HARVESTING 75 



casion, and once took the place of harvest festivals, Thanks- 

 giving Day is our national harvest festival. It ranks as a 

 legal holiday and is fixed by proclamation. This day was sug- 

 gested by the Hebrew feast of tabernacles, or the ' 'feast, of 

 ingathering at the end of the year.' 7 Occasionally in our 

 country there is also an after harvest dance. 



Our festivals, however, have lost the rude simplicity and 

 rustic romance characteristic of the past, and they are less 

 immediately connected with the harvest. Modern invention has 

 quite changed the nature of harvesting, rendering it an ordi- 

 nary process and depriving it of many features which made it 

 important and interesting in the olden times. One feature 

 which has survived is the annual migration of harvest la- 

 borers. The novelty, the hardship, and the adventure incident 

 to the travel, and the unusual compensation for the toil, so 

 often performed with emulative zeal, have always lent a pe- 

 culiar charm and enchantment to this occupation for a certain 

 class of humanity. Every harvest, bands of the Irish used to 

 travel to England, while the Italians and Austrians still go to 

 France and Germany to help reap the grain. Shiploads of 

 Italians regularly go to Argentina for the harvest time, and 

 return to Italy when the season is over. Every year great 

 numbers of agricultural laborers, both men and women, emigrate 

 from the central and western provinces of Russia to the steppes 

 of the east and southeast. 



Nowhere else has this feature of harvesting evolved to such 

 an extent as in the United States. The characteristic attrac- 

 tions are here found in an unusual degree, especially upon the 

 bonanza farms of the northwest. In this district there is no 

 farming in the usual sense of the word, for wheat raising has 

 become a business interest differentiated from all others. The 

 hard and practical business atmosphere of our age is every- 

 where prevalent, an atmosphere that would soon chill the sim- 

 ple home customs of our fathers. Not even home life is found 

 here, for the year around the bulk of the work is done by 

 transient laborers who live at the division dormitory, or in 

 quarters far out on the fields. Nor is there the association of 

 the factory, for men working on different parts of the same 

 farm will often not see each other a single time from one 

 year's end to another. But for the harvester the fascination 



