Walter A. Wyckoff

“ However accustomed to “beating his way,” instead of going on foot, Farrell may have been, he was a good walker. Stretching far ahead was the level reach of the road-bed, with the converging lines of rails disappearing in the mist. Our muscles relaxed in the hot, unmoving air, until we struck the gait which becomes a mechanical swing with scarcely a sense of effort. Then Farrell was at his best. Snatches of strange song fell from him and remembered fragments of stage dialogue with little meaning and with no connection, but all expressing his care-free mood. ”

“ The walking was not bad at first. Over a rolling country the way wound past woodland and open fields, between banks of rank turf and wild flowers; and, but for the evident richness of soil, and the entire absence of rock, it might have been a New England valley with nothing to suggest the earlier monotony of undulating prairie.
But the walking became steadily worse, until by nightfall each step was a painful pulling of a foot out of the mire then planting it in the mire ahead, with Morris a good ten miles beyond. ”

“ Already I was much attracted by Osborn and the section-hands. Tyler was a young American, a long-limbed youth with clear smooth muscles and an intelligent, expressive face that suggested breeding, while Sullivan was a full-faced, stocky Irishman, of five-and-twenty, ready and frank, and full of energy.
The shop that they talked as we waited outside was still the topic at the table when we were called to supper in the little front room of the cabin with its wooden walls papered with old journals. Never had I been adopted more naturally by any company of fellow-workmen. ”

“ But if we were disappointed here, Price’s promise of Indian summer was abundantly fulfilled when once we had waded through the snow in the great primeval forests that cover the northern slopes of the Mogollons, and made the abrupt descent of the “rimrock.” It was like the contrast of Florida with our Northern winter. The live-oak and budding cottonwood and the warm sun and sprouting grass gave us royal welcome from the cold and snow beyond; and, at the end of the first day’s journey in this region, we came out upon a ranch. ”

“ I had never a long search in the country or in country villages, and I soon learned to avoid cities, unless I was bent upon another errand than that of employment.
I could easily have escaped Chicago and its crowded labor market. Offers of places in the late autumn as general utility man on farms in northern Ohio and Indiana were plentiful as I passed, and I well knew, during a fortnight’s fruitless search for work in Chicago in early winter, that at any time a day’s march from the city, or two days’ march at most, would take me to regions where the difficulty would quickly disappear. ”

“ Of excellent Irish family, Price was not without education and a taste for letters, although he had chosen, almost as a boy, the career of an adventurer on the frontier. And now at middle life, having ranged the Southwest as few men have done, and having seen all phases of its life and shared most of them, he was looking forward to further casual living, perfectly content so long as he had a camping outfit and could wander as he pleased over the face of nature. ”

“ In such manner the breakfast was saved from dulness, and I was sure that the parting guest was heartily speeded when my stint was done.
There is a high exhilaration in a day’s walk, even in the heat of July. The feeling of abounding life that comes with the opening day after sound sleep and abundant food, when one is free from care, and there are twelve hours of daylight ahead for leagues of delightful country, is like the pulse of a kingly sport. ”

“ One does not keep close count of days in wandering over a frontier, and it was only an aggravation of our plight to remember that it was not Sunday merely but Christmas-day as well. But if Christmas heightened the sense of hardship, it furnished an admirable setting to its end. By trusting his instinct for a short cut, Price brought us out in the middle of the afternoon upon open hills, from which we not only saw a section of Young’s Valley, but, rising clear from the middle of it, a column of blue smoke from the chimney of a ranchman’s cabin. ”

“ It was not in the character of a tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the journey; and the only notable fact about it was that I not only never lacked for labor, but I almost never had to ask for it, having scores of opportunities of work pressed upon me by employers hard up for hands. I am well aware of the abnormal in my experiment and of its little worth apart from the value of experience to myself, and I know how slight a connection with the deeper causes which give rise to congestion in labor centres the fact of ready employment in the country may have. ”

“ In a moment of encouragement he spoke of the boarding-house keeper and of her promise to take him back again, if he would return to work; but his thoughts of the girl he kept to himself, and deeply I liked him for it.
We were leaving Ottawa behind. With a sharp curve the railway swept around the base of bluffs that rose sheer on our right from the road-bed, rugged and grim in the twilight, the trees on top darkly outlined against the sky. At our left were the flooded lowlands of the Illinois bottom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But capture was no weak surrender on the part of the calf. For its dear life it kicked, and the picture of the hardy old woman, shaken in every muscle under the desperate lunges of the calf, as, clinging with both hands to its leg, she called to us with lusty expletives, to help her before she was “killed entirely,” is one that lingers gleefully in memory. The old man winked at me his infinite appreciation of the scene, and between us we relieved his panting wife and soon housed the calf. ”

“ Hardly a swell marred the level of the prairie, and the rails reached endlessly on in an unbending line across the plain.
The usual subjects of conversation were of no avail with my new acquaintance. He was not interested in corn and only languidly in the experiment with beets, and the general election failed to move him, although he ventured so far as to insist that there was no hope for the farmers of the West until the free coinage of silver should be secured. His mood was in keeping with the day, and life was “flat, unprofitable, and stale.” ”

“ Near an end of the siding, with a few feet of rails spanning the distance between, stood a little structure not unlike an overgrown kennel, where the hand-car for the men and the section tools were housed. For a space about the station and the boss’s shanty and on either side the railway and the road it was clear, then began the inevitable corn that stood full-grown on the prairie as far as the eye could see. ”

“ The savings grew to a little store; then there came the suggestion of a new suit of clothes, and a hat and boots, and a boiled shirt and collar, and a bright cravat. Farrell little thought of the native touch of art in his description of how, when all these were procured, he would fare forth on a Sunday morning, not merely another man, but other than anything that he had imagined. A sense of achievement came and brought a dawning feeling of obligation, and a desire to take standing with other men, and to know something and to bear a part in the work of a citizen of the town. ”

“ I have stood beside men whom I knew, and have seen them miss the chance of employment because they were so far weakened by the strain of the sweating system that they were incapable of the strain of hard manual labor.
Even at the best, much of the real difficulty is often the subjective one summed up in the sentence of a man who has wide knowledge of wage-earners in America, to whom I once spoke of the surprising ease with which I found employment everywhere, except in larger towns. ”

“ The idea would have been not in the least surprising had it come from a fellow-laborer in a town, where some wave of well-defined revolutionary agitation might have touched him, but coming from a native-born farmer’s son, grown to a section-boss, it served to deepen the wonder that one felt in finding so often among an agrarian population the beginnings of revolutionary doctrine.
Sullivan did not share the boss’s views. “Money lords” and “the producing classes” were but idle words to him. Life was a matter of working or loafing. If you labored with your hands, yours was the bondage of work ”

“ The ranchman was a Virginian, tall, fair-eyed, and soft of speech, and when he and Price came out together they were stanch friends on the strength of an earlier acquaintance, and we had the freedom of the ranch. We unpacked and corralled the animals and then made ready for dinner. Not for two days had we tasted food, and now we were seated with our host and hostess and their two sons at a table which groaned under sweet potatoes and roast corn and piles of bread and great dishes full of steaming “hog and hominy,” and with it all, the best of Christmas cheer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Oh, ineffable mystery of life, that he, a hobo of a few months before, should be reading now in a good girl’s eyes an answering liking to his own! He was little more than a lad, and she but a slip of a girl, and I do not know what it may have meant to her, but to him it was life from the dead. Very swiftly the winter sped and very hard he worked until he earned a job at piecework in the factory, and then harder than ever until he was making good wages. ”

“ Life in constant contact with her friends and the breadth of their many interests was in such striking contrast to existence on a ranch, with the nearest neighbor thirty miles in the offing, and with never a look from year to year over the rugged hills that formed the horizon. ”

“ There is little marvel in leading men to talk of themselves, and workingmen are no exception; but there is a difference, which is all the difference in the world, between a narrative that is evidently inspired by the hope of impressing you, and one that is a spontaneous self-revelation.
Sullivan was such another waif as Farrell, but older, and with not so fair a chance of settling ever into the framework of conventional living. ”

“ The burros plainly shared the feeling of relief in reaching a more passable region, and the art of burro-punching began, consequently, to disclose its difficulties. From one side and then the other of the trail they would break away in all directions, exploring the surrounding country, never with an air of mischief, but always with a sober, dogged perversity that was the more exasperating because it wore a mask of reason. Once back into the trail, they might keep it faultlessly for miles on end, and then, from no apparent cause, begin once more to wander. ”

“ I looked with a livelier interest at the women as we passed out, and I saw in the elder one a serene, sweet-faced, old farmer’s wife, so trim and neat that she might have stepped from a New England country side, while the younger woman, in her abounding vigor, appeared rather a product of the West.
Osborn and Tyler had turned the talk at supper to something that attracted them to Kearney for the evening, and almost immediately when the meal was ended they hitched an Indian pony that was Osborn’s to a light, rickety sulky and drove to town. ”

“ INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS If anything is wanting to darken the picture of life in city slums, it is a sense of the needlessness of much of the suffering. And this is the sense which I cannot escape in looking back upon a winter in Chicago, from the vantage point of nearly a year of walking and working through regions west of that city. ”