Part 9

He asked me where I was going, and said that he could take me five miles over the road toward Jefferson, “unless,” he added, “you’ll stop at my farm and work for me.”

I thanked him, but said that I would keep to the road for the present, and then I changed the subject to the reaper. It was of the make of the factory in which, for eight weeks, during the previous winter, I worked as a hand-truckman, and very full of association it was as I looked upon it in changed surroundings. Hundreds of such tongues John Barry and I had loaded on our truck in the paint-shop, then stacked them under the eaves over the platform; scores of such binders we had transferred from the dark warehouses to the waiting freight-cars below. Equally familiar looked the “wider,” and the receptacle for twine, and the “binder,” and the “bar.” I told the farmer that I had been a hand in the factory where his machine was made, and he appeared interested in the account of the vast industry where two thousand men work together in so perfect a system of the division of labor, that a complete reaper, like his own, is turned out in periods of a few minutes in every working day.

He, too, was autobiographical in his turn. His history was one of the innumerable examples at the West of substantial success under the comparatively simple advantages of good health and an unbounded capacity for work.

From an early home in Pennsylvania, he drifted, as a mere boy, into Indiana, and “living out” there to a farmer, he remained with him for five years. Shrewd enough to see his opportunity, and to seize it, he made himself master of farming, and became so indispensable to his employer that he was soon making more than twenty dollars a month and his keep the year around. At the end of five years he had saved a little more than eight hundred dollars, which he invested in a mortgage on good land. Then came his Wanderjahre. He went to Colorado, worked for two years on a sheep ranch, and looked for chances of fortune. They were not wholly wanting, but the prospects were distant, and, rather than endure longer the lonely life of the frontier, he returned as far as Iowa, and bought his present farm at the rate of ten dollars an acre. For twelve years he had lived and worked upon it. Under improvement, and the growth of population about it, its value had risen threefold, for he had recently added to it a neighboring farm, for which he had to pay at the rate of thirty dollars an acre.

The narrative was piquant in the extreme. There was in it so ingenuous a belief in the order of things under which he had risen unaided from the position of a hired man to that of a hirer of men. Like Mr. Ross, he had no quarrel with social conditions, except that they no longer furnished him with such hands as he himself had been. Under the demoralization of a demand for men far in excess of the supply, the agricultural laborers of the present sit lightly on their places, and are mere time servers, he said, with no personal interest in their employers’ affairs. He seemed to imply a causal relation between the condition of the labor market as it affects the farmer and the degeneracy in agricultural laborers. But whether he meant that or not, he was certainly clear in an insistence that, from his point of view, the social difficulty is one of individual inefficiency, and hardly ever takes the form of any real hindrance to a genuine purpose to get on in the world. All along our route he enforced the point by actual illustration, showing how one farmer, by closest attention to business, had freed himself of the obligations at first incurred in taking up the land, and had added farm to farm, while such another, less efficient than his neighbor, had gone down under a burden of debt.

I opened the gate, and stood watching him as he drove up the long lane leading to his house and barns, while the horses quickened their pace in conscious nearness to their stalls. A Philistine of the Philistines in the impregnable castle of his hard-earned home, I could but like and honor him.

Under the stars, on top of a load of hay that had been left standing in a barn-yard in the outskirts of Jefferson, I slept that night, and spent most of the next day, which was Sunday, under the trees of the town square, in front of the court-house, going in the morning to a Methodist church, where awaited me the courteous welcome which I found at all church doors, whether in the country or the town. For food I had a large loaf of bread, which I had purchased for ten cents at Gowrie. A little beyond Jefferson, after a delightful bath in the Raccoon River, with the uncommon luxury of a sandy bottom, I got leave of a farmer on the road to Scranton to sleep in his barn, and, after the rest of Sunday, I set out on Monday morning keen and fit for the remaining walk to Council Bluffs.

Monday’s march took me from a point not far west of Jefferson, by way of Coon Rapids, to the heart of the hills in the neighborhood of Templeton, where I spent the night on the farm of a Scotsman of the name of Hardy. The heat of the day was prodigious. Not like the languid heat of the tropics, it was as though the earth burned with fever which communicated itself in a nervous quiver to the hot, dry air, and quickened one’s steps along the baking roads. The stillness was almost appalling, and, as I passed great fields of standing corn, I could fancy that I heard it grow with a crackle as of visible outbudding of the blades.

I did not walk all the way. Twice in the day I had a lift, both of several miles, and each with a farmer whose views differed as widely from the other’s as though they were separated by a thousand miles, instead of being relatively next-door neighbors.

The first lift came in the morning along a main-travelled road which I took in the hope of meeting an intersecting one that would lead me on to Manning. A good-looking young farmer, fair-haired and blue-eyed, asked me to the seat at his side high above the box of a farm wagon. We were not long in learning that both were interested in the economics of farming, where he knew much and I little, and where I was glad to be a listener. It was like talking again with a socialist from a sweatshop in Chicago. The fire of a new religion was in him. The difference lay chiefly in that his was not the gospel of society made new and good by doing away with private property and substituting a collective holding of all the land and capital that are made use of for production; his gospel was that of “free silver,” but he held it with a like unshaken faith in its regenerating power. For months he had been preaching it, and organizing night classes among the farmers in all the district schoolhouses within reach, for the purpose of study of the money question. Just once in the talk with me he grew convincing. There was much of the usual insistence of “a conspiracy among rich men against the producing classes,” whatever that may mean, and there were significant statements to the effect that nine-tenths of the farmers of the region, which he proudly called “The Garden of Eden of the West,” were under mortgage to moneylenders, and that farmers in general, owing to the tyranny of “the money power,” were fast sinking to a condition of “vassalage;” but at last he rose to something more intelligible. It was the sting of a taunt that roused him. He had seen copied from an Eastern newspaper the statement that Western farmers were beginning to want free silver, because they grasped at a chance to pay their debts at fifty cents on the dollar. The man was fine in his resentment of the charge of dishonor.

“We mean to pay our honest debts in full,” he said; “but see how the thing works out: I borrowed a thousand dollars when wheat was selling at a dollar a bushel. If I raised a thousand bushels, I could pay my debt by selling them. But when wheat has fallen to fifty cents a bushel, I must raise two thousand to meet the obligation. That came of appreciation in the value of money. It is to the interest of Wall Street men to have it so, while we need an increased volume of money. They deal in dollars and we in wheat, and the more they can make us raise for a dollar, the better off they are. It costs me as much time and labor and wages to raise a thousand bushels of wheat as when it sold for a dollar, and the justice of the case would be in my paying my debt with a thousand bushels, for I don’t raise dollars, I raise wheat.”

No abstract reasoning or historical examples could have convinced him that an appreciation in the value of money was due to causes other than a conspiracy among what he called “the money kings,” who, in some manner, had got control of the volume of currency and so determined the prices of commodities. But with all his hallucinations in finance, it was very plain that the charge of dishonesty had been misapplied.

It was toward the end of the day’s march that I came by the second lift. For miles the country had grown more hilly, and when I left behind me the village of Coon Rapids I found myself climbing a hill that was really steep, then making a sharp descent into a valley, only to begin another hill longer and steeper than any before.

I was slowly ascending one of the longest hills when a farmer in a light market wagon called to me, making offer of a drive. I waited at the crest of the hill and climbed to the seat at his side, while the horses stood panting lightly in the cooler air that moved across the hill-tops.

In the two or three miles that we drove together, the farmer conversed very freely. Quite as well informed as my acquaintance of the morning, he was of sturdier calibre than he, and the difference in their views was complete. He knew of no conspiracy against farmers or any “producing class,” and he held that almost the most disastrous thing that could be done would be to disturb the stability of the currency. An appreciation in the value of money there had been, but it was plainly due to causes at work the world over, and quite beyond any man’s control. Farmers were suffering from it now; but a few years ago they had profited by appreciation in the value of crops, and might look hopefully for a return of better times for them. As to the farmers of that part of Iowa, their fortune had been of the best. These hills were looked upon at first as the least desirable land and were last to be taken up, but had proved, when once developed, almost the richest soil in the State. The farmers who settled there had found themselves, in consequence, in possession of land that was constantly increasing in value. From $10 an acre it had quickly risen to $20, and many of the owners would now reluctantly yield their farms for $40 an acre.

There was nothing boastful in the statements. My informant was a person of quiet speech and manner, but he had the advantage of being able to enforce from concrete examples all that he had to say, and the histories of most of the farmers, and every transaction in real estate for miles around seemed to be at his command.

Nothing could have fitted better the mood in which I left him than my meeting that evening with Mr. Hardy, at whose farm I spent the night. A genial Scotsman of clear, open countenance, whose deep, rich voice seemed always on the verge of laughter; he welcomed me right heartily, and gave me supper of the best and a bed in the granary on fragrant hay, which he spread there with his own hands, and a breakfast in the morning; and for all this he would accept return, neither in work nor pay.

We talked long together of English politics, but he was at his best on the condition of the Iowa farmer. A more contented man I have rarely met, nor a man of more contagious good-humor. As a youth he came from Scotland, and had been a pioneer among these Iowa hills. For him the hardships were all gone from farming, as compared with his early experience. An accessible market, admirable labor-saving machines, ready intercourse with neighbors and with the outside world, had changed the original struggle under every disadvantage to a life of ease in contrast. Very glad I should be of the chance to accept his parting invitation to return at some time to his home.

Early in Tuesday’s march a young Swedish farmer picked me up, and carried me on to within five miles of Manning; and, a little west of the town, I fell in with another farmer, who shared his seat with me over six miles of the way. A third lift of a couple of miles into Irwin helped me much on the road to Kirkman. I had not reached the village, however, when night fell. At a farm, a mile or more to the east of it, I found as warm a welcome as on the night before. Supper was ready, and room was made for me; then I lent a hand at the milking with the hired men. Last, before going to bed, we had a swim. The farmer kept for the purpose a pool in the barn-yard which was well supplied with constantly changing water, and nothing could have been more grateful after a day of work and walking in a temperature of 105° in the shade. I should liked to have remained there as a hired man almost as much as with Mr. Hardy, but the journey to Council Bluffs was now well under way, and I was bent upon completing it before another long stop.

On Wednesday I wished to reduce as much as possible the distance to Neola, which is a village at the junction of the St. Paul and Rock Island railways; but I had to spend the night a few miles southwest of Shelby. This was because I was not so fortunate as on the day before in the matter of lifts. I got but one drive that day. Turning from Kirkman into the stage-road leading into Harlan, the county-seat of Audubon County, I saw approaching me a buggy containing two men. I stepped aside to let it pass, but it stopped beside me, and one of the men invited me to get in. The country doctor was writ large upon him, and, at his side, was a coatless, collarless, taciturn youth, who clearly was his “hired man.” Crowded between them I sat down, and the physician turned his sharp, genial eyes upon me.

“Where are you from?”

“Where are you going?”

“How old are you?”

“What’s your name?”

“Where do you expect to go when you die?”

“Why don’t you shave?”

Such were the questions that, with almost fierce rapidity, he plied me with, waiting meanwhile for but the briefest answer to each. And when the ordeal was over, he laughed a low, shrewd laugh while his eyes twinkled merrily, as he remarked, dryly: “I guess you’ll do.”

He allowed me no time to acknowledge the compliment, but went swiftly on: