Stacking wheat and things of that kind

In chapters  XIII-XV of Hamlin Garland’s Boy Life on the Prairie (Nebraska, 1961) the stacking of wheat is explained in enough detail for the book to be usable as an instruction manual, and he also describes the various technical changes wheat harvesting went through during his lifetime.  (From when I was about six I just barely remember the kind of crew-operated threshing machine that left a big pile of chaff; it had replaced hand stacking and would soon be replaced by the combine). Stacking wheat was a difficult and critical job, and good stackers were in high demand during the harvest season, though not really afterwards, since they were just farmworkers after all.

Things were about the same in France:

My father would contract to cut certain fields of rye or oats, the only grains grown in our area at that time. When the grain was brought in, my father was much in demand for that particular job, setting the sheaves up in rounded stacks  called groac’hel. He was a past master in the art of constructing such stacks. Stacks had to be very well built; because the winnowing was done entirely by flail, it took a long time, and if during that time it should rain heavily on poorly constructed stacks,  the water would get inside and everything would be ruined, grain and straw.

Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, Jean-Marie DeGuignet, Seven Stories Press, 2004

Stacks were stacked out in the field, though, not in Chicago. I don’t know where Sandburg got this from:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders….

In the high and far-off times they even stacked things in New England. Maybe they still do sometimes, at re-enactments and the like:

“But most of all
He thinks if he could have another chance
To teach him how to build a load of hay”

“I know, that’s Silas’ one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like big birds’ nests.
You never see him standing on the hay
He’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.”

Arthur Rimbaud left the difficult job to his mom:

Delahaye was slightly awed when he called at the farm… He found his friend at harvest-time, rhythmically heaving the sheaves of wheat overhead to his mother, who formed the haystack.

Rimbaud, Graham Robb, Picador, 2000, p. 301.

During his time in the U.S. the great Norwegian author and quisling Knut Hamsun worked the wheat harvest on a plantation-style bonanza farm in North Dakota and warned against the 15-hour days there. Whether he actually stacked wheat is unknown.

(Part II)

My Fossil Railroad

(Update Below: June 1, 2010)

During my bicycle-barhopping expeditions in the Wobegon area I keep running into the Soo Line, often in little country towns that barely exist (Miltona + Carlos +  Forada, combined population 805, 5 or 6 taverns). This freight line, which kept chugging  along when the famous passenger railroads dwindled and almost died*, was founded by a Minneapolis milling group in 1883, during the era when the milling and railroad monopolies were competing to screw the farmers and each other. Its original purpose was to bypass Chicago and ship flour from Sault St. Marie to the East by boat. (“Soo” comes from “Sault”.)

This railway is now part of Canadian Pacific and has  been Canadian-controlled since 1888, and with connections to Winnipeg and Vancouver in addition to Minneapolis and Chicago, it is part of the Canadian network as well as the American.  It runs almost entirely through what are or once were wheat-growing areas, and in Minnesota it runs southeast from the northwest corner of the state (where there is nothing) through a thinly-populated area to Minneapolis — along the way it carefully avoiding Grand Forks, Fargo-Moorhead, Fergus Falls, and  St. Cloud (the only towns of any size).

The interesting thing for me is that the northern part of the Soo Line route almost exactly follows the “woods trail” of the fur trade’s old Red River oxcart trails (which remained in use into the 1860s, less than 20 years before the rail line was built.)  Where the oxcart trail turned east at Ottertail (pop. 533, but once an important place), the rail route drops south and hooks up to the east plains trail, which it follows to Glenwood or a little beyond, and then diverges again and goes directly to Minneapolis-St. Paul instead of cutting over to Saint Cloud as the oxcart trail did.

The Soo Line and the sleepy little towns on it (which were built as railroad towns in the first place) are relics of history, more Wobegonian than Wobegon, as if they hadn’t gotten the word that railroads are a thing of the past.  As far as oxcarts go (from back when railroads were a thing of the future),  there’s no sign of them left except some scattered French family names and place names.

Before the Plains of Abraham, Minnesota was on the border between Quebec and Louisiana, and half the state remained nominally French until the Louisiana Purchase.  The Pembina area in the northwest was settled by Europeans much earlier than anywhere to the south, and until after the Civil War it was oriented to Winnipeg and Hudson’s Bay rather than southwards, so that northern Minnesota formed an interzone between the U.S. and Canada (or the U.S. and the Métis). The oxcart trail allowed the fur traders up north to escape the toils of the Hudson’s Bay Company  by trading in Saint Paul. (Immediately after the Civil War there was talk about Minnesota annexing adjacent areas of Canada all the way to the Pacific, but nothing came of that.)

As Hawthorne pointed out long ago, and as Henry James and T.S. Eliot reminded us, and as our teachers also reminded us if we made the mistake of majoring in English, we Americans don’t have old ruined castles &c, so we have to make do with what we’ve got.

* A number of bicycle trails around here have been built on the right-of-ways of decommissioned railroads. One I frequently use used to be part of the mighty Great Northern’s transcontinental route.

Update

The Soo Line, Patrick Dorin, Superior Publishing, 1979

This book is for primarily for railroad buffs and includes dozens of pictures of locomotives, trains, depots, and bridges. For me, looking at  photographs of big black steam engines one after another is terribly nostalgic, since they were discontinued in 1954 when I was eight years old, and I was very sorry to see them replaced by the much less dramatic diesel engines. Steam locomotives are still a great metaphor for power, since they’re noisy and smoky and black, unlike the slick new diesels.

A nineteenth century map in the book clearly shows the line’s original orientation toward Sault St. Marie in one direction and Winnipeg in the other, while the 1970 map shows every station stop on the whole line. There seems to be a stop about every 7 miles, probably based on the old watering stops, and the map explains a lot of tiny, otherwise mysterious towns out in the middle of nowhere. In the 170 or so miles between Moose Lake (not too far from Duluth) and Plummer (in NW Minnesota, not near anything) the map shows 28 stops, of which 26 are still on today’s highway maps, all but two of them with fewer than 1000 people and 8 of them unincorporated.

(Links below)

Terrorism in Lake Wobegon

“The Minnesota Patriots Council (1991)”,  Jonathan B. Tucker and Jason Pate:  Chapter 10 in Toxic Terror, ed. Jonathan B. Tucker, MIT Press, 2000.

Powerline, Paul Wellstone and Barry Casper, U. Massachusetts Press, 1981

Us folks here in Lake Wobegon are sick and tired of being portrayed as naive, mild-mannered cornballs who pose no threat to anyone else.

As it happens, in 1991 Wobegonians Leroy Wheeler, Douglas Baker, Richard Oelrich, and Dennis Bret Henderson became the first persons convicted under U. S. Code 18 U.S.C. § 175, which forbids the civilian production of chemical and biological weapons. The Monterey Institute of International Studies included the “Minnesota Militia” sarin terrorists as one of only a dozen case histories worldwide discussed in their book on the terrorist use of chemical and biological warfare 1946-1991.

Furthermore, during the period 1976-8 a different terrorist group in the area brought down down fourteen 175-foot powerline towers and shot out nearly 10,000 electrical insulators.

The experts from the BCSIA Studies in International Security from the Monterey Institute of International Studies (Tucker and Pate, p. 28) have concluded that

….living in an isolated economic backwater [Lake Wobegon] probably contributed to [the Minnesota Militia sarin terrorists'] chronic frustration. Given this lifestyle, coupled with the influence of living in a state with a strong history of grassroots political activism that sometimes included violence, it should come as no surprise that they began to seek people and institutions to blame for their problems.

So don’t mess with Wobegonians. Ja sure, we seem as nice as could be. But you can never really be quite sure.

America: an alcoholic history

The Alcoholic Republic
W. J. Rorabaugh
Oxford 1979

Rorabaugh’s theory, reminiscent of the theory that civilization can be traced back to communal beer-drinking festivals,  is that the United States was founded on drunkenness, but that around 1830 the country sobered up, got religion, forgot about drunken republican brotherhood,  and devoted itself thereafter to property accumulation.

Rorabaugh has done his homework and tells us pretty much everything we want to know about the history of America’s drinking habits. During the early colonial period spirits were regarded as a healthful gift of God and drinking started at breakfast. During the the revolutionary and early republican periods communal bingeing became widespread, but after about 1830 or so, when the republican ideals had proven hard to maintain,  the norm became individualistic evangelical Christianity, sobriety, and self-improvement in the pursuit of wealth –  or else solo binge drinking.

For the first settlers west of the Appalachians, whiskey was the only cash crop and served as a form of currency in a cash-poor region. (Rorabaugh compares American frontier life in the early 19th century to that of the similar impoverished rural cultures in developing but still underdeveloped Sweden and Scotland). Most of the American groups especially noted for drunkenness are about what you’d expect  (laborers, sailors, Irish immigrants),  but few would have guessed that schoolteachers and ministers would be among them. It’s also surprising to find that the Primitive (Hardshell) Baptists forbade members to join  temperance societies.

Still later, when the existence of a permanent working class with little hope of rising any higher became evident, desperate forms of escapist drinking became most prevalent. The temperance movement rose as early as 1750, but only when it took a religious form around 1830 did it become effective. Drinking by immigrants and the lower classes was always regarded as more harmful than drinking by “real Americans”, and the prohibition movement tended also to be middle class and nativist.

The beverages of choice were fruit brandy, rum and hard cider in the beginning, whiskey and cider during the period of early independence, and finally whiskey and beer. Tea and wine were generally regarded as unpatriotic, and after a certain point, so was rum. During the early days milk and clean water  were hard to get and were even regarded as unhealthful, and few adults drank either if they could help it. The American taste was for distilled spirits mixed strong, and some early temperance advocates even promoted beer as a temperance drink. (But beer only became important relatively late, with the German immigration after 1850.)

Rorabaugh speculates that whiskey helped people endure a horrendous diet consisting almost entirely of pork and corn meal. Beyond that, “Americans had psychological needs that were met better  by alcohol than by food” (p. 122). American drinking culture, as distinguished from Italian drinking culture for example, helped men deal with their disappointments, anxiety, and high but probably  unattainable goals. He also notes that both abstinence and the characteristic alternation of abstinence and bingeing are conducive to a strong work ethic, contrasting both patterns to the use of opium in that respect.

Drunk or sober, students of American history  should all find  Rorabaugh’s book to  be of great interest.

[Links, further reading, and my  ancestor the frontier brewer are at "more"].