Although we understand that farm work was hard work, we also know that whenever possible farmers were eager to use the best available technology. In fact, within
ten years after settler farming communities were established on the Prairies, threshing involved the latest technology. And a lot of manpower, including children. It’s hard to fathom now, just how much manual labour was involved.
Victor David told of harvest during his childhood: “Our first threshing,” he reported, “was done with an 18 inch separator on skids, fed by hand. The grain came out in a tray or box underneath. The straw just dropped out the back and had to be forked away. The power to drive this was a treadmill and our two good mules. It was on a steep incline, and the mules walked uphill, turning the tread which turned the big wheel which in turn drove the separator. My first job threshing, when I was six years old, was riding one of the mules and with a switch keeping them both at the same pace.”
With new equipment came new jobs. Mr. David’s story continues: ”Then we bought an upright steam engine, one of the first in our district...Though it took four horses to pull it around, and the separator - a 28 cylinder - took four more horses, it was a big improvement over the earlier one. This separator had a bagger on the side and a straw carrier. My job then was drawing water in two barrels on a stoneboat to keep the engine in water. I was ten that year. When my brothers were with me to steady the barrels, it was not bad, but when I was alone and the barrels upset, and the whistle was blowing three calls which meant ‘Water needed, hurry up!’ that was bad. “
Reports from others add perspective…
“Harvesting began later than it does today,” said Lloyd Jones. “Threshing began in late September after the sheaves had been stacked and the fall ploughing done. Gangs of twenty men or more would live with the machines for weeks at a time, and the threshing was usually not completed until November or December or later. The men slept in cabooses, or before that in the shelter of a pile of sheaves, four under a canvas or large blanket with feet together for warmth. The fireman was the most unlucky on cold nights, since he had to rise at four or five o’clock to get up steam, and he also had to keep watch on the pipes to keep them from freezing.”
In 1903 Grover Willis from southern Ontario arrived in Deloraine on a Harvest Excursion. He got work on a farm about eight miles north of Deloraine for $2.00 per day plus board and a bunk to sleep in, although he had to supply his own blankets. There was plenty of straw to be had for a mattress. He shared his memories decades later:
“The farmer’s wife would come to the fields mid-forenoon and mid-afternoon with lunch and tea or coffee. We had about one hour at noon to rest and then work through to dark. Then we had a real man’s dinner before retiring.”
“After the cutting and the shocking of the grain was complete, the big threshing machine and steam engine was taken out among the grain shocks. The crew consisted of the owner, the engineer, two men up on a table at the front of the machine, (one to feed the sheaves in each side, two men with a wagon and a team of horses each for each side of the machine) and two men on each side of the machine to pitch the sheaves into the wagon, and one straw binder. When a wagon rack was filled, that driver would go to his side of the machine and pitch the sheaves to the man feeding his side of the machine. This man had a knife in one hand to cut the twine that held the sheaf together and then deftly spread the sheaf and rolled it into the carrier that took the grain into the knives where the straw was cut to pieces and the grains threshed out... The grain being carried in a small elevator and dumped into a waiting wagon box. When the box was full, that wagon was driven to the granary or the local grain elevator at the nearest railway siding. Another wagon was waiting to replace the one just filled.
When the straw fell at the back of the machine, it made a large loose pile where it was the job of the straw bucker to remove it a way from the machine, go back again and remove the next pile which had been forming while he was gone with the first one. The second pile would be placed up against the first one and so on until the machine was moved to a new location in the field where there were more shocks of grain all around it. In this way the sheaves would not need to be hauled a long way. Then the operation would be started all over again.
When the set was completed and the whole operation moved to a new location, there would be a long string of small loose straw stacks and when night came we would go out and burn them. Quite a spectacle to see these straw bucks burning all around the various farms.”
Then, as now, farming was both a serious business and a way of life.
Horse-drawn binders on a farm near Deleau. The first step in the harvesting process - cutting the grain and “binding” it into sheaves, which the binder did. The men then took ten or twelve sheaves and arranged them, on end, in piles called stooks (shocks).
Harvest Excursion ‘greenhorn’ Grover Willis and the rest of the crew on a farm north of Deloraine, 1903.
Threshing near Napinka.
Threshing near Deloraine.
Sources: J.A. Victor David Museum & New Horizons. Reflections - Turtle Mountain Municipality and Killarney, 1882- 1982. Inter-Collegiate Press of Canada, 1982 Photos: Deloraine - Winchester Historical Society. Grassland Collection. Archives of Manitoba Grover I. Willis, Personal Memoirs, January 3, 1964
