The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

From Davenport I went by rail to Minneapolis, for I had resolved to emerge for a week and attend the National Republican Convention in that city, and not days enough remained, when I reached the river, to admit of my walking there in time for the political gathering. But when the Convention closed I started again, penniless and afoot, on the long march which I have interrupted twice, once when working for a fine old Irish farmer near Belle Plain, and a second time when I accepted Mr. Barton’s offer.

It is difficult to pass thus lightly over wide stretches of the journey. Under every casual sentence is a mine of what proved valuable experience to me: The days in the Steel Works, for example, as a member of a gang of foreign laborers and associated with an army of skilled and disciplined workmen, meeting some of them on familiar terms at the boarding-house and at the club, which is an interesting experiment on the part of the company. Then a tramp along the Illinois River through a rich country which teemed with vegetation in the luxuriance of the tropics; and a day’s march on the railway with a veritable hobo who had lost his partner and cheerfully took up with me, and who proved to be a delightful fellow, by no means lost to manliness, from whom I parted most regretfully when a job was found for him in a brick-kiln near Ottawa. Then the Convention itself, with its vast array of party organization, and its highly dramatic incidents as affecting the careers of political leaders, and its strong undercurrents of personal and sectional ambition, and the interesting personages, and picturesque figures; all so intensely real and finely typical and keenly alive with national spirit, and splendidly representative of wide, heterogeneous empire bound together in marvellous union. And then a few days spent near Belle Plain, where, driven by the rain from the road, I found shelter in a farm-house shed and was eagerly seized upon by the farmer as a hired man, until one morning, when, as usual, I had risen at sunrise and had cleaned the stables and curried the horses and was milking the old white cow, the longing for the tramp laid sudden hold of me and soon after breakfast my eager feet were again on the main-travelled road. The storm had passed, the sun was shining from a cloudless sky, and a strong, cool wind was tossing the graceful branches of a cluster of American elms at the roadside as I left the farm, and was blowing through the dewy, dark recesses of a bit of fragrant woodland as I climbed the hill, giving the sense of infinite vitality; when I reached the summit there lay below me, embedded in deep green, one of the hundred exquisite lakes of southern Minnesota, with its rippling surface joyously dancing in the sunlight and adding a touch of magic beauty to the rich, undulating landscape of varying field and forest and deep meadow-land. All about me were the homes of original settlers, where yet live some of the very men and women who, only a generation ago, began to reclaim this paradise from a boundless waste of treeless prairie. Looking out upon it now from such a height, seeing its dense woodlands, the fields rank with standing grain, the farm-houses gleaming white in the sun, the blue sheets of living water, and the distant Minnesota threading its way by towns and villages along fertile banks, one could but dream of its future, when the crudeness will be gone, and close culture will have made it all a very garden of the Lord!

It was through such country as this that my way led me toward the Iowa border. I walked along the valley of the Minnesota by Le Sueur and St. Peter to Mankato, where I spent Sunday, and then, cutting over the ridge, I went by Lake Crystal to Garden City, and so through Vernon and Amboy to Winnebago and on to Blue Earth City.

Not often on the march am I offered a lift, but now and again I am picked up and hurried over some miles of the road, and it was one of the best of these windfalls that befell me on this particular journey. I had left Amboy only a few miles behind, and the long, dusty road stretched far to the south in the direction of Winnebago, where I meant to spend the night. The day was clear and gratefully warm; in the meadows had just begun the metallic music of the mowers, and on the air was the first fragrance of new-mown hay. Soon I caught the sound of the rapid drum of horses’ hoofs behind me, and, turning, I saw a gentleman seated in a light open four-wheeler, driving a pair of Indian ponies at a spanking pace in my direction. He drew up beside me, and asked, pleasantly, whether I cared to ride. I lost no time in thanking him and in mounting to the seat at his side; in a moment more we were off at a ten-mile gait, and I was watching with delight the business-like movement of the ponies’ pace, with their backs so straight and level that each might almost have held a coin without dropping it.

In the meantime Dr. Brooks (for so I shall call the gentleman, who was returning to Winnebago from a professional visit on the outskirts of his practice) was engaging me in conversation. We very naturally discussed the recent nominations and the issues of the coming general election, and then I had ample opportunity of learning much from him of actual local conditions.

He seemed to me to be singularly well informed. He had travelled widely over the West, and this particular region he had known familiarly since its early settlement. Every farm-house which we passed he pointed out to me, telling me the farmer’s name meanwhile, and something of his history. There was a curious uniformity in the narrative. The life was rough enough in the beginning, no doubt, and of the essence of hard frontier struggle, but it sounded like a fairy tale as he told me of one man and another who had come out in the early days almost penniless from the East or the Middle West or, in some cases, from a foreign country, and had “squatted” on the soil; now these settlers had each a hundred and sixty acres under high cultivation and a good, substantial house and adequate barns and machinery and stock; they could secure money on easy terms at the local bank when they needed it, and the market value of their land had risen two hundred per cent and even higher in the past twenty-five years.

I should have suspected a land-boomer in the doctor had there been anything aggressive or boastful in his manner, but he was speaking with the simple directness of one who knows and who needs no bluster to disguise ignorance or an ulterior motive.

I was deeply interested, and presently remarked that, coming as I did from the East, the demand for labor on the Western farms had been a surprise to me, and that I was sure that what he was telling me would sound strange to Eastern men, whose preconceptions of agrarian conditions at the West are formed largely from the representations of certain political parties which are recruited from the farming classes.

Dr. Brooks smiled indulgently, and kept his eyes straight ahead while he answered me.

“If you stay out here long enough,” he said, “you’ll find that there are two kinds of farmers in the West. There is one kind that know their business and that are farmers, and there’s another kind that are a good deal more interested in politics than they are in farming. You can put it down as a pretty safe rule that the farmers who have the best knowledge of their business and who are the most industrious and frugal and economical are the least dissatisfied with their conditions and the least anxious to change them by political action, while the more inefficient and shiftless and thriftless a farmer is, the more likely he is to be a violent agitator for financial or political change.