poop, as animals do, cause some excitement in the usually quiet town and fill the street from the second block stockyard site east of Broad to five/six blocks west up on Carroll/Livestock! Few know of those events.

Or even think of how the herders and haulers have been a part of our history. If you know of haulers whose yells and whoops once filled the air, make a list before recall of them disappears altogether.