The Unplowed Sky

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The Unplowed Sky

A Novel

Jeanne Williams

This story is dedicated with love and appreciation to Uncle Lou, who worked on a threshing crew and helped build roads and railroads in No-Man's Land; to Aunt Dorothy, an indomitable spirit, who drove “Big Red” in the harvest fields; and to Alice Shook, my kissin' cousin, who has shared with me such vivid memories of life on the land and when the threshers came.

A
UTHOR
'
S
N
OTE

Even though they were no longer farming wheat, my grandparents and parents often spoke of those days, and Mother and Grandmother well remembered cooking for harvest and threshing crews. Half a century later, I'm sorry that I didn't listen better and ask more questions. Thank goodness, in the sixties, I did record considerable information from my father, Guy E. Kreie, who plowed virgin prairie near Dodge City when he was a boy and later grew wheat with my maternal grandparents and uncles near Elkhart, Kansas. I also have some treasured material from my mother's mother, Susanna Parks Salmon, and I wrote the book in view of a photo of my mother driving a tractor and my father on a header with my uncles and grandfather.

One might call these family memories the seed of this story, but I was lamentably ignorant about wheat farming when I decided to write this book about the period when the mighty steam engines that had revolutionized grain farming were being challenged by kerosene and gas-powered machines and the development of a practical combine that could harvest and thresh grain at the same time.

While reading
Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs
by Thomas D. Isern (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1990), I was intrigued with the threshing outfits that traveled from farm to farm all over the plains. In the heyday of steam threshing, one hundred thousand men swarmed like migrating birds to a swath 200 to 300 miles wide that stretched from Texas into Canada. They harvested and threshed the fields that fed the nation and, during the war years, much of Europe.

Women usually cooked for the traveling threshers, whipping up huge, hearty meals in a small shack on wheels. There are countless photographs of women, many of them only seventeen or eighteen, standing beside their cookshacks, and managing to look pretty and neat in spite of their hard work. Many a romance bloomed as men vied to dry dishes for the cook!

The twenties saw dramatic changes in American life. Women got the vote in 1920. Radio grew from infancy to a medium as influential and widespread as television today. Henry Ford's production lines brought the price of a Model T to below $300. Prohibition fomented racketeers and bootleggers. Still, though flappers might smoke and dance the Charleston in the cities, on farms without electricity or indoor plumbing, women's work was laborious beyond modern imagining.

Fortunately for me, since I usually write about such households, I lived on my grandparents' farm in my teen years. It didn't bother me at all then to carry water from the spring for all our needs, scrub laundry on a washboard, read by kerosene lamps, and carry wood for heat and cooking. I'm glad I don't have to do it now, though.

Material for this book came from many sources apart from immediate family. I owe a tremendous debt to Dave Webb and Noel Ary of the Kansas Heritage Center in Dodge City, who lent me tapes and videos and suggested sources. Dave, a railroad enthusiast who lives in an antique depot, sent me many relevant articles and an invaluable taped interview with Hazel Moore and “Pat” Murphey who was a county agent in Greeley and Comanche counties. Also through the Heritage Center, I was able to view an excellent film on threshing that shows the old steam engines,
Steam Thrasherman
, Lloyd N. White of Colby, Kansas, adviser.

Naturally, I pestered all my relatives who experienced harvest and threshing firsthand. My cousin, Dr. Jack Salmon, videotaped his father's and mother's recollections. Later, when I visited them, they shared vintage photos and answered a lot of questions. Thank you, Uncle Lou and Aunt Thelma!

Alice Shook, my friend and cousin, wrote some warm, humorous and fascinating memories of life on an Oklahoma Panhandle farm. She also went to the trouble to send steam-whistle signals that she got from the kind people at the Antique Engine and Threshers Association at Bird City, Kansas.

My aunt, Dorothy Thompson, who has herself run a tractor at harvesttime, sent me a number of useful pictures, photos, and recollections. She has always been supportive of my writing, and I am glad I have filled a bookshelf for her.

George Scofield of Ponca City, Oklahoma, grew up in Elkhart, my birthplace, and worked at a drugstore. He sent me a wonderful account of life there in 1924, describing how he helped build a railroad across the Texas Panhandle, very much like the project Garth hires on for in this book. His spirited memoir yielded many interesting details about a work crew.

My neighbor, Sally Spofford, gave me some real licorice root and told me about that and other treats of the twenties. She also bore, as ever, with my travails.

Helen Brown, director of the Morton County Museum at Elkhart, gave me a special tour of that impressive and intriguing collection. It has everything from dolls to a windmill and a fine collection of machinery, including a marvelous old steam engine.

For Shaft's wonderful beard and kitten, I am indebted to friend and fellow writer Nelson Nye's nephew, Tom Johnson of Springfield, Kentucky. He told me about a small cat he had rescued and how it slept beneath his beard or draped itself shoulder to shoulder. No lover of cats could resist such a charming practice, and he kindly granted me permission to borrow his beard and cat.

Among books that helped in re-creating time and place were
Land of the Post Rock
by Grace Muilenburg and Ada Swineford (1975) and
Natural Kansas
, edited by Joseph T. Collins (1985), both from the University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas;
Kansas Bootleggers
by Patrick G. O'Brien and Kenneth J. Peak (Manhattan, Kansas: Sunflower Press, 1991) and
This Was Wheat Farming
by Kirby Brumfield (New York: Bonanza Books, 1958).

Robert L. Yates's
When I Was a Harvester
(New York: Macmillan, 1930) is the true story of a seventeen-year-old college boy who goes west to work the harvest. It was in his account that I read about Saskatchewan greyhounds. Carey MacWilliams's
Ill Fares the Land:
Migrants and Migratory Workers in the United States (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), has a concise and illuminating section on harvesters and threshers, showing how this work force differed from most migrant laborers.

Also useful were J. Sanford Rikoon's
Threshing in the
Midwest,
1820–1940
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988);
Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas
by James C. Malin (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1944);
The Grain Harvesters
by Graeme Quick and Wesley Buchele (St. Joseph, Michigan: American Society of Agricultural Engineers);
The American Farm Tractor
by Randy Leffingwell (Osceola, Wisconsin: Motorbooks International, 1991); and Jon Steward's
The Reaper
(New York: Greenberg, 1931).

A memoir I kept always at hand is
Pioneer Threshers
written and published by Joseph Dale Fry (Garden City, Kansas, 1993). Illustrated with a wealth of family photos and pictures of machinery and components, it gives a detailed, step-by-step account of threshing as his parents and family knew it, from 1884 to 1928. This is no dull textbook. It is a captivating story, full of humor, about real people and how they lived and worked. Mr. Fry kindly cleared up some of my perplexities by phone and letter. One of his prize possessions is a scale-model Case steam engine and separator made by his brother.

Another deskside reference was
Days of Steam and Glory
by Dana Close Jennings (Aberdeen, South Dakota: North Plains Press, 1968). Through drawings, photos, and vigorous language, it shows how the engineer cared for his engine, got it up to operating pressure, and what could happen if things went wrong.

Loving owners of the great old machines still get them out for threshing demonstrations throughout the wheat-growing country; and, once again, if only for a summer day, the giants belch smoke and whistle and thresh the grain.

J
EANNE
W
ILLIAMS

October 1993

Cave Creek Canyon

I

Hallie stretched, opened her eyes, and smiled at the dawn. Then she realized that it glowed through a strange window in a wall papered with violets, and there was an unfamiliar warmth beside her. She turned, saw the curly black head burrowed into the pillow, and everything came back in a welter of confused feelings. Her main feeling was relief: relief that she had a job where she could look after her small half-brother while earning their living.

Her father had died of cancer a few days into that new year of 1924. Seven months later—just five days ago, but they seemed a lifetime—his widow Felicity had come to see Hallie, who was working her last week for the MacReynoldses. The childless couple who had been so kind to her had sold their dry-goods store and were moving back east in hopes that the climate would improve Fanny MacReynolds's health.

“I have a well-to-do childless cousin in St. Louis who is willing to adopt Jackie,” Felicity said, as Hallie listened thunder-struck. “But since the child's your half-brother, I thought it only fair to see if you wanted to raise him.”

Hallie's insides twisted. She looked at this small, pretty woman who had gotten rid of Hallie's mother's things as if they carried infection, who had made Hallie feel like an outsider with no place in either the house or her father's love. As she grew older, and especially since her father's death, Hallie had begun to understand a little of how difficult it had been for him and was sorry that she had coldly rebuffed his invitations and overtures after she had gone to live with the MacReynoldses.