By Gregory Clark, September 8, 1923.
Roaring Bunch of Men Go From East Every Summer Seeking Adventure, Find None, and, Without Price of Return Ticket, Stay West and Make Good.
Harvesters going west are like troops going to war in more respects than one.
There is the same noise and abandon. The primitive colonist sleeper cars bear the same crowded and forbidding look. And both harvesters and soldiers are full to the brim with the expectation of high adventure.
And adventure doesn’t come.
Just as the soldier landed with a chilling flop into the drab and unfruitful and uneventful round of spit and polish and drill and the stupid eternity of the trenches, so the harvester, ready for big doings in the wide romantic west, finds a hay fork in his hand, or about twenty square miles of new-cut wheat to be stooked before dark, or a thousand bushels of grain to be heaved by brute force into the separator, amidst a smother of dust and chaff, before the boss calls it a day and lets the cook sound his whistle.
A harvesters’ excursion is spoken of in the east here as something picturesque and outward bound. So it is. Eight hundred men all in a roaring bunch constitute a picture.
But when a harvesters’ excursion hits the west and is smashed by the impact into countless little squads and sections and troops of four or ten or seventeen men, dumped all forlorn off the train at some little packing box way station in middle of a limitless prairie, the romance goes out of it.
Eighty per cent. of the men who leave the east on a harvesters’ excursion hope never to return. They have visions of the Big Chance which life so far has denied them.
And eighty per cent. of that eighty per cent. are broke when they leave the east.
And what are the rewards of a harvester?
In Manitoba, this year, the wage per day ran round $3.50. Out further west it ran to $4 and In seme places as high, as $4.501. The harvester paid strictly by the day. If it rains and there no cutting or stooking or threshing, there is no pay. If it blows up rain about noon there is half a day’s pay, and no more. Sundays, no pay. At four dollars a day, working at most twenty-four days in the one month’s work the harvester must put in before he can use the return stub of his cheap fare, he can earn $96.
He has had to pay $15 plus half a cent a mile beyond Winnipeg to come out west. It will cost him half a cent a mile to Winnipeg and twenty dollars from there heme. If he smokes cigarets and has any other expensive habits the likelihood is he will return to the hard and undemonstrative east as broke as he left it. In fact, many of them are so broke they can’t pay their fare home and have to stay west.
In Brandon I talked with one old chap in the livery business who said that that was how he came to settle in the west – came out harvesting and couldn’t pay his way home. And blamed if he didn’t think the west was largely populated with people in the same predicament.
Thousands of the harvesters don’t get regular jobs helping a farmer for a steady month or six weeks. Only a few lucky ones get taken on with “outfits” – which are threshing gangs that travel from farm to farm. Most of them get a few days’ work at stooking, and then get tired and move over a few miles to some I place they’ve heard about where there are better jobs going begging.
“The trouble with harvesters is this,” said a Manitoba wheat rancher, “the tough ones that can do the hard manual labor of harvesting are a restless crew, either finding fault with the grub or getting into fights or moving on for the sheer love of moving on. The quiet, conscientious fellows are usually those not accustomed to hard manual labor. They will stay on the job, but they can’t handle the work.”
So this army of fifty thousand men dumped into the west every August spreads thin or thick over the map, restless, hard-worked, disillusioned, most of them making just barely enough money to pay their passage back to the east at the end of four to six weeks.
But like old soldiers, who will keep on going to wars no matter how sour the last one turned, there are old harvesters who keep on going west every autumn, moved by the expectation of adventure which is so elusive a jade in this workaday world.
The harvesters’ special from the east, with a three to four day weary jam of passengers, usually pulls into Winnipeg at night. I don’t know whether Winnipeg has arranged that or not. But at any rate the great majority of harvesters never see Winnipeg at all.
Their train pulls in in the dead of night.
As they break, gasping with relief, out of the train that has imprisoned them for four days, into the Winnipeg freight yards, they find themselves being lined up before a small wicketed office under arc lights, where representatives of the Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta government employment bureaus are waiting to inform them where harvesters are required.
The expeditionary nature of the excursion goes out of the harvesters’ special right there in Winnipeg.
“Have you any place in mind?” asks the agent.
“No,” replies the harvester.
“How about Lethbridge?” says the agent. “Twenty-five men wanted there at once by farmers not ten miles out.”
“Done.”
“Have you the fare?”
Then the harvester walks over to the ticket booths and gets his half cent a mile fare to Lethbridge.
“A train for Lethbridge leaves from here in two hours,” says the ticket man.
It is three o’clock in the morning. Winnipeg lies cold and asleep without. The harvester goes out to see Winnipeg, walks a deserted block, rambles back to the station to sit till his train is ready in the dawn. Gets aboard, pounds westward another few hundred miles in a colonist sleeper, and wakes up to be debarked in Lethbridge.
Farmers are waiting at the employment bureaus in the station. The harvester is hailed by the farmer.
“How much a day?”
“Four dollars, sleep in the house, home cooking.”
The great majority go to no such town as Lethbridge for the jumping off place. They find themselves unloaded, amid the cheerful hoots of fellow passengers, at a little packing case station, without a human habitation in sight for all the miles and miles of bronzed fields on every side. Half a dozen farmers are waiting, with motor cars and flat wagons, to snaffle such men as are getting off at that point.
Thefts of good men occur. When the train stops at one of these little jerkwater stations, and ten men debark for fifteen farmers waiting, the farmers will jump aboard the train, swiftly scan the cars, and make take-it-or-leave-it offers to the best looking men in the car. That is, men booked through to further points.
Or they will run along the open windows of the car, calling:
“Any good men in there want four dollars a day and six weeks steady work?”
“I want five old hands.”
“Two men wanted – have you had any experience? Hop out. Four a day.”
Many of the farmers won’t take pot luck in the men sent. They prefer to board the train and pick out the men they want on appearance, offering them half a dollar a day extra for a bribe. In this way they get the men they want.
In nearly all the farms, which run from a half section of 320 acres to a section of 640 acres, the harvesters are taken right into the home of the farmer and eat at the family board. On the big wheat ranches of one and two or more sections, the farmer has a bunk house built within the tree enclosure in which his homestead stands and which is used for accommodating harvesters only. He hires a cook for the season. The food is always plentiful and plain.
But it is with an “outfit” that the harvester comes nearest adventure.
An outfit consists of a tractor, a threshing separator and a caboose. The tractor drags the threshing machine and the caboose from farm to farm and runs the separator at threshing. From eight to fifteen men constitute the crew of an outfit.
As soon as the grain is in the shock, the outfit sets forth on the rounds which it has planned during the summer. From ranch to ranch it goes, snorting and steaming. The caboose is cut off in a shady spot – if possible – and the thresher is set up in the middle of a field. The farmer, with rented and borrowed teams, totes the shocks of grain to the roaring maw of the separator. No bringing in the sheaves to the barn in the West. They just thresh right in the field. When they have cleaned up one square mile, they move the outfit to another part of the prairie and thresh all the wheat within range. The threshed grain is either stored in little granary sheds or is carted into the barns.
Great heaps of straw and chaff, as big as city houses, are thus left dotting the stubble fields, like slag heaps around Hill 702.
Passing from Winnipeg. I saw three huge columns of smoke ascending in the air to the north.
“Forest fires, eh?” I remarked to the passenger beside me. He chuckled.
“Ain’t no forests in these parts, mister. Them’s straw stacks burning.”
“How would that happen?” I asked, from the east where straw is so much per so much.
“Well, a farmer jest throwed a match into it, I guess.”
They burn their mountains of straw in the West.
No greenhorn can get aboard one of these “outfits.” They are prize workers. The owner of the outfit gets so many cents a bushel for the threshing, and it is in his interests so get the job done in record time. He hires men with some pride in their shoulders. They work like demons. They work all hours, from dawn to dark. They take joy in beating the last day’s record, the record of former crews. They go to their caboose at the end of the day dead beat, hardly able to sit up and sing after their huge if unornamental meal.
But it is the nearest thing to adventure there is in harvesting.
The ordinary harvester bends his back at stooking, at teaming sheaves to the threshers, at bucketing grain into the granaries, at all the simple, ancient acts of agriculture which have changed little in ten thousand years. It is uneventful, healthy, heartbreaking work, the kind of work a man can easily pass up when the spirt moves him.
The railroad officials figure that 20 per cent. of the return ticket stubs they issue are not used each year. Twenty per cent. of fifty thousand men is ten thousand. That is draining the east and populating the west at a pretty good rate.
But the west is a large and roomy and hospitable place, for all its cold and its bleak wastes of prairie (how an Englishman from the green rolling hills of ‘ome must pine!) and somehow the thousands who stay either stranded or by choice in the west as the result of their harvest excursion, shake down.
That cheery, hail spirit of the adventurous trainload of irresponsibles somehow sticks to the westerner. If you whoop on the main street of an eastern city, a policeman will run you in or a space will be left about you in the traffic. Whoop at the main crossings in a western city and nobody pays the slightest attention, unless you look lonesome, and then a crowd will form around you in the traffic and take you home to supper.
In Winnipeg, I asked a man the time, and he took me home to dinner. In Brandon, I enquired the location of the railroad station, and my informant turned out to be a cousin. In Dauphin, I picked up a man’s hat the wind blew off and he introduced me to a member of parliament, a judge, the local chairman of the newly formed license commission, and the leading Presbyterian divine, right there and then on the street.
And by special interrogation, I found that each and every one of these cheery informants was originally a harvester who came west, went broke, settled and made good.
Editor’s Notes:
- $4 in 1923 would be $70 in 2024. ↩︎
- The Battle of Hill 70 was a World War One battle. ↩︎
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