and then I changed the subject to the reaper. It was of the make of the
factory in which, for eight weeks, during the previous winter, I worked
as a hand-truckman, and very full of association it was as I looked upon
it in changed surroundings. Hundreds of such tongues John Barry and I
had loaded on our truck in the paint-shop, then stacked them under the
eaves over the platform; scores of such binders we had transferred from
the dark warehouses to the waiting freight-cars below. Equally familiar
looked the “wider,” and the receptacle for twine, and the “binder,” and
the “bar.” I told the farmer that I had been a hand in the factory where
his machine was made, and he appeared interested in the account of the
vast industry where two thousand men work together in so perfect a
system of the division of labor, that a complete reaper, like his own,
is turned out in periods of a few minutes in every working day.
He, too, was autobiographical in his turn. His history was one of the
innumerable examples at the West of substantial success under the
comparatively simple advantages of good health and an unbounded capacity
for work.
From an early home in Pennsylvania, he drifted, as a mere boy, into
Indiana, and “living out” there to a farmer, he remained with him for
five years. Shrewd enough to see his opportunity, and to seize it, he
made himself master of farming, and became so indispensable to his
employer that he was soon making more than twenty dollars a month and
his keep the year around. At the end of five years he had saved a little
more than eight hundred dollars, which he invested in a mortgage on good
land. Then came his _Wanderjahre_. He went to Colorado, worked for two
years on a sheep ranch, and looked for chances of fortune. They were not
wholly wanting, but the prospects were distant, and, rather than endure
longer the lonely life of the frontier, he returned as far as Iowa, and
bought his present farm at the rate of ten dollars an acre. For twelve
years he had lived and worked upon it. Under improvement, and the growth
of population about it, its value had risen threefold, for he had
recently added to it a neighboring farm, for which he had to pay at the
rate of thirty dollars an acre.
The narrative was piquant in the extreme. There was in it so ingenuous a
belief in the order of things under which he had risen unaided from the
position of a hired man to that of a hirer of men. Like Mr. Ross, he had
no quarrel with social conditions, except that they no longer furnished
him with such hands as he himself had been. Under the demoralization of
a demand for men far in excess of the supply, the agricultural laborers
of the present sit lightly on their places, and are mere time servers,
he said, with no personal interest in their employers’ affairs. He
seemed to imply a causal relation between the condition of the labor
market as it affects the farmer and the degeneracy in agricultural
laborers. But whether he meant that or not, he was certainly clear in an
insistence that, from his point of view, the social difficulty is one of
individual inefficiency, and hardly ever takes the form of any real
hindrance to a genuine purpose to get on in the world. All along our
route he enforced the point by actual illustration, showing how one
farmer, by closest attention to business, had freed himself of the
obligations at first incurred in taking up the land, and had added farm
to farm, while such another, less efficient than his neighbor, had gone
down under a burden of debt.
I opened the gate, and stood watching him as he drove up the long lane
leading to his house and barns, while the horses quickened their pace in
conscious nearness to their stalls. A Philistine of the Philistines in
the impregnable castle of his hard-earned home, I could but like and
honor him.
Under the stars, on top of a load of hay that had been left standing in
a barn-yard in the outskirts of Jefferson, I slept that night, and spent
most of the next day, which was Sunday, under the trees of the town
square, in front of the court-house, going in the morning to a Methodist
church, where awaited me the courteous welcome which I found at all
church doors, whether in the country or the town. For food I had a large
loaf of bread, which I had purchased for ten cents at Gowrie. A little
beyond Jefferson, after a delightful bath in the Raccoon River, with the
uncommon luxury of a sandy bottom, I got leave of a farmer on the road
to Scranton to sleep in his barn, and, after the rest of Sunday, I set
out on Monday morning keen and fit for the remaining walk to Council
Bluffs.
Monday’s march took me from a point not far west of Jefferson, by way of
Coon Rapids, to the heart of the hills in the neighborhood of Templeton,
where I spent the night on the farm of a Scotsman of the name of Hardy.
The heat of the day was prodigious. Not like the languid heat of the
tropics, it was as though the earth burned with fever which communicated
itself in a nervous quiver to the hot, dry air, and quickened one’s
steps along the baking roads. The stillness was almost appalling, and,
as I passed great fields of standing corn, I could fancy that I heard it
grow with a crackle as of visible outbudding of the blades.
I did not walk all the way. Twice in the day I had a lift, both of
several miles, and each with a farmer whose views differed as widely
from the other’s as though they were separated by a thousand miles,
instead of being relatively next-door neighbors.
The first lift came in the morning along a main-travelled road which I
took in the hope of meeting an intersecting one that would lead me on to
Manning. A good-looking young farmer, fair-haired and blue-eyed, asked
me to the seat at his side high above the box of a farm wagon. We were
not long in learning that both were interested in the economics of
farming, where he knew much and I little, and where I was glad to be a
listener. It was like talking again with a socialist from a sweatshop in
Chicago. The fire of a new religion was in him. The difference lay
chiefly in that his was not the gospel of society made new and good by
doing away with private property and substituting a collective holding
of all the land and capital that are made use of for production; his
gospel was that of “free silver,” but he held it with a like unshaken
faith in its regenerating power. For months he had been preaching it,
and organizing night classes among the farmers in all the district
schoolhouses within reach, for the purpose of study of the money
question. Just once in the talk with me he grew convincing. There was
much of the usual insistence of “a conspiracy among rich men against the
producing classes,” whatever that may mean, and there were significant
statements to the effect that nine-tenths of the farmers of the region,
which he proudly called “The Garden of Eden of the West,” were under
mortgage to moneylenders, and that farmers in general, owing to the
tyranny of “the money power,” were fast sinking to a condition of
“vassalage;” but at last he rose to something more intelligible. It was
the sting of a taunt that roused him. He had seen copied from an Eastern
newspaper the statement that Western farmers were beginning to want free
silver, because they grasped at a chance to pay their debts at fifty
cents on the dollar. The man was fine in his resentment of the charge of
dishonor.
“We mean to pay our honest debts in full,” he said; “but see how the
thing works out: I borrowed a thousand dollars when wheat was selling at
a dollar a bushel. If I raised a thousand bushels, I could pay my debt
by selling them. But when wheat has fallen to fifty cents a bushel, I
must raise two thousand to meet the obligation. That came of
appreciation in the value of money. It is to the interest of Wall Street
men to have it so, while we need an increased volume of money. They deal
in dollars and we in wheat, and the more they can make us raise for a
dollar, the better off they are. It costs me as much time and labor and
wages to raise a thousand bushels of wheat as when it sold for a dollar,
and the justice of the case would be in my paying my debt with a
thousand bushels, for I don’t raise dollars, I raise wheat.”
No abstract reasoning or historical examples could have convinced him
that an appreciation in the value of money was due to causes other than
a conspiracy among what he called “the money kings,” who, in some
manner, had got control of the volume of currency and so determined the
prices of commodities. But with all his hallucinations in finance, it
was very plain that the charge of dishonesty had been misapplied.
It was toward the end of the day’s march that I came by the second lift.
For miles the country had grown more hilly, and when I left behind me
the village of Coon Rapids I found myself climbing a hill that was
really steep, then making a sharp descent into a valley, only to begin
another hill longer and steeper than any before.
I was slowly ascending one of the longest hills when a farmer in a light
market wagon called to me, making offer of a drive. I waited at the
crest of the hill and climbed to the seat at his side, while the horses
stood panting lightly in the cooler air that moved across the hill-tops.
In the two or three miles that we drove together, the farmer conversed
very freely. Quite as well informed as my acquaintance of the morning,
he was of sturdier calibre than he, and the difference in their views
was complete. He knew of no conspiracy against farmers or any “producing
class,” and he held that almost the most disastrous thing that could be
done would be to disturb the stability of the currency. An appreciation
in the value of money there had been, but it was plainly due to causes
at work the world over, and quite beyond any man’s control. Farmers were
suffering from it now; but a few years ago they had profited by
appreciation in the value of crops, and might look hopefully for a
return of better times for them. As to the farmers of that part of Iowa,
their fortune had been of the best. These hills were looked upon at
first as the least desirable land and were last to be taken up, but had
proved, when once developed, almost the richest soil in the State. The
farmers who settled there had found themselves, in consequence, in
possession of land that was constantly increasing in value. From $10 an
acre it had quickly risen to $20, and many of the owners would now
reluctantly yield their farms for $40 an acre.
There was nothing boastful in the statements. My informant was a person
of quiet speech and manner, but he had the advantage of being able to
enforce from concrete examples all that he had to say, and the histories
of most of the farmers, and every transaction in real estate for miles
around seemed to be at his command.
Nothing could have fitted better the mood in which I left him than my
meeting that evening with Mr. Hardy, at whose farm I spent the night. A
genial Scotsman of clear, open countenance, whose deep, rich voice
seemed always on the verge of laughter; he welcomed me right heartily,
and gave me supper of the best and a bed in the granary on fragrant hay,
which he spread there with his own hands, and a breakfast in the
morning; and for all this he would accept return, neither in work nor
pay.
We talked long together of English politics, but he was at his best on
the condition of the Iowa farmer. A more contented man I have rarely
met, nor a man of more contagious good-humor. As a youth he came from
Scotland, and had been a pioneer among these Iowa hills. For him the
hardships were all gone from farming, as compared with his early
experience. An accessible market, admirable labor-saving machines, ready
intercourse with neighbors and with the outside world, had changed the
original struggle under every disadvantage to a life of ease in
contrast. Very glad I should be of the chance to accept his parting
invitation to return at some time to his home.
Early in Tuesday’s march a young Swedish farmer picked me up, and
carried me on to within five miles of Manning; and, a little west of the
town, I fell in with another farmer, who shared his seat with me over
six miles of the way. A third lift of a couple of miles into Irwin
helped me much on the road to Kirkman. I had not reached the village,
however, when night fell. At a farm, a mile or more to the east of it, I
found as warm a welcome as on the night before. Supper was ready, and
room was made for me; then I lent a hand at the milking with the hired
men. Last, before going to bed, we had a swim. The farmer kept for the
purpose a pool in the barn-yard which was well supplied with constantly
changing water, and nothing could have been more grateful after a day of
work and walking in a temperature of 105° in the shade. I should liked
to have remained there as a hired man almost as much as with Mr. Hardy,
but the journey to Council Bluffs was now well under way, and I was bent
upon completing it before another long stop.
On Wednesday I wished to reduce as much as possible the distance to
Neola, which is a village at the junction of the St. Paul and Rock
Island railways; but I had to spend the night a few miles southwest of
Shelby. This was because I was not so fortunate as on the day before in
the matter of lifts. I got but one drive that day. Turning from Kirkman
into the stage-road leading into Harlan, the county-seat of Audubon
County, I saw approaching me a buggy containing two men. I stepped aside
to let it pass, but it stopped beside me, and one of the men invited me
to get in. The country doctor was writ large upon him, and, at his side,
was a coatless, collarless, taciturn youth, who clearly was his “hired
man.” Crowded between them I sat down, and the physician turned his
sharp, genial eyes upon me.
“Where are you from?”
“Where are you going?”
“How old are you?”
“What’s your name?”
“Where do you expect to go when you die?”
“Why don’t you shave?”
Such were the questions that, with almost fierce rapidity, he plied me
with, waiting meanwhile for but the briefest answer to each. And when
the ordeal was over, he laughed a low, shrewd laugh while his eyes
twinkled merrily, as he remarked, dryly: “I guess you’ll do.”
He allowed me no time to acknowledge the compliment, but went swiftly
on:
“Do you know that Mr. Frick has been shot and may die?”
I did not know it, for I had not seen a newspaper since leaving Algona,
and my intercourse had been with farmers whose news reaches them by the
weekly press,
It was an exceedingly tragic climax to the situation at Homestead, and
not without influence in determining the sympathies of the Western
farmers with the issues involved there. It had been amazing to me to
discover how keen was the interest taken in the strike all along my
route, and it was not a little significant, I thought, to find
everywhere a strong indignation against the use of a private police
force in accomplishing ends legal in themselves and fully provided for
by law and usage. So far in the struggle the feeling of the farmers was
with the men. Beyond that they appeared uncertain. There was a question
of fact to begin with. Did the cut affect more the hands who were
working for a dollar and a half a day or the skilled workmen who were
reported to get, some of them as much as fifteen dollars? Until this was
clear, there could be but speculation.
Most interesting of all, I had found their attitude toward the question
that was widely raised of a right the workmen were said to have in the
property at Homestead, apart from their wages, on the ground of their
having created its value. Here was the real issue of modern
industrialism, and on it I found the farmers conservative, to say the
least.
The American farmer is a landed proprietor with a gift for logical
tendencies that does him credit. His chiefest aim is to maintain, if
possible, his economic independence, and a doctrine that would give to
his hired man an ultimate claim to ownership in his farm is not one that
is likely soon to meet with wide acceptance among his class.
It was with the physician that I talked these matters over, and I was
interested to find my experience confirmed by that of so expert an
observer, whose chances were so good.
Very reluctantly I parted from him at his door and made in the direction
of Neola. Owing to rains that delayed me on Thursday, I did not enter
Neola until the middle of the afternoon of that day, and there I did not
stop in passing, but pressed on to Underwood, where I spent the night.
Friday was clear again and hot, but the roads were difficult, and I had
to desert them for the lines of the St. Paul and Rock Island railways,
that parallel each other side by side for several miles into Council
Bluffs.
For the past day I had not had a single offer of a job. The farmers, as
I approached the town, seemed either less in need of men or less willing
to take up with a chance wayfarer. No doubt I should have had no
difficulty had I set about a search for work. Certainly I could not have
fared better than I did for dinner at a farm, where I was allowed to
lend a hand with a load of hay. And after dinner, when the farmer and I
talked together for an hour, I found in him the same contentment which
struck me as so general among Iowa farmers.
But my letters were in the Post-office at Omaha, and I felt impatient of
delay until I should get them. I did not get them on that day, however,
nor for several days to come. In Council Bluffs I met the unlooked-for
barrier of a toll-bridge across the Missouri. Five cents would give me a
right of way, but I had only one, and must, therefore, look for work. I
counted myself very fortunate when, at nightfall, I got a job in a
livery-stable.
I had crossed Iowa, and Mr. Ross’s promise had been abundantly
fulfilled. On any day of the march I could have found a dozen places for
the asking, and scarcely a day had passed that I had not repeatedly been
asked to go to work. I should have thought this a condition peculiar to
the harvest time, had not many of the farmers told me that, while their
need is greatest then, it is so constant always that no good man need
ever be long without work among them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A SECTION-HAND ON THE
UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A SECTION-HAND ON THE UNION PACIFIC RAILWAY
It cost five cents to go from Council Bluffs to Omaha in the summer of
1892. That was the toll of a foot passenger in crossing the bridge
which, spanning the Missouri, joined the two cities. It was a reasonable
toll, I dare say, and paid probably no more than a fair return on the
capital invested in the bridge, but it was five cents and I had only
one. One dingy copper coin, with its Indian head and laurel wreath, was
all that was left of the savings from my last job. I must, therefore,
find work in Council Bluffs, and the letters which had been waiting for
me in Omaha must wait a little longer. But I felt fagged, for I had
reached the end of a six days’ walk of some 200 miles, so I took a seat
on a bench in the shade in the public square near a fountain, whose play
was soothing in the heat of a midsummer afternoon.
I thought regretfully then of the farmer with whom I dined at noon that
day, and with whom I might have remained as a hired man. Besides, I
remembered with some concern two men on foot who met me on the outskirts
of Council Bluffs.
“Where are you from, partner?” one of them asked, with some bluster in
his manner.
“I’ve just come down through the State from Algona,” I replied.
“Is there any work out the way you came?”
“Lots of it,” I assured him.
“Well, there ain’t none the way you’re goin’. Me and me pal is wore out
lookin’ for a job in Omaha and Council Bluffs.”
I had come 1,500 miles as a wage-earner, and I had 1,500 yet to go
before I should reach the Pacific, but not yet had it been hard to find
work of some sort, except when I chose to stay in a crowded city in
winter. The anxiety that I felt in this instance proved groundless, for
when, in the cool of the evening, I looked for employment I found it at
the third application, and I went to bed that night a hostler in a
livery-stable at a wage of twenty dollars a month and board at a “Fifth
Avenue” hotel.
Ten dollars less twelve cents, which were due for the hire of books at a
stationer’s shop, were clear gain at the end of two weeks’ service in
the stable. But the necessity of writing up notes and of answering many
letters, besides the allurements of a public library, kept me for
several days in Omaha, so that my cash had dwindled, when, one afternoon
about the middle of August, I left the city, with the broad State of
Nebraska as the next step of the journey.
It was natural to follow the Union Pacific Railway. It takes its course
westward through the State, and is paralleled by a main-travelled road
that connects the frequent settlements along the line. Just out of Omaha
the railroad makes a southern bend, and I avoided this by following the
directer course of the highway that led next morning to a meeting with
the rails at Elkhorn. The going there was of the plainest. The railway
followed the northern bank of the Platte River and the road followed the
rail. If the day was wet, I left the road and walked the sleepers; if
the day was dry, I walked the road, but always I was within easy hail of
a lift, and so fell in with many an interesting farmer and was saved
many miles of walking.
It was late in the afternoon of a rainy day that there chanced a lift of
the most timely. From low, heavy clouds had been falling since early
morning a misty rain that almost floated in the warm, still air. For a
hundred yards together I might find a tolerable path along the turf at
the edge of the road. Then, as the mud grew deeper, I took to the rails
and kept them, until the monotony of the sleepers drove me to the mire
again. I had seen scarcely a soul that day except the fleeting figures
on the trains and an occasional bedraggled section-hand who looked
sullenly at me, barely deigning a salutation as I passed. It seemed
hardly worth while to be abroad, but I had found it generally best to
stick to the road when I could, and I was beginning now to think of a
shelter for the night and trying to find some satisfaction in having
covered more than twenty miles since morning.
The rumble of a heavy wagon began to sound down the road; and when I
could hear the splash of the horses’ hoofs near by, I was delighted to
catch the call of the driver, as he asked me to a seat at his side. He
was a farm-hand, young and muscular and slouching, as he sat
stoop-shouldered, with the lines held loosely in his bare hands, while
the rain dripped from a felt hat upon the shining surface of his rubber
coat.
Why he had asked me to ride I could not clearly see, for he scarcely
turned his lacklustre eyes upon me when I climbed up beside him, and he
seemed not in the least anxious to talk.
We were driving through a region that was growing familiar from its
changelessness. On every side were fields of corn, unfenced, and bounded
only by the horizon, apparently, as they stretched away into cloudy
space. Like islands in a sea of standing corn were widely scattered
groups of farm buildings, their clusters of cottonwood-trees about them
and sometimes a fruit orchard. And if there was any other break in the
monotony of corn, it was where vast acres had been turned to raising
beets for the sugar trade. Hardly a swell marred the level of the
prairie, and the rails reached endlessly on in an unbending line across
the plain.
The usual subjects of conversation were of no avail with my new
acquaintance. He was not interested in corn and only languidly in the
experiment with beets, and the general election failed to move him,
although he ventured so far as to insist that there was no hope for the
farmers of the West until the free coinage of silver should be secured.
His mood was in keeping with the day, and life was “flat, unprofitable,
and stale.”
He quickened finally, to the theme of work, but only as a vent to his
depression. Work was plentiful enough; for such as he, life was little
else than work, but of what profit was it to slave your soul out for
enough to eat and to wear and a place to sleep?
There was no escaping the tragedy of the man’s history as he told me
simply of his father’s death from overwork in an attempt to pay off the
mortgage on the farm and how his mother was left to the unequal
struggle. He himself was eleven then, and the elder of two children; he
could remember clearly how the home was lost—the accumulated labor of
many years. From that time his life had been an unbroken struggle for
existence, against odds of sickness that again and again had swept away
his earnings and thrown him back to the dependence of an agricultural
laborer.