farmer, but he was my first acquaintance in Iowa, and he had things to
say about the unemployed. A director in a bank and the owner of a
livery-stable, he was owner of I know not what besides, but I know that
he was delightfully cordial, and that his hospitality was of a kind to
do credit to the best traditions of the West.
He answered my question obligingly, then asked me whether I was looking
for a job.
“For if you are,” he added, “there’s one right here,” and he waved his
hand expressively in the direction of the stalls at the rear.
This was more than I had bargained for; it was wholly new to my
experience to find work in a town before I even asked for it.
I told him frankly that I was out of employment and that I must find
some soon, but that there were reasons, at the moment, why I wished to
reach Minneapolis as early as possible.
Being without the smallest gift of mimicry I could not disguise my
tongue, and it had been a satisfaction from the first to find that this
lack in no way hampered me. I was accepted readily enough as a
working-man by my fellows, and my greenness and manner of speech, I had
every reason to think, were credited to my being an immigrant of a new
and hitherto unknown sort.
“What’s your trade?” the men with whom I worked would generally ask me,
supposing that clumsiness as a day laborer was accounted for by my
having been trained to the manual skill of a handicraft.
“What country are you from?” they inquired, and when I said “Black
Rock,” which is the point in Connecticut from which I set out, I have no
doubt that there came to their minds visions of an island in distant
seas, where any manner of strange artisan might be bred.
What they thought was of little consequence; that they were willing to
receive me with naturalness to their companionship as a fellow-workman
was of first importance to me, and this was an experience that never
failed.
At last I was west of the Mississippi, and, that I might pass as a man
of education in the dress of a laborer, was a matter of no note, since
men of education in the ranks of workmen have not been uncommon there.
It was plainly from this point of view that Mr. Ross was talking to me.
If I was an educated man, it was my own affair. That for a time, at
least, I had been living by day’s labor was evident from my dress, and
it was not unlikely that I was looking for a job. Happening to have a
vacant place in the stable, he offered it to me, and, being interested
in what I had to say, he led me to speak on of work during the past
winter in Chicago, and my slight association there with the unemployed
and with men of revolutionary ideas.
Before I knew it, we were drifting far down a stream of talk, and time
was flying. Six months’ living in close intimacy with what is saddest
and often cruelest, in the complex industrialism of a great city had
produced a depression, which I had not shaken off in three weeks’
sojourn in the wholesome country. I was steeped in the views of men who
told me that things could never grow better until they had grown so much
worse that society would either perish or be reorganized. The needed
change was not in men, they agreed, but in social conditions; and from
every phase of Socialism and Anarchy, I had heard the propaganda of
widely varying changes, all alike, however, prophesying a regenerated
society, the vision of which alone remained the hope and faith of many
lives.
The pent-up feelings of six months found a sympathetic response in Mr.
Ross; the more so as I discovered in him a wholly different point of
view. He had no quarrel with conditions in America. As a lad of fourteen
he came from Germany and, having begun life here without friends or help
of any kind, he was now, after years of work and thrift, a man with some
property and with many ties, not the least of which was a love for the
country which had given him so good a chance.
The mere suggestion of a programme of radical change roused him. He
began somewhat vehemently to denounce a class of men, foreigners, many
of them, strangers to our institutions, irresponsible for the most part,
who bring with them from abroad revolutionary ideas which they spread,
while enjoying the liberties and advantages of the nation that they try
to harm.
“Why don’t they stay in their own countries and ‘reform’ them?” he
added. “Thousands of men who have come here from the Old World have
raised themselves to positions of honor and independence and wealth as
they never could have done in their native lands. And yet these
disturbers would upset it all, a system that for a hundred years and
more we have tried and found not wanting.
“I am interested in a local bank,” he continued. “The management has
been successful; the directors are capable men, and the investments pay
a fair dividend. Now suppose someone, the least responsible person in
the corporation, were to come forward with a new, untried system of
banking and should insist upon its adoption and even threaten the
existence of the bank if his plan should be rejected. That would be a
case like this of your Socialist and Anarchist.”
He was a little heated, but he caught himself with a laugh and was
smiling genially as he added:
“I see your ‘unemployed’ friends often. Scarcely a day passes that men
don’t come in here asking for a job. My experience is that if they were
half as much in earnest in looking for work as I am in looking for men
that can work, they wouldn’t search far or long. I’ve tried a good many
of them in my time. I can tell now in five minutes whether a man has any
real work in him; and those that are worth their keep when you haven’t
your eye on them, are as scarce as hens’ teeth. There are good jobs
looking for all the men that are good enough for them; if you want to
prove it, start right in here, or go into the State and ask the farmers
for a chance to work.”
I did not say that this last was the very thing I meant to do. Instead,
I began to tell him of the cases that I knew of men, who, through no
fault of their own, were out of work and were not free to go where it
could be easily found. Mr. Ross was sympathetic with what was real and
personal in the sufferings of unfortunate workers; and gathering
encouragement, I went on to speak of suffering no less real which was
the result of sheer incapacity, a native weakness of will or lack of
courage or perseverance. This made him smile again, and, with a twinkle
in his eye, he asked me whether I did not think it was expecting a good
deal of organized society to provide for the unfit. Then drawing out his
watch, he glanced at it and, turning to me with a fine disregard of the
outer man, he asked me to go home with him to supper. I should have been
delighted. Perhaps I ought to have gone. I had not forgotten, however, a
too hospitable minister in Connecticut; but at the next moment I
accepted gladly Mr. Ross’s invitation to drive with him in the evening.
Behind a sorrel filly that fairly danced with delight of motion, we set
out an hour or more before sunset, and Mr. Ross drove first through
business streets, pointing out to me the principal buildings as we
passed, then up to the higher levels of the hillside, on which the city
stands, through an attractive residence quarter. From there we could
look down upon the river flowing between banks of wooded hills, with its
swollen, muddy waters made radiant by the sunset. Then back to the lower
city we went and out over the bridge to the military post of Rock
Island, past the arsenal and the barracks to the officers’ quarters
among splendid trees and broad reaches of shaded lawn, and finally to an
old farm-house, which had been the home of Colonel Davenport at the time
of his struggles with the Indians. It was not a distant date in actual
years, but the contrast with the present sway of modern civilization
seemed to link it with a far antiquity.
The streets were ablaze with electrics as we drove through the cities of
Rock Island and Moline, where the pavements were thronged by slowly
moving crowds.
When I left Minneapolis, a little more than a week later, I had in mind
Mr. Ross’s challenge that any search for work in the interior of the
State would discover abundant opportunities. I was bound next,
therefore, for the Iowa border. It would not have taken long to reach it
at the usual rate of thirty miles a day. But I did not go through
directly. For several days I worked for a fine old Irish farmer near
Belle Plain, whose family was stanch Roman Catholic, and whose wife was
a veritable sister of mercy to the whole country side, indefatigable in
ministry to the sick and poor. A few days later I stopped again and
spent a memorable week as hired man on Mr. Barton’s farm near Blue Earth
City.
It was well along in July, therefore, when I crossed into Iowa from the
north, walking down by way of Elmore and Ledyard and Bancroft to Algona,
where I spent a few days and then set out for Council Bluffs.
The walk from Algona to Council Bluffs was a matter of two hundred miles
and a little more, perhaps. The heat was intense, but, apart from some
discomfort due to that, it was a charming walk, leading on through
regions that varied widely but constantly presented new phases of native
wealth. I should have enjoyed it more but for the awkwardness of my
position. It was embarrassing to meet the farmers, yet I wished to meet
all that I could. It was not easy to frame an excuse for not accepting
the work that was constantly offered to me. To negotiate with a farmer
for the job of helping with the chores in payment for a night’s lodging
and breakfast was trying to his temper, when he was at his wit’s end for
hands to help at the harvesting. I felt like one spying out the land and
mocking its need.
Through a long, hot afternoon I walked from Algona in the direction of
Humboldt, some twenty-six miles to the south. The country roads were
deserted, the whole population being in the hay-fields, apparently. The
corn, which was late in the planting, owing to the spring floods, was
making now a measured growth of five inches in the day.
In the evening twilight I passed through the Roman Catholic community of
St. James and walked on a few miles in the cool of the evening. Not
every farm-house that I saw wore an air of prosperity. I came upon one,
which, even in the dark of a starlit night, gave evidence of infirm
fortune. The garden-gate was off its hinges and was decrepit besides.
With some difficulty I repropped it against the tottering posts when I
entered. In a much littered cow-yard, I found a middle-aged farmer, who
with his hired man had just finished the evening milking. Without a word
he stood pouring the last bucket of milk, slowly through a strainer into
a milk-can on the other side of the fence, as he listened to an account
of myself. What I wanted was a place to sleep and a breakfast in the
morning. In return I offered to do whatever amount of work he thought
was fair. When the bucket was empty he gave me a deliberate look, then
simply asked me to follow him to the house. Throwing himself at full
length on the sloping cellar-door, he pointed to a chair on the doorstep
near by as a seat for me, and began to question me about the crops in
the country about Algona. I was fortunate enough to divert him soon to
his own concerns, and, for an hour or more, I listened, while he told me
of a long struggle on his farm. For fifteen years, he had worked hard,
he said, and had seen the gradual settlement and growth of the region
immediately about him; yet, with slightly varying fortunes, he was
little better off than when he took up the farm as a pioneer.
There was a mystery in it all that baffled him. Low prices were the
ostensible cause of his ill-success; he could scarcely get more for his
crops than they cost him; but back of low prices was something else, an
incalculable power which took vague form in his mind as a conspiracy of
the rich, who seemed to him not to work and yet to have unmeasured
wealth, while he and his kind could hardly live at the cost of almost
unceasing toil.
By five o’clock in the morning we were at the chores, and were hungry
enough when the summons came to breakfast at a little after six. There
is, in certain forms of it, a cheerlessness in farm-life the gloom of
which would be difficult to heighten. The call to breakfast came from
the kitchen, which was a shed-like annex to the small, decaying, wooden
farm-house. The farmer, the hired man, and I washed ourselves at the
kitchen-door, then passed from the clear sunlight into a room whose
smoke-blackened walls were hung round with kitchen utensils. The air was
hot and dense with the fumes and smoke of cooking. A slovenly woman
stood over the stove, turning potatoes that were frying in a pan, while,
at the same time, she scolded two ragged children, who sat at the table
devouring the food with their eyes.
Scarcely a word was spoken during the meal, until, near its close, the
farmer’s wife quite abruptly—as though resuming an interrupted
conversation—broke into further account of a horse-thief, whose latest
escapade had been not far away, but those whereabouts remained unknown.
The very obvious point of which was that, however her husband had been
imposed upon, my efforts to pass as an honest man had not met with
unqualified success with her. In such manner the breakfast was saved
from dulness, and I was sure that the parting guest was heartily speeded
when my stint was done.
There is a high exhilaration in a day’s walk, even in the heat of July.
The feeling of abounding life that comes with the opening day after
sound sleep and abundant food, when one is free from care, and there are
twelve hours of daylight ahead for leagues of delightful country, is
like the pulse of a kingly sport. From higher points of rolling land I
could see far over the squares marked by the regularly recurring roads
that intersect one another at right angles at intervals of a mile. The
farm-houses stood hidden each in a small grove, with the wheel of a
windmill invariably whirling above the tree-tops, and with here and
there a long winding line of willows and stunted oaks marking the course
of a stream.
It was but twelve miles to Humboldt, and I stopped there only long
enough to ask the way to Fort Dodge. The roads were as deserted as on
the day before, and I was some distance past Humboldt before I fell in
with a single farmer.
He came rumbling down the road, sitting astride the frame of a farm
wagon from which the box had been removed. The fine dust was puffing
like white smoke about his dangling legs, while the massive harness
rattled over the big-jointed frames of the horses.
“You may as well ride,” he called, as he overtook me, and I lost no time
in getting on behind.
More fruitful as a field of conversation even than the weather were the
crops at that season. I had picked up a smattering of the lingo, and we
were soon commenting on the abundant yield of hay, and the fair promise
of rye and wheat, and the favorable turn that the unbroken heat had
given to the prospects of the corn, in the hope that it held, in spite
of the late planting, of its ripening before the coming of the frost.
But, for all the good outlook, the farmer was far from cheerful. I
suspected the cause of his depression and avoided it from fear of
embarrassment to myself, while yet I wished to hear his views about the
situation. When they came, they were what I anticipated:
A good hay crop? Yes, there could hardly be a better, but of what use
was hay that rotted in the fields before you could house it, for want of
hands? And this was but the beginning of the difficulty.
The whole harvest lay ahead, and the advancing summer brought no
solution of the problem of “help.” He was very graphic in his account of
the year-around need of men that grows acutest in midsummer, and I did
not escape the embarrassment that I feared; for, when he pressed me to
go to work for him, I could only urge weakly that I felt obliged to
hurry on. He was glad to be rid of me at the parting of our ways, a
little farther down the road, where he turned to the unequal struggle on
his farm, while I walked on at leisure in the direction of Fort Dodge.
A heave of the great plain raised me presently to a height, from which,
far over the roll of the intervening fields, with the warm sunlight on
their varying growths, I could see the church spires in the town
surrounded almost by wooded hills, with the Des Moines River flowing
among them. The air was full of the distant clatter of mowing machines,
which carries with it the association of stinging heat and the patient
hum of bees and the fragrance of new hay.
As I descended into the next hollow there came driving toward me a young
farmer. He was seated on a mower, his eyes fixed on the wide swath cut
by the machine in its course just within a zigzag rail fence that
flanked the road. The green timothy fell before the blade in thick,
soft, dewy widths that carpeted the meadow. A chance glance into the
road discovered me, and he brought the horses to a stand. As he pushed
back his hat from his streaming forehead, I could see that he was young,
but much worn with care and overwork.
“Will you take a job with me?” he asked, and the wonder of it was the
greater, since that whole region has through it a strong Yankee strain,
and men of such stock are sore pressed when they come to the point
without preliminaries.
Again I had to resort to a feeble excuse of necessity to go farther;
but, curious as to the response, I ventured an inquiry about the local
demand for men.
“Oh, everyone needs men,” the farmer rejoined impatiently, as,
tightening the reins and adjusting his hat, he started the horses,
anxious, evidently, to drown further idle talk in the sharp noise of the
swift-mowing knives.
In the river valley I was not long in finding a lane which disappeared
among a scattered growth of stunted trees in the direction of a rocky
bluff that marked the bed of the stream. Every day’s march brought some
chance of a bath, and, at times, I was fortunate enough to fall in with
two or three in thirty miles, and nothing could be more restful or
refreshing in a long walk, or a better preventive against the stiffness
that is apt to accompany it. Here I could both bathe and swim about, and
when I regained the highway, it was almost with the feeling of vigor of
the early morning.
The main-travelled road did not lead me, as I expected, into Fort Dodge,
but to an intersection of two roads, a little west of the town. Instead
of going eastward into the city, I turned to the west, in the direction
of Tara, a small village on a branch of the Rock Island Railway. The
setting sun was shining full in my face, but no longer with much effect
of heat. As I hurried on in the fast cooling air, the way led by an
abrupt descent into a ravine, where flowed a small tributary of the Des
Moines among rocks and sheer banks, forming a striking contrast with the
rolling prairie. It was but a break in the plain. From the top of the
opposite bank, the land stretched away again in undulating surface, with
much evidence of richness of soil and the wealth of the farmers.
Not without exception, however; for, at nightfall, I was nearing a small
house, through whose coating of white paint the blackened weather-boards
appeared with an effect of much dilapidation. When I entered the garden,
passing under low shade-trees, I met a sturdy Irishman, bare-headed, and
in his shirtsleeves, whose thin white hair and beard alone suggested
advancing years.
There was no difficulty in dealing with him. He was not in need of a
hired man, but was perfectly willing that I should have supper and
breakfast at his home and a bed in the barn on the terms of a morning
stint. Accordingly, I followed light-heartedly into the kitchen, where,
in the dim light, I saw his wife and a married daughter, with her son, a
lad of six or eight.
Supper was ready; with every mark of kindly hospitality, the farmer’s
wife, a motherly body with an ill-defined waist, made ready for me at
the table, moving lightly about, in spite of age and bulk, in bare feet,
that appeared from under the skirt of a dark print dress with an apron
covering its ample front. A lamp was lighted, and from the vague walls
there looked down upon us the faces of saints in bright-colored prints.
A kitchen clock ticked on the mantel-shelf, and a kettle was singing on
an iron stove that projected half way into the room. We supped on tea
and bread and hard biscuits, while the farmer questioned me about the
crops along the day’s route, and his wife heaved deep sighs and broke
into a muttered “The Lord bless us!” when I owned to having walked some
thirty-five miles since morning.
I was charmed with my new acquaintances. There was no embarrassment in
being with them, and nothing of restraint or gloom in their home. After
supper I pumped the water for the stock, and helped with the milking.
When the chores were done, I asked leave to go to bed. A heavy quilt and
pillow were given to me, and, spreading them upon the hay, I slept the
sleep of a child.
The cows had been milked in the morning and were about to be driven to
pasture, when there arose a difficulty in separating from its mother a
calf that was to be weaned. The calf had to be penned in the shed, while
the old cow went afield with the others. To imprison it, however, proved
no easy undertaking. With the agility of a half-back, it dodged us all
over the cow-yard, encouraged by the calls of its mother, from the lane,
and it evaded the shed-door with an obstinacy that was responsible for
adding materially to the content of the old man’s next confession.
For some time his wife stood by, her bare feet in the grass, her arms
akimbo, and her gray hair waving in the morning breeze, as, with
unfeigned scorn, she watched our baffled manœuvres. She could not endure
it long.
“I’ll catch the beast,” she shouted presently in richest brogue; and,
true to her word, by a simple strategy, she surprised the little brute
and had it by a hind leg before it suspected her nearness.
But capture was no weak surrender on the part of the calf. For its dear
life it kicked, and the picture of the hardy old woman, shaken in every
muscle under the desperate lunges of the calf, as, clinging with both
hands to its leg, she called to us with lusty expletives, to help her
before she was “killed entirely,” is one that lingers gleefully in
memory. The old man winked at me his infinite appreciation of the scene,
and between us we relieved his panting wife and soon housed the calf.
When my work was done, and I had said good-by to the family, whose
hospitality I had so much enjoyed, I set out for Gowrie, which was
twenty odd miles away. At Tara I found that, to avoid a long _détour_, I
must take to the railway as far, at least, as Moorland, the next station
on the line. Walking the track was sometimes a necessity, but always an
unwelcome one. It is weary work to plod on and on, over an unwavering
route, where an occasional passing train mocks one’s slow advance, and
where, for miles the only touch of human nature is in a shanty of a
section-boss, with ragged children playing about it, and a haggard woman
plying her endless task, while a mongrel or two barks after one, far
down the line.
At Moorland I resumed the highway, and held to it with uneventful march,
until, within a mile or two of Gowrie, two men in a market-wagon
overtook me and offered me a lift into the village.
To me the notable event of the day was a drive of several miles with a
farmer, in the afternoon. He had been to the freight station in Gowrie,
to get there a reaper, which had been ordered out from Chicago. The
machine, in all the splendor of fresh paint, lay in the body of the
wagon, while he sat alone on the high seat in front.
When, at his invitation, I climbed up beside him, I was delighted with
the first impression of the man. In the prime of life and of very
compact figure, his small dark eyes, that were the brighter for contrast
with a swarthy complexion, moved with an alertness that denoted energy
and force. Individuality was stamped upon him and showed itself in the
trick of the eye, and in every tone of his voice.
He asked me where I was going, and said that he could take me five miles
over the road toward Jefferson, “unless,” he added, “you’ll stop at my
farm and work for me.”