by Ken Root
The first time I saw my mother cry, I was so young that only snippets remain in my brain. She was standing by the window with a dish towel in her hands and looking out into the yard. ?They are selling the horses,? she said as I climbed onto a chair and gazed through. I think I remember seeing my brother lead two work horses onto a pick-up truck with stock racks. The truck drove away and that was the end of an era that I only know through the stories of my parents as they modernized and switched to farming with tractors but had fond memories of the thirty years of farm life they shared with horses and mules.
Oren and Marie were pretty much frozen in time from the late 1920?s, until WWII ended. I was a late in life child as they had two grown sons and a ten-year-old daughter when I came along in 1949. The mental scar of the depression was deep for these two Okies who went through the coldest, dirtiest and hottest decade in the short history of the state. Having only a wagon and team when they married and started sharecropping in 1929, the only thing they had to show for it, in 1939, was three children and a few pieces of worn out machinery. The times were so tough, they said, that cars bought in the ?20?s were parked as they couldn?t afford gas or tires. The only alternative to walking was a horse or mule. Dad bought two mules during the period and later on, a team of horses. This accounting came from my sister:
?Our team of mules were named Bobbie and Jack. Bobbie was sweet and I think we rode her under Mother`s supervision. Bobbie was the stay at home type, but Jack must have missed his old home, because I believe he ran off twice and went back to the Carney area. (about 20 miles away). Dad tracked him, then rode him home. I guess Dad was on foot. He said he was on the road at night and stopped and asked some people if he could sleep there. Once in a barn I think and once on the porch or floor.?
These animals were the mainstay of the era. They were the only pulling power a farmer had to mow hay or plow a field. Dad had a one bottom plow that was twelve inches wide. My brother and I computed the minimum distance he and the mule had to walk to plow one acre of land. It was eight-and-a-quarter miles! Counting turning around at the end of the rows, it was well over eleven. The reason for small farms was obvious with these numbers.
When the tractor came along, farmers saw it as a means to cover more land, more easily. Even dad?s first tractors: a Fordson and a Farmall F-12, were superior to horses. So why did my mother cry when the horses left the farm? It was clearly a bond with the animals that was not there with a machine. My sister related that the horses were named ?Daisy and Florie? and were cared for year round, whether they were working or not. A day in the field required watering and resting the animals and when they were put back into the barn at the end of the day, they were cooled down, fed and combed, or curried, so they could work again the next day. It was a symbiotic relationship that lasted for the lifetime of the animal and sometimes generationally from one farmer to the next.
We would hear stories of how stubborn a mule could be and the intelligence of a good work horse. ?Florie would hold her foot up when we stopped so she wouldn?t crush the tomato plants we were cultivating,? said my mother as she sang the praises of the team. She had few kind words for Jack, the mule, as he was difficult to manage. Dad would say: ?You could not work Jack to death as he was too smart to let you do it. He would stop and stand you off until he was ready to go again.?
The steel plow was the key instrument of Midwest farming as it was the tool a farmer and a team could use to turn the prairie into fields. John Deere made his first successful one in 1837 in Grand Detour, Illinois, and had a farmer try it out on the rich but sticky soil. I went to a reenactment of the event in the early 2000?s as twenty-five blacksmiths? had recreated the tools and the technology to take a broken saw blade, a white oak beam, two handles and one bolt to fabricate a device to slice the soil. The original Deere history says the blacksmith hammered a broken buzz saw blade into a diamond shape and handmade the single bolt that held it on the beam. When it was finished, he asked a farmer to try out his concept of a steel blade that would ?scour? as the soil passed over it and become slick and shiny. The alternative was cast iron tillage tools that didn?t work well in the Midwest clay loam soil.
The President of John Deere was present to try his hand at using the plow. Bob Lane was a ?button down? fellow with a background in finance, not farming, but on this day he wore new John Deere boots and jeans as he chatted with reporters while seeming to say: ?What have I gotten myself into??
We followed the re-inactor of John Deere to the field as he carried the relatively small plow and walked up to a huge Percheron mare. She was harnessed up for plowing and dwarfed us all. Lane was stricken by her size and beauty and was extremely complimentary to the owner/handler. I couldn?t resist saying: ?Sort of makes you wish you hadn?t started making tractors, doesn?t it?? He stepped behind the plow and they started down the row. Clearly the horse knew more about plowing than all the rest of us combined. She found her pace and Lane just hung on and tried to keep the plow upright. At the end of the row, one of the handles came off and he gasped for air and said: ?Not an engineering problem, boys. (Pant) That was strictly operator error!?
It is good to see draft horses haven?t been totally lost to history. They opened up our country and it would be a shame to let them slip away. The Anheuser-Bush family was credited with saving the Clydesdale breed from extinction and made it into their most successful trademark and promotion. Imagine the time when all conveyances were pulled by horses. The city streets had a different sound, and smell, as they made their deliveries each day.
Now we sit in trucks and tractor cabs that insulate us from the world. The modern engine is so complex we can only fuel it, check the gauges and hope it runs until the next trip to a high tech shop for electronic examination. Interestingly, we still rate our engines in ?horsepower? even though only an engineer can tell you the foot/pound formula. Sometimes a tractor won?t start but a horse or mule only required a harness to begin the slow process of plowing or hauling. The challenge for the driver was that he or she had to be an active participant in the process. Pulling the reins and hollering ?Gee? and ?Haw? was the equivalent to turning the steering wheel on a tractor.
In farming country, we love our past but it too slips away. The director of the Old Thresher?s Reunion, held each Labor Day weekend in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, said: ?The oldest among us were small children the last time these machines were used in the fields.? It was an era that required millions of farmers to raise millions of acres of hay and grain just to feed the tens of millions of draft animals needed to do the work.
It all sounds romantic but the power of steel could not be held back for sentimental reasons. The work horse was replaced and the farms expanded. Still, the memories, even if they aren?t our own, remain.
