by Tim Slessor
Nevertheless, although it took time, life could slowly improve for the homesteaders who hung on and persevered. They had learnt new ways of farming. Gradually, with more people taking up land, there was less isolation. The towns were growing; there were churches, schools and even a few simple hospitals. And the years of the mid 1880s were blessed with better rainfall than usual, so the crops - those that escaped the grasshoppers or the sudden hailstorms - did not wither in the ground. There were good years amongst the bad.
Through those same years, the Western railroads sent their recruiting teams across the Atlantic. In Britain alone, more than 50 agents spread out with magic lanterns, brochures and sales talk. Elsewhere across Europe, farmers who could never hope to be more than landlorded tenants would listen to the promise of owning their own land across the ocean. Even though the railroads were seldom giving their land away for nothing, their message was seductive. Oppressed but industrious farming communities, Mennonites, Moravians and Bohemians, were the most eager. Sometimes the railroads would pay all expenses for one or two chosen men to cross the Atlantic to look for themselves. Then, if these advance guards were satisfied, the message would go back: whole villages would uproot to make the long journey to the New World.
Some of these communities still exist, though they are less tight-knit than once they were. A few years back, I stopped for a meal in North Dakota; paralleling the menu in English was one in Swedish. Near Hemingford in western Nebraska there is a small colony of wheat farmers originally from Bohemia. And one wonders about the first settlers in the towns of Malmo or Gothenburg or Belgrade. In Kansas, Russian and English migrants named the towns of Catherine and Victoria after their Queens. Until a couple of decades ago, in the foothills west of Laramie, the timber workers spoke Norwegian among themselves. And further north, the radio station in Buffalo put out a daily program in Basque for the sheepherders in the nearby Big Horn Mountains. But one has to be careful. There are no dreaming spires in Nebraska’s Oxford and Cambridge, nor are there onion domes in Kremlin (Montana) or in Moscow (Texas). And there are no massed choirs in Welsh (Oklahoma), nor angels in Paradise (Montana).
Much of the human geography of Western settlement is still clear on the ground. Fly over Nebraska, Kansas or Oklahoma and you can see the precise geometry of the early surveyors. They went ahead of the homesteaders and superimposed an exact quilt of 1-mile squares. Each square was, and still is, known as a “section”; 160 acres is thus a “quarter section” - an original homestead. If you ask a farmer how much land he owns, he will invariably answer you in terms of sections. “Got a half section right here, where my great gran’daddy and his brother homesteaded, and then there’s a section 3 miles south on the east side of the county road which used to belong to my wife’s folks. Got most of that under wheat present time.” If you are interested (and how could you not be?), he will show you the site of his great gran’daddy’s sod-house, and then go on to tell you stories of the Depression and the subsequent slow and often difficult progression to some kind of eventual prosperity. From the earliest sod-house days, it may well have taken his family more than a century.
Today, as you fly at 3-4,000 feet through the bumpy summer air of, say, western Kansas, you look out over hundreds of square miles of ripening wheat. This is part of one of the world’s great granaries. Perhaps, below, you will see echelons of combine harvesters. They will chew their way northward all summer, following the migration of the sun whose ripening warmth creeps up the map at a rate of 12 miles a day. So the combines start down in Texas in May; they finish 1,500 miles away on the prairies of Canada in late September, often in the first light flurries of snow.
***
“It’s eighteen hours a day, and the only way we know it’s Sunday is if one of the crew takes an hour out to get to church.” Dale Starks was the boss; he started traveling the wheat trail in the 1950s with a bank loan and one small secondhand combine. By the time I met him 25 years later (I was making a documentary about the wheat harvest) he owned nine combines and employed 20 young men to drive them and their attendant fleet of trucks and pick-ups. He and a hundred or more other harvest bosses and their crews were contracted by farmers from one year to the next, from Texas to Alberta.
A farmer with, say, 1,000 acres of ripening wheat wants it harvested the moment it is ready, against the risk of summer hailstorms which can hammer down from nowhere and flatten the man’s bank balance in a few catastrophic minutes. Only the very biggest farms can afford to have enough combines to do the job themselves, and even then, what would the combines be doing for the rest of the year? Hence the system of contracted harvest crews.
When I first knew him, Dale was everyone’s idea of the direct and laconic Westerner. Booted and stetsoned, he might have been the Marlboro man’s elder brother.
“How”, I asked him, “have things changed since you started ‘contract cutting’ all those years ago?”
“Combines growed a lot bigger.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, I guess the highways have improved some.”
A man of very few words, Dale was trainer, manager, accountant and chief mechanic: the complete master of his trade. Sometimes at nearly midnight one would find him deep in the guts of one of his machines making adjustments or repairs. In the heat of noon, listening to the drone of a combine half-a-mile away, he would reach for the two-way radio in his pick-up truck and tell the distant driver that he better make a fractional change to one of the control settings, “pronto”. He could glance at a field of wheat and estimate the yield per acre to within a bushel. He knew as much about wheat, combines and the backroads of the West as any man alive. And his wife, Margie, knew as much as any woman. She was quartermaster to the whole circus: food, fuel and spare parts. She kept a motherly eye on the young bachelors in the cutting crew; she looked after the married couples and, if needs be, she could drive a combine better than anyone except Dale. As they moved northward through the summer, four days at this farm, ten at the next, their camp was a cluster of mobile homes, pick-ups and old school buses - bunkhouses for the cutting crew. Electricity and water were laid on by the farmer.
You can’t cut damp wheat. So the cutting day begins as soon as the sun has burnt off the overnight dew - about 9 o’clock. It finishes, under headlights, anything up to 15-16 hours later when the dew returns. If there is a wind there will be no dew, so the cutting can go on till 2-3 a.m. In the early weeks, some of the new recruits cannot stand the pace and they drop out. But the rest will keep it up for five months until, up in Canada, they are racing against the forecasts of incoming snow. By that time Dale Starks and his nine combines will have harvested enough wheat to keep the whole of England in bread for about five days. And some of that wheat may well be exported to England; or to India or Brazil or Egypt; or, when the harvest on the steppes has failed (as it did several times in the 1970s and 1980s), even to Russia. And there is some irony in that - given that Russia is where this strain of wheat came from in the first place.
***
Over 140 years ago, the first wheat planted on the Great Plains withered in the summer heat, its long stems tangled in the wind. The first wave of settler-farmers were dismayed; they were forced to conclude that this would never be wheat country. It was a band of immigrants from Russia, with the help of the Santa Fe Railroad, who began to change all that. Theirs is a tale worth telling.
In 1872, a man called Bernard Warkentin came to the United States; he was an advance agent for a colony of Russian-Mennonites. Four generations earlier, their ancestors had left their original homes on the north German plains to escape religious persecution. Catherine the Great gave them a home. Indeed, she encouraged these industrious farmers to come and take up land in the Crimea and on the steppes, and thereby to set an example to her own less industrious peasants. She offered the Mennonites reduced taxation, plus the educational and religious tolerance they sought. And sh
e promised that their descendants would be exempt from military conscription for the next 100 years. But nearly a century later, with their royal sponsor long gone, the Mennonites were increasingly subjected to the very restrictions that they had once escaped. And Tsar Alexander was about to revoke that military exemption. So they appointed Warkentin and a couple of others to start searching out a new home.
The story varies in some of its details, but it seems that the European agents of the Santa Fe Railroad heard of the plan (maybe they were in on it from the start) and alerted their head office. Anyway, Warkentin was brought across the Atlantic and then taken out to Kansas; he was offered 60,000 acres of railroad land for $250,000 in gold. Further, his hosts offered to build temporary barracks to house the potential immigrants through the first difficult years. The advance man liked what he saw; indeed, the country was very similar to that back home.
The first Mennonites, nearly 800 of them, arrived in New York in 1874. They brought with them their gold, smuggled past the Tsar’s police. They are also said to have smuggled (in trunks and sacks) some tons of a short-stemmed and hardy strain of wheat that they had developed over the years to withstand the difficult climate of the steppes. One legend has it that some of the Mennonite women left Russia with additional grain (nowadays it is known as Turkey Red) hidden in their voluminous pantaloons. Who knows, it could be true. What is more certain is that, mixed with the grain, were inevitably some weeds; chief among them was Russian Thistle. In time, it would spread all over the West: tumbleweed. Yes, the stuff came from Russia.
Once arrived in Kansas, the new arrivals impressed The Topeka Commonwealth. “They are the most peaceable foreigners that arrive on our shores. In their colonies there are no quarrellings, no fightings, no murders, no lawsuits, no lawyers, no juries, no courts, no police, no officers, no governors, and crimes even of the smallest character are of the rarest occurrence. They are dressed in primitive homespun garments of coarse wool. The women and children have funny old handkerchiefs tied around their heads, and certainly no Broadway milliner ever supplied one of the quaint bonnets which the fair Mennonite beauties wear.” As well as the Mennonites, there were soon other Russian immigrants, Roman Catholics, coming into Kansas They too had been wooed by the railroad.
Of course the Rooshans, as they became collectively known, recognized the steppe-like plains immediately. And, even more significantly, so did their wheat. It flourished where earlier strains had struggled. It could stand the climate and, being short-stemmed, it was not flattened by the fierce prairie winds. With Turkey Red and the hybrids that quickly followed, the seeds of the plain’s future were sown, almost literally. Of course, it did not all happen at once; the full spread of that wheat across the plains took more than a decade.
At first, and almost inevitably, the earlier homesteaders were suspicious. After all, drought, wind and the disease of rust had too often ravaged the best that they could grow. So why should these strangely dressed newcomers know better? But once the skeptics saw for themselves, they quickly became converts. Additionally, a farming lecturer from Kansas went back to Russia and, near Kharkov, found other strains which ripened in an even shorter growing-season than Turkey Red. Now wheat could be (and would be) successfully grown right up through the Dakotas and onto the short-summered prairies of Canada.
It is interesting to contrast two early reports by the embryonic Kansas Board of Agriculture. In 1872 it wrote, “Wheat is the least profitable of crops.” Yet, just four years later, it found “that on new ground, no crop is more certain than wheat”. The arrival of the Rooshans (by 1876 there were over 4,000 of them and more arriving every year) had made the difference. Many years later, near the site of their first church, the Kansas-Rooshans put up a roadside marker saying that they had established themselves in those parts “By the Grace of God, and with the Aid and Assistance of the Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad”. Surely, no railroad could ask for more than to share credit with the Almighty. Incidentally, by 1910, according to the census of that year, there were over 100,000 Rooshans on the plains; almost all of them were wheat farmers. They are still there, from Kansas to Alberta.
As life improved, the sod-busters were able to move from a house of “prairie marble” to one of wood.
***
If the hard Russian wheat arrived ready-made for the plains, it was one of the few things that did. Heating was certainly not easy. Obviously those “meadow muffins” around a sod-house would not last long for cooking and winter warmth. What then? The settlers had to turn to anything that would burn: corncobs, sunflower stalks and, above all, hay. It was said to take “two men and a boy” to gather enough hay to keep a fire going through a freezing night. But, in time, someone devised a special stove which only required the full-time efforts of the boy.
That hay-burner was just one of the many new-fangled tools that helped the settler families to improve their lives. One does not need to know by what precise means the need for other contrivances, newly designed or merely adapted, was recognized back in the factories and workshops of the east. But through the 1870s and 80s, as well as developing the sod-busters’ plow and the hay-burning stove, the nation’s tinkerer-mechanics (a sub-species of homo sapiens that still seems to exist in greater numbers in America than anywhere else in the world) came up with evermore contraptions and machines to ease the farmers’ work: corn planters, drills for deep wells, self-governing wind-pumps, reaper-binders, threshing machines and, not least, barbed wire. Most of these things could be ordered via another invention of those times: the mail-order catalogue. For many years it was, along with the family Bible, the most important book on Western farms. Indeed, by 1899 you could even order a wooden house (in bits) for $1,499 from Sears-Roebuck in Chicago; a sewing machine cost $12.75, a Smith and Wesson revolver $9.75; or for $6.80 you could buy an Ezeeoff - a gadget for castrating calves.
Of all the inventions, barbed wire was one of the simplest while also one of the most important. Livestock and crops are mutually exclusive; unless they are kept apart, the stock will trample and eat the crops. So where there was no timber for split-rail fencing, barbed wire quickly became the farmer’s vital friend. Today we take the simplicity of the stuff for granted. But 140 years ago one might have had to guess what it was for. Folklore says that back in Illinois in 1874 a certain farmer, Henry Rose, owned an athletic cow that kept breaking through a split-rail fence into Mrs. Rose’s pea-patch. So, to deter the animal, Mr. and Mrs. Rose drove some sharp wire points into the top rail. It worked so well that, proud of their ingenuity, they took a length of the rail along to the local county fair to show their friends and neighbors. That much is the folklore of the story. What is more certain is that two of the Roses’ neighbors were sufficiently impressed to go home and try their own experiments. They both hit on the same basic idea: to dispense with the wooden rail and, instead, to wrap short bits of twisted wire directly onto a long strand of wire. They decided to combine their efforts, and partners Joseph Glidden and Isaac Elwood fought patent battles against all comers for the next 20 years. The problem was how to stop the small twists (the barbs) from merely sliding along the wire. The solution lay in using a coffee-grinder to twist two strands together, so that the barbs were wrapped around one strand and held in position by the other encircling strand. In 80% of the wire made today, that idea has not changed.
Farmers were soon lining up for this invention at the hardware stores. It cost about $150 a mile: enough to run a single strand around a 160-acre homestead. By 1880, with more than 20 manufacturers, the business had become a full-blown industry. By 1900 more than 400 US patents had been filed: some for variations on the wire itself, some for particular configurations of the barbs, some for the machinery to make the stuff. There is a kind of rural poetry in the different designs: Kennedy Barb, Split Diamond, Twist Oval, Lazy Plate, Crandall’s Link, Merril Twist, Burnell’s Four Point, Brotherton Barb, Champion Zig-zag and, most descriptiv
e of all, Billings Vicious. It has been said that, because of barbed wire, patent law became, for a few years, the most lucrative branch of the American legal trade; certainly the lawyers made millions. There is no record of whether Mr. and Mrs. Rose with their awkward cow made anything.
***
The museum was shut when I got there, but there was a note on the door telling any would-be visitor to phone someone called Lee. So I did as I was told, and Lee Shank was with me inside ten minutes; he had been having an early lunch. In this small mid-Kansas town of La Crosse they take barbed wire seriously. Indeed, they will tell you that this is the Barbed Wire Capital of the World. Certainly, with a museum and a library dedicated to the stuff, one would not want to doubt their claim.
You might suppose that if you have seen one piece of barbed wire, you have seen them all. But that would be before you had been inside the museum. Arrayed along the walls and in glass cases are more than 3,000 varieties; they have been collected from all over the world and range from the most modern varieties (including several made of plastic) back to the earliest types from the 1870s. A good example of the latter, perhaps no more than 18 inches long, can fetch at least $200 from a devotee at the annual “Swap’n’Sell Fair”. I was too late for the 2007 jamboree, but Lee reckoned that over 1,000 collectors had turned up. Each year they have auctions, seminars and contests to find the world’s fastest wire splicer. I think they elect a Barbed Wire Queen. Certainly, there is a Barbed Wire Hall of Fame, a collectors’ magazine and a flourishing internet site at Rush County: Barbed Wire Museum. Lee encouraged me to turn the handle on a replica of Mrs. Glidden’s coffee-grinder, to twist some wire together. He explained an array of fencing tools, and he talked, as only an enthusiast can, about the whole history of barbed wire. The afternoon was quickly gone; I would not have missed it - it was an education. Lee, thank you.