The protagonist Jurgis Rudkus (with his wife Ona) and along with some additional family members come to the Chicago stockyards with dreamy eyes full of hope. They do not speak English and find great difficulty adjusting to life in Chicago. The people, the culture, the high costs and the mesmerizing meat packing factory all provide an alien, industrial utopian environment, an environment completely different from the idle village society they had come from. America was the place to be for rags to riches stories and every man had the opportunity to be successful and achieve the American dream. Sadly as was the reality of the Gilded Age of America, it was all a ruse. Poverty and corruption were rampant and the factories employed “bosses” that drove naïve immigrants to work to near slave-like