Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  By eight the day-shift combine crews are clocked out of the fields and are swarming into the Hi-Way Café, the big chrome-sumptuous restaurant at the junction of Routes 73 and 18. All have clown faces: a matt powdering of meally chaff dust through which sore, red-rimmed eyes blink tiredly; the backs of their necks are scorched lobster by the sun and their hair is cottonwool with dust and bleaching.

  They are all piratically ragged, in T-shirts and singlets black with sweat and diesel grease, in denim shirts with the sleeves ripped and collars torn off and knotted at the navel, in shirts that are no more than fluttering ribbons flying from the shoulder, in butcher-stripe dungarees and oil-stained jeans, in battered felt hats and wickerwork peaked caps. Some wear stockman’s and hunting boots, others are in sneakers, and two are barefoot. Some have slung from their belts canvas sheaths for pliers and spanners. A few sport beards, one a goatee, another a full black bush, another a spade beard with shaved upper lip, German settler mode.

  A good many appear to be university students and high school boys, flamboyantly stressing the buccaneer style of the peregrinating harvest hand, earning their vacation money the hard way. But there are full-time professionals here. One gigantic young man with a sun-frizzled crew-cut, who is eating his second steak dinner, is wearing green burlap slacks and blouse stencilled across the back with ROLAND MC CREERY ELEV. CO. PEKIN, I A. Outside in the car park several of the pick-up trucks and heavy duty trucks are marked JACK SCHNEIDER, LURAY, KANSAS, CUSTOM CUTTING. Across the road in an improvised open air servicing workshop are mobile sleeping vans and kit wagons which service the crews.

  Rainfall has delayed the winter wheat harvest in Shannon and Bennett counties. The spring wheat is no more than sixty per cent ripe, oats seventy per cent. Rust has spoiled some fields altogether and they have been abandoned, uncut, for ploughing up. But the rye is being cut and the earlier Omaha wheat and the rust-resistant Lancer and Ottawa wheat are ready for the combines. Some have already done their job and gone, for on the road through from Hot Springs I had met columns of caterpillar tractors mounted on bogies, following car-drawn trailers and equipment auxiliaries, thundering Northward to the next contract assignment, and eventually across into Alberta and Saskatchewan : the systematic pounce from one cycle of ripeness into the next.

  There is not anyway the amount of combining to do in this region that there once was, for batches of old wheat land have been insulated under soil conservation schemes or sown with other crops under the encouragement of Federal subsidies to check surplus production. So now the tornado of invasion which hits such barely formulated rube towns as Pine Ridge and Martin - ‘wide places in the road’, the truckers call them - is limited to the few days of the ‘flash’ harvest. The combine crews, whose summer hegira is through seven or eight states and into Canada - these panzer squadrons whose business is brief in the prairie towns they hardly see through the haze of their exhaust fumes and husk dust - are the mechanized remnant of the harvest hordes of only a few years ago.

  *

  For nearly thirty years, from the late 1890s until the sudden ubiquitous takeover by the combine in 1926, the seasonal inundation of the wheat belt by hands for hire was one of the prodigious phenomena of the American scene.

  ‘Each season,’ writes McWilliams, ‘a great black shadow of men passed like a cloud over the plains and, with uncanny swiftness, disappeared’ - a lightning sketch of both the spontaneity and the cruelty of the American catch-as-catch-can economy. The wheat belt was for those thirty years a requisite in the survival pattern of the floating worker, and for those thirty years the American farmer deftly recast the hobo from ministering angel to cloven-hooved trespasser within a few weeks, and season after season repetitively performed that same tergiversation: the warm welcome when the corn ears hung heavy, the cold shoulder when all was stubble.

  Taylor recalls that in the years before World War I ‘one could see the freights in July moving slowly through Sioux City into the Dakotas, the roofs and doorways of boxcars literally black with men en route to the wheat fields’. Grain traffic’s financial importance to the railroads induced a magical tolerance at this time of the year. In an access of Christmastide benevolence, the club-swinging police patrols of the sidings and the trains, the enmity toward all with a bundle and an IWW card, the approved belligerence of train crews to the ride snagger, and the vagrancy fines and vigilante bum-rushes in the wayside halts - all, for this enchanted moratorium, was forgiven and waived.

  The ‘blackbirds’, the sought-for birds of passage, began in mid-summer to make for the depots and jumping-on points. They moved out of the flophouses in St Paul and Kansas City and Chicago and Des Moines; construction workers in Montana and Oregon remembered that it was time for a change of locus, packed up and hurried for the freight yards; margin-land farmers in Northern Texas and the hills of Missouri kissed their families goodbye and swung aboard a local rattler; jungle camps all over the United States thinned and emptied. And all the tributaries thickened as they converged upon the midriff of America, until every freight entering the Great Plains wheat fields was heavy with human cargo.

  Nobody hid or dodged then. Men rode openly on the carriage tops and crammed in the gondolas and stock cars, and no detective or station superintendent tried to sell a ticket or grab a collar - not daring to anyway when the quarry was suddenly so multitudinous.

  Two hundred thousand men moved each summer in this way, then onward in a series of short hops by freight from the winter wheat areas of Oklahoma and Texas up into the spring wheat areas of Northern Nebraska, the Dakotas and Minnesota. It was like a collective fugue, a mass of men deserting their haunts and backgrounds and appearing in the identity of a harvest force.

  The farmers could not do without them for cities offering pools of labour were far spaced, and most of the farming was then family-unit in size. The deliverance of help by the long-distance trains was a conjuring trick which had to work every year when the instant came for the corn to be got in.

  This was no sudden caprice. Much earlier there was unease about the system of a one-crop wheat culture which produced a gun-at-head wage rate (from the farmer’s viewpoint) and a hazardous existence (from the labourer’s).

  In 1869 John C. Burroughs, in his presidential address to the Madison County Agricultural Society, reported in the Transactions of Illinois State Agricultural Society, declared: The labour of a country is the true element of its wealth, and when we pursue that course that compels labour to be migratory, by giving it employment for but a few weeks in a year, you may expect to pay dear for your whistle.’

  Farmers concentrated on wheat because it was ‘the great money crop’ of the Middle Western and Pacific States. As farmers went Westward to take up new land in the Upper Mississippi Valley, wheat gave quickest cash return. Virgin soils were burstingly fertile, wheat was easy to plant.

  With high value and concentrated bulk, frontier wheat could be transported to distant markets in competition with wheat from the East and from Europe. Similar conditions in the Great Central Valley of California were producing similar developments there. In the early 1860s fleets of sailing vessels began swarming into San Francisco Bay to load their hulls with wheat for the annual race to the world’s markets.

  Until about 1850 grain was sown by hand and harvested by hand with the cradle scythe, and the operation was contained within the family and mutual neighbourly assistance. The hiring of outside labour was eschewed except for temporary help from nearby settlements. An Ohio report states that ‘the rush to the California gold mines in 1849 and early ‘50s unsettled wages a trifle, but the call for labourers to gather in the harvests was responded to by the villagers in every neighbourhood, and the women in many cases came cheerfully to the fields and performed the work of men.’

  The Rural New Yorker in 1855 published this impressionistic but doubtless authentic description: ‘… the mechanic had left his shop, the student had left his books, even those averse to labour, and those who held th
emselves above it, had entered the lists, for the ripened grain in wheat raising districts - the crop of the farmer - must be secured at the proper season … A small army of men were in the field, paired off like dancers at a cotillion party, the reaper swinging his huge cradle in among the thick straw and laying its rich burden at the feet of the binder who followed a step behind.’

  The tight pattern of small interlocked units began to fracture as profit inducements swelled. The old thirty-acre, self-sustaining holding was, it was already being noted in 1845 (in Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review), giving way in Michigan and Wisconsin to ‘fields of 200 or 300 acres … and frequently 500 and 800 acres are put under a single fence*. Large quantities of grain were being lost for want of hands. ‘Such results,’ it continued, ‘would seem to inculcate deeply the lesson, that employments should be multiplied, and a diversity of crops raised, and reliance no longer placed in a single, and that a precarious, crop. But the lesson passes off with the occasion.’

  Under the emerging system everyone was navigating on uncharted seas. Employers and men facing each other to set the money terms for a brief, impersonal relationship lacked the steadying influence of a custom which weighed in the more leisurely arrangements for yearly hiring. Uncertain prices and the hazards of crop damage pressed upon the employing farmer; the shortness of their seasonal opportunity to earn, and the arduous-ness of harvest labour, impressed upon the hands. To assess a wage rate equating supply with demand was a task for trial and error; last year’s rates were largely irrelevant.

  Mechanization, still far off as a practicality, was being foreseen as the solution. In 1871, in The Southern Cultivator, a Georgia farmer welcomed mowing and reaping machines as a deliverance: ‘You may harvest when you please, with your machine, not subject to the whims of hand cradlers, or the disaster attending failure to get them’ - a truth to be seized avidly fifty years later when cheap mass-produced machinery made it realizable.

  Paradoxically in the beginning of the speed-up of mechanization, stimulated by Civil War needs, it actually increased the farmer’s reliance on the bindle stiff. During the 1860s and 1870s as steam tractors, gang ploughs, mechanical wheat planters, drills and broadcast seeders came into their hands, farmers threw their fences wider and specialized yet more intensely in wheat, and the big scale prairie farmers required even larger armies to shock and thresh the grain. Whopping profits compensated for the annual crisis.

  ‘There seemed to be music in the very pronunciation of that word WHEAT,’ said the president of the Madison County Agricultural Society of Illinois in 1869. Tear after year the contest has been as to who could sow the greatest number of acres, until Madison and adjoining counties presented, last harvest, the appearance of one vast wheat field.’

  And the bigger the field, the bigger the problem that the farmers were creating for themselves: the drifting flocks of hard-bargaining men without local involvement or loyalties.

  A perspicacious Englishwoman writing in The Country Gentleman in 1869 spotted the spreading dissolution. She urged farmers’ wives to ‘make their husbands put up cottages and employ steady married men; for this roving set of boarding hands is enough to make every woman dread the name of a farmer’s wife. Most decidedly no slaves in the last or any age ever had the evils to bear, with regard to worry and drudgery, as the poor women with men to board and such help as exists here.’

  The migratory tide was moving; the economy was helping to create the hobo. ‘Reminded but undeterred,’ writes Taylor, ‘farmers first planted wheat, then afterwards sought men who could be detached from home moorings to shift from brief harvest to brief harvest, migrating hundreds of miles in following the ever-ripening grain. Almost simultaneously with sod-breaking and settlement the wheat harvest became the occasion to recruit from farther and farther a huge number of workers needed at no other time. Well to the East and South of the wheat fields of the great Northern frontier lay older, more thickly settled communities with towns growing into cities that could furnish men.

  ‘In the venture of tapping these distant reservoirs the farmers had an ally in the railroads. Since these depended for revenue on selling land and hauling wheat they saw the farmers’ interest in moving labour as their own. If the labourers rode free, the wheat paid freight and sold more land. Annual repetition moulded labour through experience and expectation to a new type, matching a new need - migratory workers without ties to the farm community, travelling without women, ready to accept a succession of irregular and short employments for a season.’

  In Illinois and Minnesota this change was ‘striking men in the face’. In 1868 Harper’s Magazine published an article, ‘Among the Wheat Fields of Minnesota’ by G. W. Schatzel, who, ‘excited by the unfolding drama of an unfamiliar agriculture’, described the scene in a small town as a gang of rough-looking men from Iowa and Missouri, each with a bundle or valise, disembarked from a train: ‘Able-bodied, hardy, of all shapes and sizes, they looked like a detachment of Goths and Vandals on a marauding expedition to our peaceful hills and vales. They were the first instalment of “fieldhands” from below, come to assist our farmers to gather in their crops.’

  Taylor stresses their crucial difference: ‘They had not come to help neighbours harvest a bumper crop. Without roots in the Minnesota community, the only connection of these migratory labourers with the farmers who had planted the wheat was the ‘cash-nexus’ of Carlyle - cash and board for a couple of weeks’ work in the harvest. In response to an expanding market this demand by Minnesota wheat farmers for migratory seasonal labourers was creating, like cell-division, two separate men - a ‘labourer’ and a ‘farmer’, where before there had been but one, a “farmer-labourer” called a “farmer” …’

  There follows a blow-by-blow dialogue of the sparring, in Minnesota in the bumper harvest of 1867, the labourers holding out for three dollars a day and keep, the farmers refusing to cave in. The stubborn vanguard moves on; others roll in; the warfare continues, until some days later, and the harvest still unstarted, the farmers drive to the depot to meet the latest train batch of labourers. This time it is different:

  ‘Each farmer affectionately stows away his gang in the wagon. He treats them very cordially now, almost deferentially, for he fears he may lose them even yet should more than three dollars be offered by some desperate fellow who has failed to secure any. And so, whipping up his team, he drives away in hot haste …’

  Nakedly revealed in this 1867 harvest was the new diagram of agricultural capital and labour which was to last until the 1920s. Then, the use to which this conjured legion of mobile workers could be put - despite the harshness of their demands - was suddenly understood by the frontier farmers.

  They were ‘exploited almost immediately and on an ever grander scale,’ Taylor says. ‘Greater bonanza “farms” began to blanket the Red River Valley uniting Minnesota and North Dakota. These famous enterprises, which marked the zenith of the new development in wheat, did not grow by swallowing up small farms, like some of the plantations of the Southeast. They sprang full-blown in the early Seventies when the railroad was put through the valley and sold its virgin land to Eastern investors in great blocks at low prices.’

  Already by 1880 there were eighty-two farms of more than 1,000 acres in the area. In 1890 the number was 323. Averaging about 7,000 acres each, according to William Allen White in Scribner’s Magazine in 1897, these bonanza estates rose to the towering height of 75,000 acres of the Dalrymple ‘farm’.

  ‘The bonanza enterprises were not farms as American settlers knew them nor were their labourers - sucked in and blown out to drift hither and thither with the seasons - hired men. Owners usually were absentees who left their properties in the hands of managers. The custom was so widespread in the wheat belt at the close of the nineteenth century that twenty-eight per cent of the wheat acreage of the entire nation was operated by managers. Few farm labourers were worked steadily.’

  White’s report from North Dakota c
ontinues: ‘During the ploughing season about fifty men are employed. At the end of the ploughing season these men are discharged - all but ten of them, who find work on the farm the year round. The discharged men go back to their homes in the pineries or in the cities farther South…

  ‘Except for the half-score men who are engaged upon the big farms - in ploughing season, at seeding-time, during harvest and when the season for threshing comes - the men who do the most important work are transient labourers. Frequently they are birds of passage, whose faces are familiar to the foreman, but whose homes may be a thousand miles away.

  ‘Men of this character are not “hoboes” - yet now and then a tramp does “rest from his loved employ” and work with the “harvest hands” … These men are regular harvesters, who begin with the early June harvest in Oklahoma, working Northward until the season closes in the Red River country.

  ‘Men of this class never pay railroad fare. Thousands of them - perhaps fifteen men for every thousand acres in wheat - ride into the bonanza district on the “blind baggage” on passenger trains. When they have leisure and a taste for scenery they jolt placidly across the continent homeward-bound in what the lingo of the cult calls “side-door sleepers”.’

  There may here be confusion on the writer’s part in the application of the word hobo, which he obviously takes to be a synonym for tramp or loafer, although it is possible that among the travellers themselves it had not yet taken on its later distinct meaning of a mobile casual worker. In a 1925 Saturday Evening Post article, Herbert Quick recalls that on his father’s Iowa farm ‘we hired men who would now be called hoboes, but were really good industrious young fellows out to make money when wages were high.’

  What is also evident is that the new breed who were seasonally ‘sucked in and blown out to drift hither and thither’ had already soaked up the zircon light of potluck adventure from the border-men of a few decades before. Henry King in an 1879 Scribner’s Monthly article writes that in Kansas where a few years earlier there was ‘all a desolate and unblest extent of buffalo-grass’, the old pastoral methods had been ‘superseded by an epic; the plentiful reaping-machines, with their glare of paint and burnished still and their great overwhelming “reels”, have a kind of Homeric character.’