The Hetland brothers, Krist, Rasmus, and Alfred acquired a threshing machine that was run by a steam engine. During the threshing season, they took the TWO machines and threshed for neighbors. These brothers could spend hours talking of this adventure.
A cook car drawn by horses, accompanied the rig. In this small room on wheels, a woman or two cooked meals for the entire crew, at least twenty men. They often moved at night so one person had to walk ahead with a lantern to guide the way.
In later years, the cook car was abandoned and the farmers had to feed the crew. When this change took place, the farmers wives tried to outdo each other my making the biggest and best meals. The men enjoyed this wonderful food with much talk and laughter at the table. The children of these families, of course, loved everything about threshing time. It was an exciting time and also one of neighborhood sociability. Both the men and women worked hard.
The women usually did the milking after the men took the many horses out of the barn in the morning. They also tried to make sure that the cows were milked before the men came home in the evening as the teams of the threshers took up all the room. Sometimes, if the cows were left until the men came, the milking would have to be done out in the yard. If the cow decided to graze while being milked, the person doing the milking would just have to follow her around the yard until the milking was done.
During threshing time a typical schedule was this:
breakfast, 6 AM, coffee 9 AM, dinner, 12 noon, afternoon lunch, 4 PM, and supper 7:30 PM. The women carried the lunches to the fields to serve the men. Some of the dinners were also carried out to the fields to the part of the crew that kept the machines going. These men kept the work going while the others went to the house to eat, as they didn't want to shut down their machines.
One of the men was kept busy hauling water for the steam engine. At 5 AM this engine was then ready to sound off as a signal for the crew to get up and start the day of work.
The work in the field was exciting. The men would take great pride in being able to make a straw pile that would stand graceful and shed the rain. It became quite an art to accomplish this piling of straw as the machine separated the grain from the straw. The grain would fall into horse drawn wagons, hauled from the field and stored on the farm. Every kernel of grain would have to be handled by a scoop shovel.
But before the grain could be put through the threshing rig, it had been cut by the binders. As it was cut, the stalks fell to the ground in twine-tied bundles. These bundles were then picked off the ground, set up into shocks, 10 to 12 bundles per shock. The shocking was done by the family or by men who drifted into town, in or on boxcars. These men would come up from the south looking for work. They were usually found hanging around the streets or stockyards, where they slept and cooked their meals. The farmer or boss of the machine would make a trip into town and secure as many workers as needed.
Many times the same men would come back, year after year. At night the workers would sleep in the haymows. A washbasin and clean towels were placed in a shed or outside for the men to clean up. Later bunkhouses were built for the men to sleep in. When it rained, the whole crew stayed at the farm where they were threshing. This would deplete the potato patch and the supply of oats and hay for the horses.
It was so exciting to see the men pitching bundles into the separator. When the horse-drawn hayracks were emptied, they would dash back to the field to get another load. These loads would have to be loaded evenly or they would tip. Sometimes the horses would decide not to go up to the separator, and then there would be a runaway.
Source: Griggs County History 1879 - 1976 Page 314