n the produce and commission business.
Each man put in five hundred dollars. The business prospered. One of the
great products in demand was smoked and pickled meats. At that time
farmers salted and smoked hams and brought them to town, with furs,
pelts and bags of wheat.

All the tide of humanity that streamed into Milwaukee, westward bound,
bought smoked or pickled meats--something that would keep and be always
handy.

These were Winter-packed. The largest packer was John Plankinton, who
was a success. John was knowing, and he made Phil. Armour his junior
partner, as Plankinton and Armour. Then business sizzled. They were at
the plant at four o'clock in the morning. They discovered how to make a
hog yield four hams. Our soldiers needed the hams and the barreled pork,
so shortly more hogs came to market. The War's end found the new firm
much stronger and well stocked with large orders for mess-pork, sold for
future delivery at war-time prices, which contracts they filled at a
much lower cost and to their financial satisfaction. Their guesser was
good and they prospered.

Meantime, the city of Chicago grew faster than Milwaukee. There was a
rich country south of Chicago, as well as west, and of this Philip
Armour had really never thought.

Chicago was a better market for pickled pork and corned beef than
Milwaukee, as more boats fitted out there, and more emigrants were
landing on their way to take up government land.

One of Mr. Armour's brothers, Joe, was a packer in Chicago. Another
brother, H. O., was in the commission business there. Joe's health, it
seems, was pretty bad, so in Eighteen Hundred Seventy, Philip Armour
came to Chicago, and shortly the house of Armour and Company came into
being--H. O. Armour going to New York to look after Eastern trade and
financing. In those days branch houses were unknown and packing-house
products were handled by jobbers.

* * * * *

The Father of the Packing-House Industry was Philip Danforth Armour. The
business of the Packing-House Industry is to gather up the food-products
of America and distribute them to the world.

Let the fact here be stated that the world is better fed today than it
ever has been since Herodotus sharpened his faber and began writing
history, four hundred fifty years before Christ. In this matter of food,
the danger lies in overeating and not in lack of provender.

The business of Armour and Company is to buy fro