The Sod-house Frontier, 1854-1890: A Social History of The Northern Plains by Everett Newfon Dick

Author:Everett Newfon Dick [Dick, Everett Newfon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839743900
Google: yps3zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Barakaldo Books
Published: 2020-01-15T03:34:42+00:00

CHAPTER XXI — BEGINNING OF MACHINE FARMING

AMONG the first inventions to ease the load of the toiling farmer were those perfecting mechanical devices for lightening the work of harvesting and threshing grain. As early as 1831 in the Shenandoah Valley, Cyrus McCormick had brought forth a mechanical harvester. The machine was unwieldy amid stumps and hills, however, and did not come into wide use until the great prairie wheat lands with their broad level fields, unhampered by stump or stone, were opened to settlement. The great impetus to the increased use of machinery resulted from the Civil War. The imperative need for breadstuffs sent prices soaring. A surplus of money during the War boom, and a shortage of manpower, caused the displacement of men in the harvest field. In the days before the War the trans-Missouri farmer had harvested his little patch of grain with a cradle and bound it in the same fashion as it had been done since the dawn of history.

The Kirby Patent Harvester which reached the prairie frontier during the early part of the Civil War, was a crude machine constructed somewhat on the order of the present day binder{269} with a platform and reel. The reel knocked the grain onto the platform. Two men operated the machine. The driver sat immediately over the bull wheel; the second man, directly behind him with a rake, pulled the grain off onto the ground where it lay in gavels and was bound up by five to eight men; depending on the heaviness of the grain, each binding station covered a fifth to an eighth of the field. The man on each station bound up his portion of the swath while the reaper was making the next circuit of the field. In the evening cutting was stopped and all hands shocked the grain.{270} The small acreage grown then made it possible for the owner of one of these machines to cut all the grain in the community. He secured labor largely in exchange for this service. Before the War was over the self-raking reaper appeared. It was operated by one man, the driver only. The machine, as its name indicates, raked the bunches off automatically.

Binding on station was grueling work of a competitive nature. The man on station kicked the gavel together with his feet while he jerked a handful of wheat from the sheaf. With a quick twirl of the wrist he spliced a straw band, stooped to gather the grain in his arms, and rose with the bundle on his knee. With a fast pull and a twirl over his thumb, finally tucking in the end, he dropped the bundle into the stubble and rushed to the next gavel. To allow the machine to make a round before the man had all his station bound was a disgrace. A hand who allowed that was said to be “doubled.” Binders vied with one another in contests of endurance and speed. Individual binders would urge the driver to go faster in order to disgrace the worker on some other station.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.