We've been very busy this week and the boss has been going at full speed.

Stooking the sheaves is pretty hard work, that is it gets heavy when you have to do it the whole day long, in a bare field under a blazing sun. When the grain is ripe you have to cut it as quickly as possible. Just imagine it, up before dawn and finished after sunset. Wednesday we began bringing the sheaves in. The boss and I get the sheaves with a big wagon, and bring them to the yard, where we make big stacks.

The threshing is done mechanically. The boss doesn't own a thresher (one costs $3 000). Someone in Elgin has one and he comes to the farms and threshes for so much a bushel. You begin threshing in the morning at 4 o'clock and finish about nine in the evening.

I was offered a job on a threshing machine at $2.25 per day. I was hired as a pitcher.

Now I'll tell you how things operate. The threshing machine (or separator) is driven by a steam engine by means of a belt. On each side of the separator a wagon unloads the sheaves of wheat into the machines. Each wagon has a teamster who steers the horses and unloads the wagon. There were four pitchers. Our job was to load the sheaves onto the wagons in the field. When the wagon is full the teamster goes to empty it into the machine. There are seven teamsters and four pitchers, an engineer for the machine, a man who watches and oils the separator, a tank man who gets water for the engine, a stoker, three or four men to transport the separated grain to the granaries-in total we had about a 20-man gang.

We threshed about 1200 bushels (43 600 L) of wheat a day.

At night we slept in a wooden shack lined with eight bunks, each one holding two men. In the middle of so many rough harvest hands you could find every kind of person.