The Killer

by Stewart Edward White

Its troubles began. Driven to the railroad and into the corrals, it next had to be urged to its first experience of sidedoor Pullmans. There the powerful beasts went frantic. Pike poles urged them up the chute into the cars. They rushed, and hesitated, and stopped and turned back in a panic. At times it seemed impossible to get them started into the narrow chute. On the occasion of one after-dark loading old J.B., the foreman, discovered that the excited steers would charge a lantern light. Therefore he posted himself, with a lantern, in the middle of the chute. Promply the maddened animals rushed at him. He skipped nimbly one side, scaled the fence of the chute. "Now keep 'em coming, boys!" he urged.

The boys did their best, and half filled the car. Then some other impulse seized the bewildered rudimentary brains; the cattle balked. J.B. did it again, and yet again, until the cars were filled.

You have seen the cattle trains, rumbling slowly along, the crowded animals staring stupidly through the bars. They are not having a particularly hard time, considering the fact that they are undergoing their first experience in travelling. Nowadays they are not allowed to become thirsty; and they are too car sick to care about eating. Car sick? Certainly; just as you or I are car sick, no worse; only we do not need to travel unless we want to. At the end of the journey, often, they are too wobbly to stand up. This is not weakness, but dizziness from the unwonted motion. Once a fool S.P.C.A. officer ordered a number of the Captain's steers shot on the ground that they were too weak to live. That greenhorn got into fifty-seven varieties of trouble.

Arrived at their journey's end the steers were permitted six to twelve individuals. The man in charge had to know mules—which is no slight degree of special wisdom; had to know loads; had to understand conditioning. His lantern was the first to twinkle in the morning as he doled out corn to his charges.

Then came the ruck of field hands of all types. The average field hand in California is a cross between a hobo and a labourer. He works probably about half the year. The other half he spends on the road, tramping it from place to place. Like the common hobo, he begs his way when he can; catches freight train rides; consorts in thickets with his kind. Unlike the common hobo, however, he generally has money in his pocket and always carries a bed-roll. The latter consists of a blanket or so, or quilt, and a canvas strapped around the whole. You can see him at any time plodding along the highways and railroads, the roll slung across his back. He much appreciates a lift in your rig; and sometimes proves worth the trouble. His labour raises him above the level degradation of the ordinary tramp; the independence of his spirit gives his point of view an originality; the nomadic stirring of his blood keeps him going. In the course of years he has crossed the length and breadth of the state a half dozen times. He has harvested apples in Siskiyou and oranges in Riverside; he has chopped sugar pine in the snows of the Sierras and manzanita on the blazing hillsides of San Bernardino; he has garnered the wheat of the great Santa Clara Valley and the alfalfa of San Fernando. And whenever the need for change or the desire for a drink has struck him, he has drawn his pay, strapped his bed roll, and cheerfully hiked away down the long and dusty trail.

That is his chief defect as a field hand—his unreliability. He seems to have no great pride in finishing out a job, although he is a good worker while he is at it. The Captain used to send in the wagon to bring men out, but refused absolutely to let any man ride in anything going the other way. Nevertheless the hand, when the wanderlust hit him, trudged cheerfully the long distance to town. I am not sure that a new type is not thus developing, a type as distinct in its way as the riverman or the cowboy. It is not as high a type, of course, for it has not the strength either of sustained and earnest purpose nor of class loyalty; but still it makes for new species. The California field hand has mother-wit, independence, a certain reckless, you-be-damned courage, a wandering instinct. He quits work not because he wants to loaf, but because he wants to go somewhere else. He is always on the road travelling, travelling, travelling. It is not hope of gain that takes him, for in the scarcity of labour wages are as high here as there. It is not desire for dissipation that lures him from labour; he drinks hard enough, but the liquor is as potent here as two hundred miles away. He looks you steadily enough in the eye; and he begs his bread and commits his depredations half humorously, as though all this were fooling that both you and he understood. What his impelling motive is, I cannot say; nor whether he himself understands it, this restlessness that turns his feet ever to the pleasant California highways, an Ishmael of the road.

But this very unreliability forces the ranchman to the next element in our consideration of the ranch's people—the Orientals. They are good workers, these little brown and yellow men, and unobtrusive and skilled. They do not quit until the job is done; they live frugally; they are efficient. The only thing we have against them is that we are afraid of them. They crowd our people out. Into a community they edge themselves little by little. At the end of two years they have saved enough capital to begin to buy land. At the end of ten years they have taken up all the small farms from the whites who cannot or will not live in competition with Oriental frugality. The valley, or cove, or flat has become Japanese. They do not amalgamate. Their progeny are Japanese unchanged; and their progeny born here are American citizens. In the face of public sentiment, restriction, savage resentment they have made head. They are continuing to make head. The effects are as yet small in relation to the whole of the body politic; but more and more of the fertile, beautiful little farm centres of California are becoming the breeding grounds of Japanese colonies. As the pressure of population on the other side increases, it is not difficult to foresee a result. We are afraid of them.

The ranchmen know this. "We would use white labour," say they, "if we could get it, and rely on it. But we cannot; and we must have labour!" The debt of California to the Orientals can hardly be computed. The citrus crop is almost entirely moved by them; and all other produce depends so largely on them that it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that without them a large part of the state's produce would rot in fields. We do not want the Oriental; and yet we must have him, must have more of him if we are to reach our fullest development. It is a dilemma; a paradox.

And yet, it seems to me, the paradox only exists because we will not face facts in a commonsense manner. As I remember it, the original anti-Oriental howl out here made much of the fact that the Chinaman and Japanese saved his money and took it home with him. In the peculiar circumstances we should not object to that. We cannot get our work done by our own people; we are forced to hire in outsiders to do it; we should expect, as a country, to pay a fair price for what we get. It is undoubtedly more desirable to get our work done at home; but if we cannot find the help, what more reasonable than that we should get it outside, and pay for it? If we insist that the Oriental is a detriment as a permanent resident, and if at the same time we need his labour, what else is there to do but pay him and let him go when he has done his job?

And he will go if pay is all he gets. Only when he is permitted to settle down to his favourite agriculture in a fertile country does he stay permanently. To be sure a certain number of him engages in various other commercial callings, but that number bears always a very definite proportion to the Oriental population in general. And it is harmless. It is not absolute restriction of immigration we want—although I believe immigration should be numerically restricted, but absolute prohibition of the right to hold real estate. To many minds this may seem a denial of the "equal rights of man." I doubt whether in some respects men have equal rights. Certainly Brown has not an equal right with Jones to spank Jones's small boy; nor do I believe the rights of any foreign nation paramount to our own right to safeguard ourselves by proper legislation.