Stockyards City, Where the Cattle Economy Lives
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Exchange Avenue, a few miles southwest of downtown, is one of the more genuinely unreconstructed streets in the American West. The storefronts are low and brick. The smell of livestock arrives before the buildings come into view.
The boots in the shop windows are working boots, not decorative ones. Stockyards City is not a theme park version of a cattle town, it is what remains of an industry that once made Oklahoma City one of the largest livestock markets in the world. The Oklahoma City Stockyards opened in nineteen ten, barely twenty years after the Land Run.
The cattle economy had been growing in Indian Territory since before statehood, and the new city's position on the rail lines made it a natural collection point for livestock moving east to the Chicago and Kansas City packing houses. By the nineteen fifties, the Oklahoma City yards were processing more cattle than any other market in the country, at peak years, more than six million head annually passed through the exchange. The work was hard and unglamorous.
Cattle arrived by rail from ranches across western Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, and Kansas. Cowboys on horseback worked them through the pens. Commission men and buyers made deals over handshakes on the exchange floor.
The business district that grew up around the yards, the saddle shops, the hat shops, the cafes, was built by and for the working trade, not the tourist trade. The market shrank as the industry consolidated and meatpacking moved closer to the feedlots in Kansas and Nebraska through the nineteen seventies and eighties. But the Oklahoma City Stockyards never fully closed.
It remains an operational livestock auction, one of the largest in the country, and the Exchange Avenue district is a designated historic area. Cattlemen's Steakhouse, which has served the stockyards since nineteen ten, still serves lunch in a dining room decorated with branding irons. The boots, the hats, and the handshake deals are still there.
They are just quieter than they used to be.
