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Stan is a smashing guy and a really good laugh. I watched as he and his hands rounded up twenty head of cattle under the golden morning sun and drove them on to a huge trailer. Then, sitting in the cab beside Stan as we drove the cattle to market, I felt like a proper cowboy. The boys could have herded the cattle in the traditional manner all the way to the market at the edge of Oklahoma City, but Stan didn’t want to do that. Oklahoma had suffered a drought for most of the last fifteen years, so his cattle were already underweight, and they would have lost even more pounds on a long drive. But there was a silver lining to this particular cloud: because of the drought, far fewer cattle were being sent to market, so each animal fetched a much higher price than a similar steer would have ten or fifteen years ago.

Travelling in Stan’s big trailer with the cattle in the back, occasionally the smell wafted into the cabin. Holy Mother of Jesus! It was something else.

Approaching the toll gate near the end of the interstate, Stan turned to me and smiled. ‘Watch this girl. She’s been here a while,’ he said. ‘She’ll notice I’ve got cattle on the back. Just watch the speed with which she shuts the window as soon as she gets the money.’

We pulled up at the toll booth and Stan handed over the cash.

‘See you, Stan.’ Va-voom, the window shot across.

Stan told me that on a previous trip into town, one of the cattle had peed and shat itself during the stop at the toll booth and it had squirted straight through her window. After that, she wasn’t taking any chances.

We dropped off the cattle at the Oklahoma City National Stock Yards, the largest feeder cattle market (dealing only in young, male calves) in the world. Twelve thousand cattle might be sold there in single a day. Since its inception, more than 102 million head of livestock had passed through the iron gates.

The National Stock Yards form part of Stockyard City, a neighbourhood of Oklahoma City that’s more like a self-contained town. A bit like the Vatican, it rules itself, and it answers to the county, not the city, which dearly wants to get rid of it because of the smell and the effluent, the noise and the traffic. But it’s not going anywhere. Many of the businesses in the area date back to 1910, when the Oklahoma National Stock Yards Company began its public livestock market. At its height, in the 1950s, Stockyard City’s meat-packing operations employed about 10 per cent of the city’s workforce. When I visited, though, it almost felt like a theme park. The fronts of many of the stores – which catered exclusively to cattlemen, selling Western clothing – were wooden and lit by gas. It was a lovely piece of period history.

Noisy and smelly, Stockyard City and the National Stock Yards are well worth a visit. I loved all the mooing and seeing the cowboys riding up and down. Anyone who went into the stockyards could see the cattle arriving and being herded into pens. Poor things, they didn’t know they were destined to be hamburgers or steaks soon, although they seemed to sense that something sinister awaited them. But at least the huge abattoirs that used to be right next door to the market area had been relocated. Nowadays the cattle were transported by truck to the slaughterhouses once they’d been sold.

The stockyards hold auctions only on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I had to wait until the next day to see the auctioneer in action. In the meantime, I decided to visit the place that, tragically, most of us now associate with Oklahoma City.

On 19 April 1995, twenty-six-year-old Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck packed with nearly three tons of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, nitromethane and diesel fuel outside the nine-storey Alfred Murrah Building. McVeigh had built a cage inside the truck so that the explosive mixture would blow towards the front of the building – he really put a lot of thought into it – and shortly after nine o’clock in the morning he detonated the bomb. The explosion decimated the building, killing 168 people and injuring another 800.

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