The Era Before Tractors

In 1901 Secretary of Agriculture James “Tama” Wilson dismissed Thomas Edison’s claim that technology would soon replace the horse on the farm. To be sure, Wilson acknowledged a role for new modes of transit. The electric railroad, Wilson believed, would entice urbanites to settle the countryside and ease the commute from farm to city. But Wilson doubted the electric railroad or other contraptions would dethrone the horse, which had provided traction on the farm for centuries. Wilson was quick to identify the fl aws of the automobile, which could not, he judged, traverse uneven ground or drive through mud. Agriculture in the early 20th century seemed to demand more horses rather than fewer, particularly in the West, where farms were large and labor scarce. Farmers on the large tracts in the Dakotas, Washington, and Oregon used combines so heavy that they required as many as thirty-three teams of horses to pull them. These combines were themselves state-of-the-art technology, cutting grain in a swath of fourteen to twenty feet and threshing and bundling it. The demands of planting, cultivating, and harvesting crops led farmers either to maintain a stable of horses or to hire the job. The combine cut the stalk near the ground. Once cut, the grain entered the thresher, which shook seed from the stalk. The thresher channeled the stalk to a straw stack and the grain to sacks. Teams of harvesters began work in June, moving north with the harvest to the Dakotas and to Montana by September. The combine seemed to prove that the horse and technology fed off each other and formed an interlocking system.

Integral to technology at the turn of the century, the horse shaped labor, the use of farmland, and the working lives of farmers. The horse could not be switched on and off like a lightbulb but required year-round care. The family short of labor hired a man to organize horses for work and to care for them. The horse thus heightened the demand for labor and kept men on the farm who might otherwise have sought work in the cities. The horse also commandeered its share of the harvest. The farmer had to set aside land to feed his horses: in parts of the Midwest he grew oats for his horses on as much as one-third of the land. What the farmer did not feed his own horses he sold as fodder to farmers from the South and West. Under these circumstances, one would have been rash to join Edison in forecasting the disappearance of the horse.