One hundred years ago in the old hometown harvest hands and hoboes started gathering to find work on farms around the community. Apparently a little heavier influx of men came looking to work that year because of a crop failure in South Dakota. They came mostly by train and not with a paid ticket either. They started coming in June as reported in The Progress and were hanging out in the stockyard just west of town. The editor referred to them as "the side door Pullman class," and each man cooked for himself on an open fire.
Now, in July, the editor wrote "Laborers are arriving on every train and those who want to work are finding no difficulty in obtaining employment. There are the usual number of hoboes among them who are not looking for anything that means labor. At Oakes Tuesday seventy-five harvest hands captured a freight train and forced the train officials to take them to Jamestown. The Oakes authorities attempted to arrest the men, but the hoboes were too many for them."
The village of Sheldon must have felt some threat because of this influx of strangers and hired a night watchman. "Jim has a policeman star something less than six inches in diameter but he doesn't wear it where it can be seen. He also carries a gun and is going to get a club. When fitted out he will make a typical Irish cop."
Songs and stories have been written about these workers, itinerant mostly because they had no choice, if they wanted to eat they had to go find it. Seasonal labor offered the only jobs for them. John Steinbeck, Jimmie Rodgers, and Woody Guthrie easily come to mind as being good spokesmen for the times. Jimmie Rodgers, not to be confused with the rock and roll era Jimmie Rodgers, wore several nicknames: The Singing Brakeman, and The Blue Yodeler, and the Father of Country Music. Some lines from his song Waiting for a Train: "All around the water tank/ Waiting for a train/ A thousand miles away from home/ Sleeping in the rain..." It was a hard life for these men.
I couldn't resist finding a picture of an old engine with the steam and smoke pouring out of her. It has been a long time since I've seen one, but I've never forgotten. When a freight train headed southeast of Enderlin it had to climb a grade and the clouds really poured from these engines then when they had to work extra hard.
