VI
97 lines✦
The End of the Road; Moonshine; and Some Proclamations_ AUGUST 1, 1912. Standing up at the Postoffice desk, Pueblo, Colorado. Several times since going over the Colorado border I have had such acordial reception for the Gospel of Beauty that my faith in thismethod of propaganda is reawakened. I confess to feeling a new zeal.But there are other things I want to tell in this letter. I have begged my way from Dodge City on, dead broke, and keeping allthe rules of the road. I have been asked dozens of times by franticfarmers to help them at various tasks in western Kansas and easternColorado. I have regretfully refused all but half-day jobs, havingfirmly resolved not to harvest again till I have well started upon acertain spiritual enterprise, namely, the writing of certain new poemsthat have taken possession of me in this high altitude, despite thephysical stupidity that comes with strenuous walking. Thereby hangs atale that I have not room for here. Resolutely setting aside all recent wonders, I have still a fewimpressions of the wheatfield to record. Harvesting time in Kansas issuch a distinctive institution! Whole villages that are dead any otherseason blossom with new rooming signs, fifty cents a room, or when twobeds are in a room, twenty-five cents a bed. The eating counters aregenerally separate from these. The meals are almost uniformlytwenty-five cents each. The fact that Kansas has no bar-rooms makesthese shabby food-sodden places into near-taverns, the main assemblyhalls for men wanting to be hired, or those spending their coin.Famous villages where an enormous amount of money changes hands inwages and the sale of wheat-crops are thus nothing but marvellouslines of dirty restaurants. In front of the dingy hotels are endlessancient chairs. Summer after summer fidgety, sun-fevered, stickyharvesters have gossiped from chair to chair or walked toward thedirty band-stand in the public square, sure, as of old, to beencountered by the anxious farmer, making up his crew. A few harvesters are seen, carrying their own bedding; grasshopperbitten quilts with all their colors flaunting and their cotton gushingout, held together by a shawl-strap or a rope. Almost every harvesterhas a shabby suit-case of the paste-board variety banging round hisankles. When wages are rising the harvester, as I have said before,holds out for the top price. The poor farmer walks round and round thevillage half a day before he consents to the three dollars. Stacker'swages may be three to five simoleons and the obdurate farmer may haveto consent to the five lest his wheat go to seed on the ground. It isa hard situation for a class that is constitutionally tightwad, oftenwisely so. The roundhouses, water tanks, and all other places where men stealingfreight rides are apt to pass, have enticing cards tacked on or nearthem by the agents of the mayors of the various towns, giving averagewages, number of men wanted, and urging all harvesters good and trueto come to some particular town between certain dates. The multitudeof these little cards keeps the harvester on the alert, and, as thesaying is: "Independent as a hog on ice." To add to the farmer's distractions, still fresher news comes by wordof mouth that three hundred men are wanted in a region two counties tothe west, at fifty cents more a day. It sweeps through the harvesters'hotels, and there is a great banging of suit-cases, and the whole townis rushing for the train. Then there is indeed a nabbing of men atthe station, and sudden surrender on the part of the farmers, beforeit is too late. Harvesting season is inevitably placarded and dated too soon in onepart of the State, and not soon enough in another. Kansas weather doesnot produce its results on schedule. This makes not one, but manyhurry-calls. It makes the real epic of the muscle-market. Stand with me at the station. Behold the trains rushing by, hour afterhour, freight-cars and palace cars of dishevelled men! The moreelegant the equipage the more do they put their feet on the seats.Behold a saturnalia of chewing tobacco and sunburn and hairy chests,disturbing the primness and crispness of the Santa Fé, jostling thetourist and his lovely daughter. They are a happy-go-lucky set. They have the reverse of the tightwad'svices. The harvester, alas, is harvested. Gamblers lie in wait forhim. The scarlet woman has her pit digged and ready. It is fun forthe police to lock him up and fine him. No doubt he often deserves it.I sat half an afternoon in one of these towns and heard the localundertaker tell horrible stories of friendless field hands with nokinsfolk anywhere discoverable, sunstruck and buried in a day or so bythe county. One man's story he told in great detail. The fellow hadcomplained of a headache, and left the field. He fell dead by theroadside on the way to the house. He was face downward in an ant hill.He was eaten into an unrecognizable mass before they found him atsunset. The undertaker expatiated on how hard it was to embalm suchfolks. It was a discourse marshalled with all the wealth of detail onereads in _The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar_. The harvester is indeed harvested. He gambles with sunstroke, diseaseand damnation. In one way or another the money trickles from his loosefingers, and he drifts from the wheat in Oklahoma north to the wheatin Nebraska. He goes to Canada to shock wheat there as the seasonrecedes, and then, perhaps, turns on his tracks and makes for Duluth,Minnesota, we will say. He takes up lumbering. Or he may make acircuit of the late fruit crops of Colorado and California. He is,pretty largely, so much crude, loose, ungoverned human strength, moreuseful than wise. Looked at closely, he may be the boy from themachine-shop, impatient for ready money, the farmer failure turnedfarm-hand, the bank-clerk or machine-shop mechanic tired of slow pay,or the college student on a lark, in more or less incognito. He may bethe intermittent criminal, the gay-cat or the travelling religiouscrank, or the futile tract-distributer. And I was three times fraternally accosted by harvesters who thoughtmy oil-cloth package of poems was a kit of burglar's tools. It _is_ asystem of breaking in, I will admit.
✦