Daily capital journal. (Salem, Oregon) 1903-1919, 1906-07-28

Socialist neighbor horse and buggy
to use and plenty of whisky and
cigars to hand out to the voters
This was also declined. 1t was all
very funny.
The Socialist made a good hand
and really gave me a great deal of
information about the tenets of his
political faith. He would not take
any pay and when he found / had
hired man by the hour to help me,
he quit on the ground that he did
not wish to take that mans employ
ment away from him by his volunteer
services. When he was assured that
the other man did not want the job,
but was only working after his regu-
lar days work was over to accommo-
date me, he came back and helped
me until the hay was in the barn. At
the end of the hard work / took him
over to the house and gave him his
| choice of some buttermilk or any
other contents of the refrigerator
that he might prefer. We talked of
the old time grain harvest when
nearly every farmer thought he had
to have whisky for the harvest hands.
1t took from ten gallons to a barrel
to make a big grain harvest. There
were no self-binders, and the hands
bound around the field by stations,
If the team was slow it took four
hands to bind the three stations, but
many farmers found it paid to push
the team and have a fresh team to
put on at noon, and keep the five
binders busy, and they were kept on
the jump. The reaping machines in
the seventies got to have the self
raking attachment.
Raking the bundles from one of
the old-fashioned apron reapers,
that carried the grain as it fell, was
a hard job. Binding a station was
no small task, but took a full
handed man. He made his own
bands of the grain, and If the grain
was hort or weedy, or full of thistles
it tried his patience, and made a
man want to take something besides
water to help him around. Coming
in wet with perspiration at night,
washing at the pump, eating three
meals and two lunches, three times
as much as the same man would eat
now, sleeping on improvised beds
in the barn, or right on the sweet
smelling hay itself, was all part of
the harvesters' life. After harvest
we generally got job stacking and
sometimes stayed till threshing. To
pitch bundles on the wagon was not
| easy, and good pitcher who could
land bundle right to the stackers
hands, was always sure of a job. The
stacker laid the bundles with heads
pointing in, and pressed them all
down with his knees. The art was to
make them water proof, and have
the stack bulge out as If it rose from
the ground, and then tapered to a
beautiful spire-like point. have
travelled across the Iowa prairies
when one could not see the horizon
for stacks of grain.
There are few Western men who
have not helped make a grain crop.
From carrying water to the hands in
the hot blistering fields, binding a
station with another boy when
neither of us could make full hand,
to tending the men on the stack, or
bucking away straw at the tail of a
threshing machine, or holding sacks
when the old half bushel measure
was filled at the side of the thresh-
ing machine, and the sweeps of the
old-fashioned horsepower went
around with a man on the center of
the gear cracking his whip merrily
to the eight teams that drove the
separator, l have done all the work
connected with grain harvesting. l
have. gone a step farther and worked
in the Touring mills where the grain
was received at the scales hopper,
went up the elevators, and thence via
the conveyors into the great bins,
again to come back into the packers,
where it was nailed up in barrels and
branded. Then have helped team
it to the railroad, and to the Missis-
sippa river, where 1t went its way
to market. These are the recollec-
tions OF a hard-working but happy
boyhood, that cannot but think was
as good an education as any college
could give.
How all these thoughts and ex-
periences come thronging back from