Wheat Harvest 1900s

 Wheat farming in those early days required plenty of man power and horsepower, along with a considerable investment in specialized machinery for harvesting. The two most important machines were the header and the thresher. The header cut off the heads of the mature wheat stalks with a device somewhat like a giant reel mower. A header required six horses, which pushed—not pulled—the machine through the fields. The header also had a conveyor belt that catapulted the heads into a wagon along side. The wagon would then take the heads to the second key piece of machinery, the thresher. This huge contraption required 12 to 14 horses. By the late 1880s, big iron steam engines appeared on the scene to power the threshers. These 42,000 pound behemoths and their engineer-drivers traveled from farm to farm at harvest time. Harvesting required an aver age of 20 men on every farm. Beginning in July, dozens of workers would arrive by train in wheat towns and wander "up and down Main Street, looking for work," as a 1968 history recalled: "They came from every where. Some could tell of fol lowing the harvest from Texas up through the Dakotas into Canada. Others had farms of their own in the Willamette Valley and were out to make a little extra to help with the mortgage back home."