Threshing Outfits

Neil Darough´s threshing outfit 1897. Provincial Archives of Mantioba, Lowe, F.H.H. 112, N11029 

J.C. Wallaces outfit at harvest time during a wet week in Lundar, Manitoba in 1910. Provincial Archives of Mantioba. Agriculture -85

Wheat farming became the main occupation of farmers in the Killarney and Argyle areas from the 1890s onward when access to railways improved. With increased cultivation threshing became an important event on the farming calender. 

Threshing outfits would move from farm to farm from September to December and do the threshing for farmers. There would be 16-18 men to a gang, one foreman who ran operations, one fire man, one water man, about 2-3 grain men and the same number of field pitchers and 8 men would be on the stook team.

The fire man would get up first around 5 am to start the engine. Work started at 7 am and finished at 7 pm. The men were fed at the farm so threshing time was very hard work for the women too who had to prepare three meals a day for the entire team of hungry men. The gang would sleep at the farm, sometimes in the house if there was space but otherwise in a caboose or even in the stacks. 

The arrival of the threshing outfit at a farm thus brought many changes to the daily routines of everyone and was much anticipated.  In the evenings the team would socialize and play tricks on each others, especially on the ´green horns´, who were the new boys in the team. Most farmers preferred to have a team over early in the season as they could sell their crop earlier and it was also easier to feed them while there were still plenty of fresh provisions in the house. 

In the Killarney and Argyle areas there were several gangs in operation and it seems that farmers tried to hire a local team although incoming teams were not unheard off.  Of the Scottish settlers Malcolm MacDonald (son of Angus Macdonald from Lewis) ran a team and so did Arni Sveinsson, Thorsteinn Antoniusson and Jon Fridfinnsson of the Icelanders. It is likely that these men will have hired boys who spoke the same language as them (i.e. Gaelic and Icelandic) to secure a smooth threshing operation although we know that Joe Cobb (an Irish man) worked on Arni Sveinssons team for a while. It may also have been for language reasons that farmers chose to hire a team that was ran by a man of the same nationality. They may furthermore have been trusted above others to come earlier in the season and to charge a reasonable fee. 

Operators like Sam McKay may perhaps have bred suspicion of ´foreign´threshers. In 1889 Sam who came from Ontario did the threshing at Hernit Christopherson´s farm in the Argyle district. Hernit, who emigrated from Iceland in 1883, paid Sam $36 for the threshing, which he later denied having received. Sam sued Hernit who had to pay the same amount twice. He also sued  Thorkell Olafsson but Thorkell had witnesses to his intial payment to Sam so he did not have to pay a second time.

Threshing outfits became a thing of the past in the 1920s when tractors and combine harvesters took over the work.