Twenty-year-old Hayes Perkins, who spent most of 1898 wandering the Pacific Northwest in search of work, described working as a harvest hand near Colfax, Washington. Work, when it could be found, involved long hours of backbreaking physical labor. Many nights were spent sleeping outside, and men often had to resort to stealing from fields and orchards in order to keep their stomachs full. Regardless of one’s ethnicity, life as an itinerant worker was far from easy. These diverse groups sometimes worked side-by-side, though work forces were more often segregated, with non-white workers earning less than white workers. Native Americans also worked as itinerant wageworkers, as did African Americans, as evidenced by the photo above. Some were native born white Americans, others were immigrants from Europe or Asia. The “wageworker’s frontier,” as historian Carlos Schwantes has called the world of itinerant workers in the Pacific Northwest, was overwhelmingly male, though the ethnicity of the workers varied. When between jobs, they often congregated in the towns, gambling, drinking, and patronizing the local brothels. Always on the move, they found temporary employment in mines, on railroads, in canneries, in the forests, and on farms and ranches. Thousands of itinerant workers roamed the Pacific Northwest in search of work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was taken by Moro photographer Will Raymond probably some time in the first decade of the twentieth century. This photograph shows harvest hands seated on sacks of grain near the northeastern Oregon town of Moro. Harvest Hands Rest on Sacks of Grain, Moro
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