Dear Editor
For two or three years there were men who wrote letters to the papers or called into radio phone-ins to carry on about big grain-hauling trucks. They would ruin the highways, they complained.
These men didn’t notice the big trucks running all day, all night, throughout the year on the highways carrying goods for consumers such as themselves — gasoline and groceries, car parts and cans of paint. Grain trucks are not on the road around the clock, around the year. Yes, they carry large loads, a Super B handles 1,50 bushels of wheat.
At one time loads of wheat were definitely not large. I should know what a sleigh/wagon box held; it’s strange that I never made note of it. Looking at the 300-bushel feed grain bin in the yard and estimating down, I thought 50 bushels. A nephew who wasn’t around in the real horsepower days made the same estimate from his knowledge of bushels.
Those loads would have been pulled by two horses, although there were two-grain tanks in the area, a regular box built a bit higher or longer and pulled by four horses.
In the winter of 1932-33, I think it was when the oldest children of Everard and Winifred Pike had left for school, Everard received a phone call from a grain elevator agent in Waseca. If Everard could get a load of wheat in Waseca that day, he would get an extra penny per bushel.
A penny, some readers might think that is funny. It isn’t.
Everard phoned the school to ask the teacher if she could send the oldest boy home to help him. That boy was studying for Grade 9, which he passed successfully, the only high school grade available in the one-room schoolhouses.
I wonder if he left with a bit of a swagger to dash the mile and one-half home; he was leaving to do a man’s job.
After helping to shovel the wheat into the sleigh box he might have remained at home to do chores. His father set out with a team of horses and loaded sleigh on the eight-mile trip. It might have been a little shorter, perhaps he angled south-southwest through the neighbour’s yard, for winter trails often went from farmstead to farmstead. Arriving at the Waseca North Road, however, he would have six miles to go straight south. H would then have tied the lines to the sleigh box, jumped down and walked. No one would choose to ride on a pile of ice-cold wheat. If it was really cold, he would slap his mittened hands back and forth across his chest to keep up their circulation.
The horse would keep plodding on until they heard the magic words, “Whoa, time for a rest.” No need to worry about northbound traffic on the packed sleigh trail. Anything heading north wouldn’t likely be a heavy load and the unwritten code of the trail was, the heavy load gets the right of way. The northbound horses would have been driven off the trail into deep snow to let the burdened team continue. It would likely bring a bit of a rest while the drivers exchanged pleasantries or even news.
After the grain was dumped in the elevator at Waseca, the horses would have been taken to the livery stable to be unharnessed, watered and fed. How long had they been on the trail? Perhaps two hours. And the cost of the livery stable? Perhaps 25 cents. And Everard, could he afford to eat at the hotel? Had Winifred packed a lunch (frozen perhaps by then) that he could eat in the office beside a roaring wood-burning heater?
Then, off for home. With an empty box, the team could maybe trot along the trail but below a certain temperature, no one but an ignorant or brutal person would risk the chance of frost-bitten lungs. It would have been dark by the time the team jingled down the lane, but the oldest children would have done the chores — be hay in the mangers for the horses and hot meal in the house for Everard.
The extra pennies had been earned.
But what about the farmers who lived two or three times further from town, either way?
The northern farmers had expected a spur line to be built by the CPR. When Winifred was 15 she headed north for Big Gully Creek, upon which her family’s homestead abutted, to look for their stay cattle. She found the cattle, she found the ruts of the Fort Pitt Trail and she found stakes in the ground here and there. She was told those were the survey stakes for the proposed rail line. The line never appeared. The mighty CPR kept the land. We all know the story, don’t we?
I was told that sometimes those farmers would haul their wheat in convoys, peaceful convoys. They would usually cross Big Gully Creek on the Bear Island Crossing if they were north or northeast a little, because there was no grade in the north and just a short climb on the south.
A short distance north of the crossing there was a boggy area and some men had cut logs and laid a corduroy road. They did that so well that I could still ride along it on horseback until the end of the 1970s.
Those convoys, or single loads, often went past Everard and Winifred’s farmstead as the way up to the height of land wasn’t so difficult compared to the long and, for horses pulling a load, exhausting climb up Blyth’s Hill on the Waseca Road.
Sometimes these days I will meet one or more Super Bs on the road. They will have been loaded or unloaded automatically, the driver is on a comfortable seat with either heat or air-conditioning. He will hear a radio or a phone. He will be flying along at 80 km/h or 120 km/h When he gets home he will just park his outfit.
Hey, men! Wanna walk from home to the grain elevator.
Didn’t think so.
But once in a while perhaps you could think of Everard and the men like him who trudged to town behind a little load of wheat for a few extra pennies or to think about those companions, the live horsepower that hauled the loads, for some hay, oats and perhaps a pat.
Or, think about that boy and others like him. The boy pulled out of school by his father to pick p a shovel and load wheat. About 10 years later he and those other then young men, were called by the government to pick up a rifle and load bullets.
And they actually weren’t paid much more than pennies; they were more like the horses that pulled the loads; they were expected to do it.
Christine Pike
Waseca
