College Boys In The Wheat Fields

COLLEGE BOYS IN THE WHEAT FIELDS.

The harvest leveled all social barriers, and at the same time raised the standard of living in the country. The sturdy college man whose mighty muscles won him glory on the football field worked with the country lad whose distinction lay in the fact that he had shocked twenty acres of wheat in a day, rubbed elbows with the Mississippi levee hand temporarily turned harvester, slept at night in the cool of the open beside some laborer, with only a wagon overhead as shelter from the dew, and felt the better for it. And all of these, the college man, the levee hand, the country lad, and the laborer, demanded that their employer set a table that would shame, in abundance and quality, the fare of many a house that attracts the summer boarder.

Harvest hands, in companies of one hundred and two hundred, were sent from employment agencies in the states adjacent to Kansas to various points in the wheat belt. Just before the harvest, some farmer found themselves needing more help. Then the farmer used all the guile and promises at his command to induce men to stop with him instead of journeying to the point to which they were ticketed. Harvest hands who ventured on to the platform of some railway station while the engine took water have actually bee kidnapped by farmers, who used force to hold them until the train had gone. One farmer who raises hundreds of acres of wheat always secures his full quota of harvest hands from colleges. he prefers the collegians, and says they make the most intelligent and trustworthy help, and he selects them in preference to some other classes of men able to do more work each day.––From "This Year's Big Wheat Harvest in Kansas," by Philip Eastman, in the American Monthly Review of Review for August.