The summer months mean harvest time for farmers. This is the time of year when farmers find out if their expenses, time, and hard work paid off. Modern-day farmers use huge expensive self-propelled combines to harvest a hundred or more acres in a single day. Not too many years ago, harvesting was a different story. Before the invention of the combine, farmers harvested their crops in a much different and time-consuming way.

      When the crop was ready to harvest, the farmer used a "binder" or McCormick reaper to cut and bundle the grain. Horses pulled the machine, but in later years tractors replaced horses. The binder was an ingenious machine that cut and tied the grain into bundles. The bundles would drop from a side delivery mechanism as the binder moved through the field. It was a slow process, but it was the best technology available at the time. After a field of grain had been cut, bundles could be seen scattered throughout the field. The next job was to stack five or six bundles together with the heads of grain in an upright position. The process was called "shocking grain." The process allowed the grain to dry. When the farmers in the community had their grain cut and shocked, it was time to move to the second phase of harvesting - threshing.

      Some communities formed a cooperative and purchased their own threshing equipment. The thresher unit consisted of a steam tractor (later on, gas tractors were used), the separator (threshing machine), and a chuck wagon (cook shack). The number of men in a thresher crew varied from fifteen to thirty men, depending on the amount of acreage to be harvested. Each man had a specific job to do. Some drove wagons, pulled by a team of horses, which hauled bundles from the field to the thresher. Some men worked out in the field, pitching bundles onto wagons while some pitched bundles at the separator. There were usually one or two men who bagged the grain as it came out of the grain spout. There were men who hauled the grain from the separator to the barn. There was a man who operated the steam tractor, and a man who tended its boiler. The man who tended the boiler was called the "fireman," and it was his job to see there was plenty of water for the boiler. He also had to keep plenty of fuel to fire the boiler. The boiler was fueled primarily with straw, but wood was used when available. There were no easy jobs on the thresher.

      Local girls or wives of some of the men who worked with the thresher usually operated the cook shack. Their work started early in the morning, as they had to feed a bunch of hungry men five times a day. The fireman had to rise early in order to get a fire started in the boiler of the steam engine. He had to have a head of steam built up before the engine could power the separator. The women who cooked for the thresher had a very important job as they had to prepare three hearty meals a day, plus snacks at nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. It was a long day from first light to dark.

      When the thresher moved to a farmer's field, it was positioned so the wind would blow the chaff and dust away from where the pitchers and other hands were working. The steam tractor pulled the separator from farm to farm. It was terribly slow, but it had tremendous power. After the tractor got the separator into place, it would then be lined up with the separator, and a long belt would link the two pieces of equipment together. One end of the belt would be placed around the drive pulley of the separator and the other end of the belt was threaded around the drive pulley of the tractor. The tractor would tighten the belt by backing up until it was sufficiently taut. A black sticky belt dressing was usually administered to the belt as it turned to keep it from slipping. During the normal course of the day the belt would get hot and would stretch and draw slack. Moving the tractor back a few feet would retighten the belt.

      The separator was like a modern-day combine, as far as how the threshing mechanism worked. When the bundles were pitched onto the canvas, or conveyor, they moved into the machine where a rapidly rotating cylinder knocked grain from the bundles. The grain passed through a shaker, or sifter, which separated the grain from the chaff. A powerful fan blew the straw and chaff through a pipe to the ground outside where it formed a huge straw stack. The separator had two exits, one for the grain, which was collected in sacks, and a discharge pipe for straw and chaff. Working around the separator was usually a very dusty job, regardless of which way the wind was blowing. The men who bagged the grain would spread a large tarp out on the ground beneath where the grain was being bagged. The tarp was to catch any grain that was spilled from the filler spout.

     There were usually three or four wagons hauling bundles to the separator. There were two men with pitchforks throwing bundles onto the wagon. They would stack the bundles as high as they could and then the wagon would take them to be threshed. When the wagon got to the thresher, it was parked on the upwind side and pitchers would alternately throw bundles into the separator. Large mechanical rotating knives cut the twine from the bundles as they started the threshing process.

      When men or women signed on with the thresher crew, it was understood that everyone got fed along with what wages they were to earn. The thresher would be at a farm one day, or maybe three or four days, depending on how much grain the farmer had to thresh. After finishing one job, they would move on down the line to the next farm.

      The farmers of the Mustang Community owned the Mustang thresher. The Mustang thresher cooperative started in the 1920s. They had a Case steam tractor and a fourteen-inch separator. The size of the separator was determined by the width of the conveyer, or canvas.

      During the 1940s, the modern combine came upon the scene in Mustang. The first men in Mustang to purchase combines were Bryan Moore, Belford Grimland, and B. C. Rogstad. Grandpa (O. C. Knudson) didn't get a combine until after the war. Before Grandpa got his own combine, Bryan Moore usually cut Grandpa’s grain. The Mustang thresher was stored at Jeff Hanson's farm during the off season. During the war, the Case steam tractor was cut up and sold for scrap iron to help with the war effort. The separator presently sits on Molden Knudson's place* rusting away. Old threshing machines are antiques today. Most have been sold for scrap iron, but a few have been restored and kept by collectors.

      I have a fond memory of working (as a ten-year-old could work) with the Mustang thresher the last time it was operated in 1949. I don't know why it was taken out of "mothballs" and used, but I know it was. It was set up on the old Gore place between the old Ammon’s house and the creek. The exact spot where we threshed was where Carroll Knudson presently has a stock tank.

      I helped Otto Nygaard bag the grain. He'd bag it, and I would pull the sacks back out of the way, then someone else would load the sacks onto a pickup truck. Grandpa had a special rack, or rake, mounted on the front of his tractor that allowed him to haul bundles to the thresher. The lift was hooked up to his power lift so it could be raised and lowered. Other men had wagons behind their tractors that hauled bundles to the thresher. Since we didn't have the old Case steam engine to power the separator, we had to use an old McCormick-Deering tractor. I don’t remember whose tractor it was. I remember Herman Carlson had the first tractor I had ever seen with a self-starter on it. It was an Allis Chalmers. We threshed for two days, and I remember that someone brought watermelons out to the thresher. Boy, was that a treat! I remember Otto Nygaard calling me over and saying he had a rattlesnake trapped under the grain tarp. I went over and sure enough there was something soft under the tarp. As we continued threshing, I detoured around that spot where the snake was. As we finished up, we started putting things away. I wanted to be sure I was there when Otto rolled up the tarp. Any youngster would like to see a rattlesnake when they could. The snake turned out to be a fresh cow patty. I can still visualize Otto, with tanned face and his white teeth flashing, as he laughed at the expression on my face as I discovered what the "snake" really was.

      The men I remember helping thresh at the Gore place were Sander and Clarence Tergerson, Jeff Hanson, Leonard Wallace, Carroll Knudson, B. C. Rogstad, Herman Carlson, Otto Nygaard, and O. C. Knudson. (There were others I do not remember.) The heyday of the thresher was before I was born, but I can claim a bit of Mustang Community history in that I had a part in the "last run of the Mustang thresher."

       Note: I have the book THE SCIENCE OF THRESHING printed by the J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company in 1899. Grandpa gave this book to me several years ago. This is the instruction book that came with the Mustang thresher purchased by the cooperative in Mustang.

      *The Molden Knudson place is currently (1998) owned by his grandson, Terry Samples.

 JMW/March 1982

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