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OF A GREAT HARVEST FIELD

gave black headlines to information on these matters. Wheat had indeed become King.

While the harvest was in progress in Oklahoma the grain was yet green in Kansas; but speedily the sun's ripening force moved northward, and the laborers took up their march with it. From farm to farm, from county to county, out of the Territory into the State, the army of workers moved, and when the fields of the south were quiet the garnering was in full blast further north. And this was still true when the harvest had moved on and on to the great wheat-farms of the Dakotas, where grain-raising is less a business than a huge speculation. It was all a conquest of the wheat.

In the Cherokee Strip, the latest opened portion of Oklahoma, there are six counties. It is estimated that one of them alone raised enough wheat this year to distribute among the people more money than the United States paid for the entire Strip when it bought it from the Indian tribes. Such facts as this give a semblance of truth to the story told of a western Kansas farmer who shocked his wheat as the men worked behind the binder. At last the binder had come to the center of the field and had finished its work. The driver sought to leave the field, and

found that the shocks were so thick that he could not do so until some of them were moved to make a way for his machine. It is also related that men rented school quarters in Oklahoma for fifty dollars and raised thereon 2,500 bushels of wheat, having no money invested and no taxes to pay.

When the work in the fields is over, the exodus of laborers begins. At the country post-offices they have lined up on Saturday nights and bought money-orders payable to themselves at some distant office. Then they take what is left, board the trains in companies, as they did when they entered the wheat-lands, and are carried away from the level landscapes where the silent yellow stacks stand amid the acres of stubble shorn of a valuable fleece, brave tokens of their service.

Not all, however, take this course. There is yet much to do in completing the harvest. Following the binders and the headers come the threshing-machines, and thousands of able-bodied men are needed in the crews that manage them. The smoke of the threshing-engines rises from every farm, and though the task may not be ended until the leaves on the cottonwoods along the streams are brown, it is no less important than was the initial stage.

The old-time thresher, deriving its

motion from a horse-power and laboriously grinding the straw as if the work were a painful operation, is but a distant relation to the modern separator and its accompaniments as used to-day on the prairies. The separator itself is equipped with a cleaning apparatus that leaves the grain free from chaff or dirt; the straw is taken away through a tube-like stacker that places it wherever wanted. The traction

engine has wide wheels, and the driver's seat is covered with striped awning when desirable. It is the prairie automobile, and when a move is made from one farm to another it takes the whole outfit of separator, cook-wagon, water-wagon, and errand-wagon behind it and proceeds at leisurely pace over the prairie roads. Its progress through the towns in the dead of night frightens children, sets the dogs to barking, and makes the old folks dream that a freight-train has left the track and is steaming up the street.

The cook-wagon is a house on wheels, with gasoline stove, an extension table, and a generous cupboard. Arrived at the farm, it is taken to the lee of a hedge or under the trees along the creek, if such there be, and becomes the home of the crew. The cook may be a man with skill in that direction, or the wife and daughter of the owner of the machine may assist him in this department. The first meal is served at daybreak, the second at noon, and the third when darkness is coming on, for the whistle of the engine does not sound its welcome summons to stop work until sunset.

There is plenty of whole some food-meats, pies, and bread-and there is no trifling with appetite. With the prairie breeze sweeping through the screened door of the eating-house, and the hungry men gathered around the wellheaped table, the picture is a pleasant one. The business of running a threshing outfit is one that requires considerable capital and some ability as a manager. The first cost of the separator and engine is about $2,500. The demand for this machinery was such that ten outfits were sold in each of a dozen Kansas counties during the present season. Along with the machine there must be taken six pitchers, who get $1.50 a day; two feeders, who, when needed, are paid $2; an engineer, who receives the highest wages, $2.50 to $3 a day; and a water-hauler,

who takes the tank on wheels to a convenient windmill or stream to be filled for the use of the engine. The feeders stand at the hungry mouth of the machine and send the grain down among the whirling cogs and teeth, evenly and steadily. If the grain is in bundles, there stands on either side of the feeder a band-cutter, who, with a sharp knife, severs the twine holding the straw together. A boy of fifteen to nineteen can easily do this.

The owner of the farm takes care of the straw as it leaves the machine, and must have two or three men for this. Many a farmer's boy has served a perspiring apprenticeship in the drudgery of life. at the upper end of a straw-carrier, fighting to keep back the dust-laden stream that came pouring with what seemed to be malicious persistence out of the whirlpool below.

The wheat-the reddish-yellow treasure for which all the toil has been performed at last is in sight. Out of a tiny spout well to the rear of the machine it pours its welcome rivulet, falling into the farmer's wagon until the box is full to the brim. Then with the precious burden the wagon is driven to the granary or to the elevator in town, and the farmer breathes a long sigh of relief that he has come to the end of the devious journey from seed-time to harvest.

The thresher has two scales of payment for his work-six cents a bushel if he and his men are boarded by the farmer, and seven cents if he has his own cook-wagon, the latter being the usual arrangement. A good machine can turn out 800 to 1,000 bushels of wheat a day under favorable conditions. Rain, high winds, breakdowns, and other things cause delays. It is a great source of joy to all concerned when the machine hums along from morning to night without trouble. If the threshing is done in the field immediately after harvesting, the bundles are brought from the shocks to the machine as the threshing goes on, and then more men and teams are needed, making it all a busy scene. Some of the newer machines have attachments for cutting the bands of the bound wheat, and other improvements are added each season.

The long wait for a machine, sometimes necessary, has caused a demand in the West for machines that are less expensive,

and so-called "baby separators" are being tried. A farmer can afford to own one for his personal use. Then, some neighborhoods have formed farmers' associations and have purchased threshing outfits, each member of the company taking his turn at using it. This is not common, the old method being generally in use. A machine can in the run of a season thresh from 60,000 to 70,000 bushels of grain, much depending, however, on the yield per acre, the abundance and weight of

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the straw, the condition of the stacks, and the weather.

The danger of fire is always with the threshers. It may be from an imperfection in the engine, or it may be from some carelessly scattered coals; the tinderlike stubble or the vast pile of straw welcomes the blaze, and in a moment there is surging flame with clouds of smoke as the only evidence of the wealth that once covered the soil. Frequently the machine also is burned, though the engineer endeavors to couple to it his obedient but clumsy motive power and take it out of danger.

The stories of women working in the harvest-fields of the prairies are mostly fiction. If occasionally one does so, it is

If, as

They are at the bottom of the greater question, "Does wheat-raising pay?" Not always nor everywhere. This year in most parts of the West it paid handsomely. The average cost of planting and harvesting an acre of wheat, exclusive of the use of the land, is about seven dollars. was the case on hundreds of farms this season, there is a production of twenty-five bushels to the acre, and it sells for sixty cents, the usual price during the summer at the local markets of the West, there is a profit of $800 on each hundred acres. When it is not one hundred but a thousand acres that is harvested, the reward in a good wheat year is considerable. There are quarter-sections of central and

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western Kansas and of Oklahoma that this year raised enough wheat to pay for themselves. Fields that went thirty bushels to the acre, and some that did even better, were numerous, and then the farmer was certain that wheat was a good crop for him to raise. He forgot that there ever was a wheat failure, and was convinced that he could make a success every time.

But there is another side.

A farmer came into my office one day during July and was led to talk of his efforts. "We are getting along all right this year," he remarked, "but I don't like to think of what we went through."

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By small crops, do you mean?" "Not small crops-no crops. One year I got sixty bushels of wheat from fifty acres, and saved it for seed. The next year I sowed it and didn't get even one bushel. That was hard luck!

"How did we live? Chickens and cows and kaffir corn-it wasn't very good living, but one can do a good deal when he has to. But it's better now. I'm going to take home a surrey for the folks this afternoon."

He was a type of the Western farmer who has fought the good fight through the hard times and the years of bad crops to better things, and, with his family, deserves all the comforts that generous Nature can give him.

Out in western Kansas are colonies of Russian Mennonites who have year after year stirred the ground and sowed it to wheat. They have given no heed to politics and little attention to the luxuries of life. When they made money they bought more land and sowed it to wheat. At threshing-time it is one of the curious sights of the West to see them taking the cash for their crop in silver and going home with half-pecks of the white metal jingling in their capacious pockets. Their economy of living and their dogged persistence have allowed them to win where thousands of Americans have grown discouraged, and, loading their worldly goods in canvas-topped prairie-schooners, have sought better locations.

On the great wheat-farms of the Dakotas the business is conducted by capitalists, and though it is doubtful if there is any

economy in the management on a large scale, it is the method that seems best adapted to that section. It would not be practicable in the more thickly settled communities of the States farther south.

The time when the Western farmer was compelled to sell his wheat in the field or haul it from the thresher to the market is past. Most of the farm-owners are able to hold their crop from one year to the next if it seems best for securing better prices. As a result, there is less rush than formerly in getting the grain East, though the large crop this year has broken all records for the number of cars sent into the Western cities on their way to the mills or to the seaboard. All through the autumn and early winter will the grain movement continue, and the returns therefrom will make trade good in hundreds of prairie towns where the farmers will spend their profits. Hundreds of farmers and their wives will, during the autumn, take a trip "back East "to the little village where they were born and passed their boyhood and girlhood days. It will be a restful vacation for them, but they will go home better contented with the West than ever, for they will find their old-time friends changed and many of them gone.

Following the threshers, and scarcely waiting for them to get out of the fields, come the plowers, making ready for the next year's wheat crop. On the easy-running sulky-plows they will make their rounds, changing the bright yellow stubble to brown, as the chocolate-colored ribbons of earth are turned behind the steadymoving team. Plowing is begun in July, and the harrow quickly follows, so that by the last of August the fields are waiting for the early September sowing. Later, the smoke of the threshing-engine may yet drift from one side of the field while the drill is placing the seed for next year's crop. It is the beginning and end of the wheat harvest-the planting and the fruitage.

If, year after year, the prairies could produce as bountiful a yield as in the present season, there would be no limit to the good times in the West. The skies would always be bright and the happiness of the people would never be diminished.

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