Stockyard denizens in blue blazers and in Carhartt overalls, in fine cowboy hats and in cheap baseball caps, pause in the gray morning cold to talk memories and to sell memorabilia. The new owners will soon bulldoze everything to make room for more buildings of light industry pens for people. So this day Friday, Ap is the last day, closing a deal struck over a year ago when the owner of the stockyards, the Central Livestock Association, sold off the last 27 acres of what was once 166 acres of mooing, bleating, undulating commerce. A police officer’s shotgun blast soon freed the animal from worrying about the evening commute.
A bull weighing nearly a ton apparently did not like what it had been sold for and wound up for a while on Interstate 494 during the morning rush hour. Punctuation to this reality came in January, when yet another animal escaped from the stockyards. The increasingly awkward presence of livestock in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, accustomed now to more sophisticated aromas than what wafts from the pens. Times have overtaken the stockyards, for reasons too obvious to dispute. No longer can the end be forestalled by milk-and-meat memories of 122 years by the boast that these trampled grounds once constituted the largest stockyards in the world by the vital daily ritual of muck-flecked yardmen coaxing muck-flecked cows into the sales barn, where the auctioneer’s sweet serenade only hardens those bovine expressions of uh-oh.
The cattle adieu has been years in the planning, but now it is time. So long, so long, they call out to the oblivious human bustle. In a place that no longer belongs where it has always been, there rises from wood-slat pens the farewell lows and bellows of cold, wet cows.
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