A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

I thanked him, but said that I would keep to the road for the present, and then I changed the subject to the reaper. It was of the make of the factory in which, for eight weeks, during the previous winter, I worked as a hand-truckman, and very full of association it was as I looked upon it in changed surroundings. Hundreds of such tongues John Barry and I had loaded on our truck in the paint-shop, then stacked them under the eaves over the platform; scores of such binders we had transferred from the dark warehouses to the waiting freight-cars below. Equally familiar looked the “wider,” and the receptacle for twine, and the “binder,” and the “bar.” I told the farmer that I had been a hand in the factory where his machine was made, and he appeared interested in the account of the vast industry where two thousand men work together in so perfect a system of the division of labor, that a complete reaper, like his own, is turned out in periods of a few minutes in every working day.

He, too, was autobiographical in his turn. His history was one of the innumerable examples at the West of substantial success under the comparatively simple advantages of good health and an unbounded capacity for work.

From an early home in Pennsylvania, he drifted, as a mere boy, into Indiana, and “living out” there to a farmer, he remained with him for five years. Shrewd enough to see his opportunity, and to seize it, he made himself master of farming, and became so indispensable to his employer that he was soon making more than twenty dollars a month and his keep the year around. At the end of five years he had saved a little more than eight hundred dollars, which he invested in a mortgage on good land. Then came his Wanderjahre. He went to Colorado, worked for two years on a sheep ranch, and looked for chances of fortune. They were not wholly wanting, but the prospects were distant, and, rather than endure longer the lonely life of the frontier, he returned as far as Iowa, and bought his present farm at the rate of ten dollars an acre. For twelve years he had lived and worked upon it. Under improvement, and the growth of population about it, its value had risen threefold, for he had recently added to it a neighboring farm, for which he had to pay at the rate of thirty dollars an acre.

The narrative was piquant in the extreme. There was in it so ingenuous a belief in the order of things under which he had risen unaided from the position of a hired man to that of a hirer of men. Like Mr. Ross, he had no quarrel with social conditions, except that they no longer furnished him with such hands as he himself had been. Under the demoralization of a demand for men far in excess of the supply, the agricultural laborers of the present sit lightly on their places, and are mere time servers, he said, with no personal interest in their employers’ affairs. He seemed to imply a causal relation between the condition of the labor market as it affects the farmer and the degeneracy in agricultural laborers. But whether he meant that or not, he was certainly clear in an insistence that, from his point of view, the social difficulty is one of individual inefficiency, and hardly ever takes the form of any real hindrance to a genuine purpose to get on in the world. All along our route he enforced the point by actual illustration, showing how one farmer, by closest attention to business, had freed himself of the obligations at first incurred in taking up the land, and had added farm to farm, while such another, less efficient than his neighbor, had gone down under a burden of debt.

I opened the gate, and stood watching him as he drove up the long lane leading to his house and barns, while the horses quickened their pace in conscious nearness to their stalls. A Philistine of the Philistines in the impregnable castle of his hard-earned home, I could but like and honor him.

Under the stars, on top of a load of hay that had been left standing in a barn-yard in the outskirts of Jefferson, I slept that night, and spent most of the next day, which was Sunday, under the trees of the town square, in front of the court-house, going in the morning to a Methodist church, where awaited me the courteous welcome which I found at all church doors, whether in the country or the town. For food I had a large loaf of bread, which I had purchased for ten cents at Gowrie. A little beyond Jefferson, after a delightful bath in the Raccoon River, with the uncommon luxury of a sandy bottom, I got leave of a farmer on the road to Scranton to sleep in his barn, and, after the rest of Sunday, I set out on Monday morning keen and fit for the remaining walk to Council Bluffs.

Monday’s march took me from a point not far west of Jefferson, by way of Coon Rapids, to the heart of the hills in the neighborhood of Templeton, where I spent the night on the farm of a Scotsman of the name of Hardy. The heat of the day was prodigious. Not like the languid heat of the tropics, it was as though the earth burned with fever which communicated itself in a nervous quiver to the hot, dry air, and quickened one’s steps along the baking roads. The stillness was almost appalling, and, as I passed great fields of standing corn, I could fancy that I heard it grow with a crackle as of visible outbudding of the blades.

I did not walk all the way. Twice in the day I had a lift, both of several miles, and each with a farmer whose views differed as widely from the other’s as though they were separated by a thousand miles, instead of being relatively next-door neighbors.

The first lift came in the morning along a main-travelled road which I took in the hope of meeting an intersecting one that would lead me on to Manning. A good-looking young farmer, fair-haired and blue-eyed, asked me to the seat at his side high above the box of a farm wagon. We were not long in learning that both were interested in the economics of farming, where he knew much and I little, and where I was glad to be a listener. It was like talking again with a socialist from a sweatshop in Chicago. The fire of a new religion was in him. The difference lay chiefly in that his was not the gospel of society made new and good by doing away with private property and substituting a collective holding of all the land and capital that are made use of for production; his gospel was that of “free silver,” but he held it with a like unshaken faith in its regenerating power. For months he had been preaching it, and organizing night classes among the farmers in all the district schoolhouses within reach, for the purpose of study of the money question. Just once in the talk with me he grew convincing. There was much of the usual insistence of “a conspiracy among rich men against the producing classes,” whatever that may mean, and there were significant statements to the effect that nine-tenths of the farmers of the region, which he proudly called “The Garden of Eden of the West,” were under mortgage to moneylenders, and that farmers in general, owing to the tyranny of “the money power,” were fast sinking to a condition of “vassalage;” but at last he rose to something more intelligible. It was the sting of a taunt that roused him. He had seen copied from an Eastern newspaper the statement that Western farmers were beginning to want free silver, because they grasped at a chance to pay their debts at fifty cents on the dollar. The man was fine in his resentment of the charge of dishonor.

“We mean to pay our honest debts in full,” he said; “but see how the thing works out: I borrowed a thousand dollars when wheat was selling at a dollar a bushel. If I raised a thousand bushels, I could pay my debt by selling them. But when wheat has fallen to fifty cents a bushel, I must raise two thousand to meet the obligation. That came of appreciation in the value of money. It is to the interest of Wall Street men to have it so, while we need an increased volume of money. They deal in dollars and we in wheat, and the more they can make us raise for a dollar, the better off they are. It costs me as much time and labor and wages to raise a thousand bushels of wheat as when it sold for a dollar, and the justice of the case would be in my paying my debt with a thousand bushels, for I don’t raise dollars, I raise wheat.”