The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

One evening as we sat under the stars the talk turned upon astronomy, and Ed began to comment disparagingly upon the claims of astronomers of an ability to weigh the heavenly bodies, and to measure their distances from one another and from the earth. Jake heartily agreed with him, and insisted that not until a line could be carried from one to another, and each star weighed accurately in a scale, would he put any confidence in these pretended results. My attempt to point out that there were methods of determining weight and distance other than the very direct ones which they insisted upon, was very damaging to my reputation for intelligence, and was set down as of a piece with the general ignorance which I had shown in the work of a livery-stable. And when, later in the discussion, I stood out for the validity of the doctrine of the conservation of energy, against Ed’s immediate demonstration of its falsity in the heaps of refuse which he pointed out were thrown every day from our stable alone, and which must to some degree effect a variation in the totality of matter—I found that my position in the crew was threatened with unpleasantness.

But in reality both Jake and Ed were exceedingly friendly to me. They were at pains from the first to teach me my work, and to give me a hint now and again, which counted for much, in the matter of getting the job well in hand. Soon the days began to go by with astonishing rapidity. I had told Mr. Holden that I should not be with him very long, and at the end of two weeks I left the livery-stable with ten dollars and one cent in my pocket, minus the twelve cents which were due for book-hire, and which I felt had been well invested.

At Omaha I stopped for several days. Like Minneapolis and Denver, of the Western towns which I have seen, it is a splendid type of the American city of a generation’s growth, where almost miraculous progress has been made in actual material development, and where the higher demands of civilization are responded to with an energy and enthusiasm which are inspiring, and which are prophetic of splendid results.

Then out I walked one perfect afternoon upon the level plains of Nebraska, with wild sunflowers in prolific bloom and square miles of Indian-corn fields standing lusty and stark to the very horizon with puffs of belated pollen powdering the warm red light, and the corn-silk turning black at the ends, and the long, drooping, cane-like blades beginning to show the ripe yellow of the autumn.

The mere writing down the bare fact of the journey stirs in one’s blood again the joy of that free life. The boundlessness of the world and your boundless enjoyment of it, the multiplicity of abundant life and your blood-kinship with it all, some goal on the distant horizon and your “spirit leaping within you to be gone before you then!” There is scarcely a recollection of all the tramp through Illinois and Minnesota and Iowa and eastern Nebraska which is without the charm of a free, wandering life through a rich, beautiful country. What I saw of the wealth of a fertile region in central Illinois I found again enhanced in beauty and productiveness in southern Minnesota, and, varying in outward configuration but scarcely less attractive or fruitful, across the face of Iowa, losing only its variety as it modulates in Nebraska to the plains which slope upward gently for five hundred miles to the Rockies.

My mind throngs with the pictures of splendid cultivation, of leagues on leagues of farms which were had for the taking or were purchased from the Government at a dollar and a quarter an acre, and where I saw countless comfortable homes and fields white to the harvest, with no demand so strong as the one for laborers.

It was not wealth in the sense of opulence, but it was the plenty which is beyond the fear of want that marked the character of that broad domain. The poor were there, and the suffering and the deeply discontented, and there were hard conditions of life and very sordid ones, but never the hopelessness which gives to town-bred destitution its quality of despair. In the gradual development of actual resources about you appeared to be the remedies of most of the obvious ills.

“This is a rich region,” said a handsome young farmer who had offered me a lift one blistering hot day in Iowa—“this is a rich region, and it is more than rich, it is reliable. We never know a total failure of crops here; we can always make a living. This country, for hundreds of miles around, is a garden, and we live in the heart of it.” And he was one of the discontented. I only regret that I have not space here for his interesting account of the tyranny of capital under which, from his point of view, the farmers live and work, and the imperative need of monetary reform as a means of bringing about their emancipation.

It was the thing which I had heard many times from many farmers at the West, only never presented with quite equal cogency before. The opposite views had been represented to me, and there was often a singular alternation of presentation within the course of a day or two, and I had come to recognize a comical uniformity between condition and views.

If I chanced upon a farmer who had no particular quarrel with the existing order of things, who was conservative and cautious and sceptical of the efficacy of change, I was quite sure to find that he was an admirable farmer, thrifty and energetic and industrious, with a thorough knowledge of his business down to a frugal care of minor details. But if, on the other hand, I fell in with a farmer who was clamorous for radical economic change, on the ground that he and his class were being ruined by the injustices of existing economic conditions, I soon began to feel a suspicion, which all my observation deepened into a conviction, that the man of this type was fundamentally a poor farmer; his buildings and fences were sure to be out of repair, and his stock showed signs of suffering for want of proper care, and the weeds grew thick in his corn, and his machines were left unhoused and suffered more from rust than ever they did from wear.