[Harold Shea]

Rough living back...the horses looked malnourshed

The children working on the street...bet the smell

of the city would knock a person of today backwards

[Oatka]

Rough living back...the horses looked malnourshed
The children working on the street...bet the smell
of the city would knock a person of today backwards

Walter A. Wyckoff walked/worked his way across America in 1891-93 as a Social Experiment to see if an unskilled laborer could make it. (Unskilled wages then were 12 1/2 cents per hour for a 10-hour day.) He wrote three books that became best sellers in the 1900s - "The Workers - East" "-West", and "A Day With A Tramp".

His worst time was December-May in 1892 Chicago. He mentioned how the horse manure was ground into a pasty slime and how the women had to raise their skirts "to keep from being befouled" as the stuff was tracked on to the sidewalks. The place must have reeked in the summertime, but he never mentioned it in any of his travels. Must have been so commonplace he was used to it.

He did mention walking in some area that just had boards for a sidewalk and the slime would ooze up between the cracks as he walked along. He ran across two very young girls sifting through a slop barrel outside a saloon and crying with joy when they found a "rancid piece of meat". The "Good Old Days" - weren't - for many working class people.

Now, if one doesn't have a cell phone, tablet and a flat screen, they are "underprivileged".

[AnAmericanMother]

Those poor horses are not only malnourished - they're poorly conformed, over at the knee, sway-backed, ewe-necked, all the rest of it. They would look a little better if you fed them up a bit, but they would still be ugly.

Just about all the horses you see nowadays are the top end of the scale as far as conformation and build. That's because we don't use horses for general transport any more, so there is no need for cheap, ugly horses.

The people in these photos were at the bottom of the heap, so a cheap ugly horse was all they could afford. Those poor equines are the flesh-and-blood equivalent of the old smoking beater of a pickup truck with busted out windows, rusted-out fenders and a rope holding the hood closed.

Read Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. She was a reformer, so the story is a bit exaggerated and crowds every kind of mistreatment you could see on the streets of London into one horse's story -- but it's pretty accurate.

The other end of the heap:

King Edward VII with his racehorse, Persimmon, who won both the Derby and the St. Leger in 1896.