Remember When?

EXCERPT FROM BOOK “WILD HORSE PLAINS”

BY JOHN RHONE 1969

As I sit here this hot August afternoon and watch Jim Baker and his nephew, Leon Perris, put up a large tonnage of hay, I feel I should write something about those adventurous, happy-go-lucky men who used to be part of the early day scene. By some they were called migratory laborers, by others bums, tramps and go-abouts. Whatever one wished to call them, they were important when haying and harvest time came.

Jim Baker’s haying outfit consists of three tractors, one of which pull a swather which cuts the hay and automatically leaves it in windrows; another tractor pulls a hay baler; and the third a bale wagon, that fairly new and complicated machine that picks up the bales, loads them neatly onto a wagon and then when backed up to the stack, tips them nearly into a pile. These two men can put up more hay than any “full crew” of the old days ever could. By the way, Jim Baker’s grandfather is Frank Baker, one of the pioneer ranchers of Plains valley.

If Jim’s grandfather had as much hay to put up in his time as Jim has, he would have had to have had a full crew if he wanted to get the job done before the snow flew. This would have been two mowers, one dump rake, three wagons, a pull-off man and a man or maybe two in the shed or on the stack, besides two men pitching the hay on the wagons, a total of 14 horses and 11 men. Of course the larger ranches had crews several times this size.

This is where the migratory labor comes in. There never could be enough local men in haying and harvesting, so as much as most farmers and ranchers hated to do it, they were forced to hire these strangers, who seemed to be around the employment offices in the cities, or the streets and railroad yards in the towns.

Most of these characters had a set routine. They would “follow the machine.” That is, they would start the early grain harvest in Oklahoma or other place where the grain came on early, and work their way north, ending up in the Dakotas. Others started with the early hay hargest, and ended up in the Big Hole or other mountain valley. Still others, the “fruit tramps” would start with the lettuce harvest in California, and find steady work in the vegetables, berries and fruits and finish the season picking apples in the Yakima and Wenatchee alleys. Still others started with lambing and sheep shearing in the south, and ended up in July in Montana.

After the season’s work was over, the general procedure was to “grab a handful of boxcars” and return south to where “the climate fits my clothes.” There they would live a life of ease in some manner until the time to start out again the next season. Of course there were deviations from this - plenty of them - but this seemed to be the rule. In those days beating their way on freight trains was their only mode of transportation. A few would ride the “blind baggage” of the passenger trains, but not many were in that big a hurry.

As I remember, Plains used to get more than its share of these transients all year long. They used to have a camp down by the stockyards and hang around the depot, most of them waiting to catch the first freight out. Others would go from house to house asking for a bite to eat - some even offering to split some wood to pay for it. However, there were some real good men among them who could do a good day's work, if they wanted to. They had traveled so much and gained so much experience that they knew as much or more about the work than some of the bosses.

I don't live by a railroad any more, but presume that class of migratory labor has passed from the scene. However, it still takes labor, and lots of it, to get a crop of hay put up with our modern methods. The labor comes in obtaining the raw material, processing it into steel, taking the steel and manufacturing the parts for these machines and putting them together. Then comes the distribution, sales and maintenance of the machines in the fields. All this means that the laborers are concentrated in the big manufacturing points in the cities.

Instead of the wandering men looking for haying and harvest jobs, we have men and women who get a job in a factory and stay with it until retirement, with two weeks vacation each summer. Nevertheless, they are part of our harvest crews. They make it possible for just two men to put up 500 tons of hay in a season.