Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1900-08-11
WOMEN IN THE WHEAT FIELDS.
Every Available Person in Kansas
Pressed Into Service in Harvesting.
From the Chicacp Chrnnicle

From the Chicago Chronicle
Never before in the history of Kansas has
the wheat crop been as abundant it is
the present year. The harvest is in prog
ress. and all the men, women and children
in the state who can be drafted into the
army of harvesters are busy from daybreak
till dark cutting, binding and stacking the
golden grain. Ellis county alone has 49,
U76 acres of wheat. and in that section of
the state there is little of anything except
wheat grown. Most of the farmers have
their entire acreage in wheat, and to har-
vest 1t the wives and children of farmers
go into the fields and work with the men
Eighteen women of Hays City have en-
gagged to go into the harvest fields. They
will earn from S1.50 to 81 a day, and many
young woman viii appear in church this
fall with a new frock that was bought
with money earned driving a header box.
Most of the wheat Is harvested with
headers. machine pushed ahead of four
horses that cuts 1O-foot swath, clipping
the wheat halfway up the stalk and car
rying it into a header box The header box
is sort of rick on wagon that is driven
so that the wheat carrier dumps the wheat
from the machine into the box. Several
header boxes follow each machine, and as
fast one is filled it is driven to the stack
and an empty box takes its place. The wo-
men and girls and boys drive the header
boxes and distribute the cut wheat evenly
in it, This is not hard work, but it is
warm work and the hours are long.
There are several thousand Russian farm
ers in Ellis county. They came twenty
five years ago from Russia to escape draft
ing into the military service and to have
freedom of religious worship They are
devout Roman Catholics. They settled on
the open prairie. The land they came from
was fine for wheat growing and they were
wheat farmers. They brought seed wheat
with them. and they went in for wheat
growing on the prairies, and since then they
have stuck to ii. Their only crop, with the
exception of garden truck for home USE is
wheat. They own from 100 to $40 acres of
ground each; they out of debt, have
money in bank, and are buying up all the
adjoining land they can get, paying a. much
as so acre for wild, unbroken prairie
land. These Russians live in communities.
They have no farm houses.
A newspaper reporter drove recently from
Hays City to Catherine, distance of thir-
teen miles, and did not see a farm house
on the way. but the road the entire dis
lance was through one almost continuous
wheat field. without fences even. These
wheat fields are owned by the Russians
who live in Catherine. They have raised
wheat each year for twenty years on the
same land. After harvest each summer they
plow the ground and sow it in wheat ger
ting the crop IN before October. After that
they have absolutely nothing to 90 till the
following spring, when they redrill and sow
such portions of their wheat fields as have
been damaged by grasshoppers. The grass
hoppers generally eat into the borders of
nearly every field, and this necessftates a
redriQiug In the spring OF Q strip from ten