They’d take us in and treat us well but we’d leave. We wouldn’t do no tricks, not in that place.

Harvest Excursion

Didn’t stay too long in school. I guess I was 14 when I quit school. I didn’t care too much for it. Then I went out West on a harvest excursion out there and I travelled around there a bit. I liked the country out there great. That was in 1924, I think it was.

There was 1,800 on the train going out. That’s a big lot of people. It was kinda wild in some places. They went north all the way. They got clear of the big cities. It was only small little towns. The train would have to stop — it was steam engines — where there would be a water tank. Most of them’d get off, and the little stores would have their doors all boarded up so high. But [the excursioners] would just go and they’d just kick the boards in and they’d go in and they’d clean the shelves off. They’d set fire to stacks of hay ’fore they’d jump aboard the train. Oh, it was wild in some parts. Nothing they could do about it. There wasn’t hardly a window left in the train when we got out there.

It was a scattered-out place. You couldn’t go visiting neighbours or anything like that. A house here and a house there. Only time you’d get a chance to see people was perhaps Saturday evening: the old boss would take a load of us in on the truck in town.

I stayed all the harvest. It was all harvest work I was at: threshing and stooking. Then I worked right through till Christmas with the old fella — ploughing and every kind of work.

Stooking — you done it all by hand. Shocks, they called it. We call it stooks here. Home here, we’d put 12 sheaves on a stook. V—shaped you know. But out there, it didn’t matter how many sheaves you threw on the stook ’cause they were thick. Just as long as you got three or four standing up good you could just pelt them. You could put 25 on if they were handy you. That’s the way the stooks was made out there.

It was all horse work. There were no tractors then. All hand work and horses.

When I left here, I was getting a dollar a day. And when I got out there, it was four dollars a day for Stooking and five for threshing. I thought that was great. And it only cost me 23 dollars to go out there. That was a return ticket home. So, everything was cheap then.

I always wished to go back to see the place. Forty—eight years after that, I got a chance to go out there. My wife’s sister and her husband had a

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