Feeding the Threshing Crew

Women, Food and Harvest Labour on the Northern Plains

Bertine Sem had fifteen acres of flax and needed someone to thresh it.

Her story survives in “Free Land for All,” an account written by her grandson, Erling N. Sannes, from Sem’s recollections and those of other family members. Sem had arrived in Bottineau County, North Dakota, from Snåsa, Norway, in the spring of 1902. She filed for 160 acres and spent her first months living in a tent.

A neighbour broke fifteen acres for flax in exchange for her caring for his wife and new baby. Harvest required another bargain. Sem cooked for one farmer’s threshing crew, and he threshed her flax in return. The crop brought in enough money to help pay for a small shack on her claim.

Sem’s cooking purchased access to equipment and labour that she could not have supplied alone.

A threshing outfit moved from farm to farm with an engine, separator, teams and workers. Some outfits carried cook cars; in other operations, the host farm supplied the meals. Where the farmhouse kitchen fed the crew, its work followed the machine’s schedule.

A Cook Car the Size of a Pullman Kitchen

Carrine Gafkjen had also claimed land as a single woman.

Her daughter, Carrie Young, grew up in a Norwegian-American community in North Dakota and later recorded its food traditions in Prairie Cooks. Gafkjen homesteaded in 1904 and cooked for a large threshing crew during harvest.

She lived and worked around the clock in a cook car with a kitchen roughly the size of one found on a Pullman railway car. Young remembered soda pancakes, sour-cream doughnuts and fattigman, the fried cookies whose name translates as “poor man.” North Dakota lemon meringue pie also appeared on the table.

Young described households combining Scandinavian dishes with what they called American-style cooking. The cook car belonged to a regional threshing system, while its menu reflected the women preparing the meals.

Cooking for a crew required meals across a working day that could last fourteen to sixteen hours.

The Crew Ate on the Machine’s Clock

Thordur “Tom” Laxdal joined Gisli Bildfell’s threshing outfit in Saskatchewan in the fall of 1910.

Laxdal was sixteen. His job was straw monkey. He stood on a rack fed by the blower and forked straw toward the steam engine, where it was burned for fuel. The work could continue for fourteen to sixteen hours.

The crew rose at 5:30 a.m. to feed and harness the horses. Breakfast followed. Laxdal remembered that its quality varied considerably from one farm to another. Supper might not arrive until eight or nine at night.

Laxdal first slept in haystacks, then under the wagon on straw spilled from the rack. When the weather turned cold, he and others slept in granaries, sheds or chicken coops. He began on September 10 and continued threshing from stooks and then stacks until Christmas. He earned one dollar a day.

Meals divided that day into workable sections. They also gave each farm household a reputation among men who ate at a different table as the outfit moved.

Coffee carried its own expectations in Swedish-American communities. Historian Joy K. Lintelman found accounts of coffee being served with breakfast, at midmorning, after dinner and again later in the day.

Axel W. Erickson remembered a Swedish-American threshing crew in rural Kansas considering whether to eliminate its morning coffee break. The proposal was intended to reduce the workload of the women preparing the food. Erickson said it “almost broke up our gang.”

The incident says little about what every Swedish crew drank. It does show that one inherited food habit had become part of the workday and that removing it could provoke resistance from the men receiving the meal.

The Second Crew Worked Indoors

A steam-powered threshing outfit commonly required twelve to twenty men, according to Angela E. Davis’s study of women and technology in western Canada. The machine arrived, completed the work and moved to the next farm.

For the women in the house, its arrival increased an existing workload. Poultry still needed care. Cows had to be milked. Garden produce had to be gathered. Inside, meals were prepared in kitchens that often lacked running water and electrical power.

Davis found that women expressed dissatisfaction with providing threshing meals in inadequately equipped kitchens. The steam engine might reduce one kind of farm labour while creating several days of concentrated work beside a wood-burning stove.

Mary Dodge Woodward’s diaries recorded the scale reached on a large commercial farm in Dakota Territory. Crews of more than thirty men came to plow, seed and harvest the farm’s wheat.

On one hot August day in 1885, Woodward baked seventeen loaves of bread. She had made seventy-four loaves since the previous Sunday, along with twenty-one pies and other desserts. Serving supper took two to three hours before preparation and cleanup were counted.

The household hired additional women when the work became too heavy. Among them were Swedish and Norwegian immigrants, some of whom spoke little English. They earned four dollars a week, far less than the wages paid to male workers.

Other women divided the work among neighbouring households. Marilla Whitmore described four friends who organized their annual threshing cooking cooperatively. Their shared rural telephone line allowed all four to discuss the arrangements at once.

The crew visible beside the separator was therefore only part of the labour force. Another group baked bread, prepared meat, carried water and cleared dishes so the field crew could return to work.

A Norwegian Threshing Run in Alberta

The Alberta accounts come from The Golden Trail, a Camrose-area community history published in 1955 from residents’ retrospective recollections.

Hans Huseby reached Alberta in 1903 after leaving Oslo and spending time in the United States. Chris Afseth, Jim Courtney, George Platke and Chris Gaalaas came north with him from North Dakota, shipping machinery and livestock into the Camrose district.

Afseth bought a Russell steam-powered threshing rig in 1907. He replaced it with a Reeves outfit in 1912 and continued threshing locally until 1932.

His longest recorded run lasted sixty-four days in 1912, beginning with grain threshed from stooks and ending with stacks. Afseth remembered receiving $1.25 a day.

The Camrose community history identifies the men and their machinery. It does not record who cooked during those sixty-four days or whether Scandinavian foods appeared at the farms they visited.

Other accounts from the district show what feeding a mobile outfit required.

Sherman Fox remembered standing with Ludvig Peterson in a field of ripe oats. Peterson told him that “if you can hustle dinner for a crew,” he would assemble the men and teams and begin threshing that afternoon.

Dinner was ready when they arrived. Fox recalled that more than 4,000 bushels of oats had passed through the separator before nightfall. The machinery could be mobilized quickly because someone inside the house could produce a meal on the same notice.

At Ohaton, another family prepared for a twenty-seven-man outfit. Mr. Mohler remembered his wife baking 150 loaves before the threshers arrived. The Mohlers generally killed a beef or a couple of pigs. If the meat ran short, they turned to the chicken coop.

Pie presented an unexpected problem. Mrs. Mohler initially placed whole pies on the table. One worker with a long arm treated a pie as though it were his. Mohler said he had to be stopped so that a more bashful boy would not go without.

These recollections do not establish a Scandinavian menu in Alberta. They document the regional system in which Huseby, Afseth and other Norwegian arrivals operated their outfits.

What the Meal Bought

Sem’s exchange placed a visible value on cooking. Her work for another farmer’s crew secured the threshing of her own flax.

Other women received weekly wages. Many worked without separate pay because feeding the crew was treated as part of their responsibility to the family farm. Neighbours could assist one another, but that cooperation did not distribute every burden evenly.

The timing usually belonged to the machine and the crop. When the grain was ready and an outfit became available, the household had limited room to postpone dinner. A delay could leave cut grain exposed to rain or snow.

Food kept the crew working, but it also negotiated relationships. A substantial meal could uphold a farm’s reputation. Coffee could become a point of dispute. For a woman farming alone, cooking could be exchanged for the use of equipment and labour she could not provide herself.

The Nordic connection appears through particular people rather than through a single tradition. Sem traded cooking for threshing. Gafkjen carried Norwegian-American foods into a cook car. Laxdal judged breakfasts as an Icelandic-Canadian crew travelled across Saskatchewan. Swedish workers defended their coffee break. In Alberta, Norwegian men operated threshing rigs within a regional system in which host farms often supplied meals.

Final Thoughts

Once the separator pulled away, the field crew travelled to another farm. The household remained with the cookware, the plates and the regular chores that had continued throughout the visit.

First-person accounts preserve the part of threshing that machinery photographs often leave outside the frame. The engine consumed water and fuel. The people operating it required bread, meat, coffee and time at a table.

For Bertine Sem, the accounting was unusually clear. She cooked for the crew. Another farmer threshed her flax. The proceeds helped put walls around the tent where she had begun the season.

In the Camrose district, Peterson looked across Fox’s oats and asked whether dinner could be ready. The men, teams and thresher could arrive that afternoon.

The table had to be ready first.

Further Reading

Erling N. Sannes, “Free Land for All: A Young Norwegian Woman Homesteads in North Dakota.”

Carrie Young, Prairie Cooks: Glorified Rice, Three-Day Buns, and Other Reminiscences.

“An Excerpt from the Autobiography of Thordur ‘Tom’ Laxdal,” edited by LaDonna Breidfjord Backmeyer, The Icelandic Canadian, Summer 1982.

Joy K. Lintelman, “A Hot Heritage: Swedish Americans and Coffee,” Minnesota History 63, no. 5.

Angela E. Davis, “‘Valiant Servants’: Women and Technology on the Canadian Prairies, 1910–1940,” Manitoba History 25.

Elizabeth Jameson, “Connecting the Women’s Wests,” in One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests.

Thomas D. Isern, Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs: Harvesting and Threshing on the North American Plains.

The Golden Trail. A 1955 Camrose-area community history containing retrospective accounts of threshing crews, steam outfits and the households that fed them.