The white Indian boy

by Elijah Nicholas Wilson

All of the grain was not out of the fields yet and all of the men had gone off to the “Echo Canyon War,” as it was called, except a few very old men who could not do much work. The women and little boys could be seen every day out in the fields hauling grain and stacking it. There would be about half a dozen women to each team and a little boy driving the oxen. I have seen as many as fifteen to twenty teams at a time out in the big public field hauling grain, and just as many women and children as could get around the wagons. They seemed happy as larks, for they were singing bravely.

After the grain was hauled it was threshed. An old man by the name of Baker, who could just get around by the aid of two walking-sticks, took charge of the threshing machine. It was not much like the steam threshers of these days. This one had a cylinder fixed in a big box, and it was made to turn by horse power, but we had to use ox power. Old “Daddy Baker” and as many women as could get around the machine began to do the threshing. We put on four yoke of oxen to run the old “chaff-piler,” as we called it.

The oldest boys were set to pitching the grain to the old machine. One of the other boys started up the cattle and away she went. I was to do the feeding. At first the boys pitched the grain so fast that I had to shove three or four bundles at a time into the mouth of the machine. This choked the old thing, and caused the belt to break, and it took half an hour to patch up and get going again.

The straw and chaff came out together. About fifteen women with rakes would string out and rake the straw along until they left the grain behind, then about forty children would stack the straw. After we threshed an hour or two we would stop and “cave up,” as we called it. That meant to push the grain and chaff in a pile at one side. Then we would go on again.

When we had finished Brother Martendale’s job, we moved over to Brother Pumpswoggle’s place, and after that we threshed for some other brother until all the grain was done.

After the threshing was done, we took the old-fashioned fanning mill and went the rounds to clean the chaff from the grain. Some of the women would take turns turning the old thing, while others would take milk pans and buckets and put grain into the hopper. The chaff would fly one way and the grain go another. At best we could thresh only about one hundred fifty bushels a day, and we had about twenty thousand bushels to thresh, so it looked a very discouraging task, with winter so near.

But as luck would have it, some of the men came in with a large band of mules and horses they had taken from the soldiers and four of the men were left home to help do the threshing. “Lonzo” Mecham took charge of the work, and we used some of the captured mules to help out, so the threshing went on much faster. They were good mules.

During all of that fall the women took the part of men as well as women. They hauled wood from the mountains, dug potatoes, and gathered in all of the other products from the gardens and farms. Many of the poor mothers were hardly able to be out, but they took their double part bravely while their fathers, brothers and sons were off in the mountains defending their homes and families. They were poorly dressed, too, for the cold weather.

Most of the people were very poor. The Indians and grasshoppers and crickets had kept them down so that it was hard at best to make a living, and now an army was coming, they feared, to burn and kill.

The soldiers probably would have made sad work, if Lot Smith had not stopped them by burning their wagon trains full of supplies out on the Big Sandy.[4] This held them off long enough to enable the officers of the government to meet with the leaders of the state and come to an understanding; the war was happily prevented.