A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

He was a little heated, but he caught himself with a laugh and was smiling genially as he added:

“I see your ‘unemployed’ friends often. Scarcely a day passes that men don’t come in here asking for a job. My experience is that if they were half as much in earnest in looking for work as I am in looking for men that can work, they wouldn’t search far or long. I’ve tried a good many of them in my time. I can tell now in five minutes whether a man has any real work in him; and those that are worth their keep when you haven’t your eye on them, are as scarce as hens’ teeth. There are good jobs looking for all the men that are good enough for them; if you want to prove it, start right in here, or go into the State and ask the farmers for a chance to work.”

I did not say that this last was the very thing I meant to do. Instead, I began to tell him of the cases that I knew of men, who, through no fault of their own, were out of work and were not free to go where it could be easily found. Mr. Ross was sympathetic with what was real and personal in the sufferings of unfortunate workers; and gathering encouragement, I went on to speak of suffering no less real which was the result of sheer incapacity, a native weakness of will or lack of courage or perseverance. This made him smile again, and, with a twinkle in his eye, he asked me whether I did not think it was expecting a good deal of organized society to provide for the unfit. Then drawing out his watch, he glanced at it and, turning to me with a fine disregard of the outer man, he asked me to go home with him to supper. I should have been delighted. Perhaps I ought to have gone. I had not forgotten, however, a too hospitable minister in Connecticut; but at the next moment I accepted gladly Mr. Ross’s invitation to drive with him in the evening.

Behind a sorrel filly that fairly danced with delight of motion, we set out an hour or more before sunset, and Mr. Ross drove first through business streets, pointing out to me the principal buildings as we passed, then up to the higher levels of the hillside, on which the city stands, through an attractive residence quarter. From there we could look down upon the river flowing between banks of wooded hills, with its swollen, muddy waters made radiant by the sunset. Then back to the lower city we went and out over the bridge to the military post of Rock Island, past the arsenal and the barracks to the officers’ quarters among splendid trees and broad reaches of shaded lawn, and finally to an old farm-house, which had been the home of Colonel Davenport at the time of his struggles with the Indians. It was not a distant date in actual years, but the contrast with the present sway of modern civilization seemed to link it with a far antiquity.

The streets were ablaze with electrics as we drove through the cities of Rock Island and Moline, where the pavements were thronged by slowly moving crowds.

When I left Minneapolis, a little more than a week later, I had in mind Mr. Ross’s challenge that any search for work in the interior of the State would discover abundant opportunities. I was bound next, therefore, for the Iowa border. It would not have taken long to reach it at the usual rate of thirty miles a day. But I did not go through directly. For several days I worked for a fine old Irish farmer near Belle Plain, whose family was stanch Roman Catholic, and whose wife was a veritable sister of mercy to the whole country side, indefatigable in ministry to the sick and poor. A few days later I stopped again and spent a memorable week as hired man on Mr. Barton’s farm near Blue Earth City.

It was well along in July, therefore, when I crossed into Iowa from the north, walking down by way of Elmore and Ledyard and Bancroft to Algona, where I spent a few days and then set out for Council Bluffs.

The walk from Algona to Council Bluffs was a matter of two hundred miles and a little more, perhaps. The heat was intense, but, apart from some discomfort due to that, it was a charming walk, leading on through regions that varied widely but constantly presented new phases of native wealth. I should have enjoyed it more but for the awkwardness of my position. It was embarrassing to meet the farmers, yet I wished to meet all that I could. It was not easy to frame an excuse for not accepting the work that was constantly offered to me. To negotiate with a farmer for the job of helping with the chores in payment for a night’s lodging and breakfast was trying to his temper, when he was at his wit’s end for hands to help at the harvesting. I felt like one spying out the land and mocking its need.

Through a long, hot afternoon I walked from Algona in the direction of Humboldt, some twenty-six miles to the south. The country roads were deserted, the whole population being in the hay-fields, apparently. The corn, which was late in the planting, owing to the spring floods, was making now a measured growth of five inches in the day.

In the evening twilight I passed through the Roman Catholic community of St. James and walked on a few miles in the cool of the evening. Not every farm-house that I saw wore an air of prosperity. I came upon one, which, even in the dark of a starlit night, gave evidence of infirm fortune. The garden-gate was off its hinges and was decrepit besides. With some difficulty I repropped it against the tottering posts when I entered. In a much littered cow-yard, I found a middle-aged farmer, who with his hired man had just finished the evening milking. Without a word he stood pouring the last bucket of milk, slowly through a strainer into a milk-can on the other side of the fence, as he listened to an account of myself. What I wanted was a place to sleep and a breakfast in the morning. In return I offered to do whatever amount of work he thought was fair. When the bucket was empty he gave me a deliberate look, then simply asked me to follow him to the house. Throwing himself at full length on the sloping cellar-door, he pointed to a chair on the doorstep near by as a seat for me, and began to question me about the crops in the country about Algona. I was fortunate enough to divert him soon to his own concerns, and, for an hour or more, I listened, while he told me of a long struggle on his farm. For fifteen years, he had worked hard, he said, and had seen the gradual settlement and growth of the region immediately about him; yet, with slightly varying fortunes, he was little better off than when he took up the farm as a pioneer.