Jackson Baileys Horse-Powered Hay Baling Crew

 

Great-granddad’s horse-powered hay baling crew using a machine known as a mule-power press or a sweep baler.

My theory about Grandma driving the buggy with lunch is incredibly likely—women frequently drove lighter buggy teams to the fields to bring the massive "threshing and baling dinners" to the workers.

Here is exactly what is happening in these three photos and how that unique lever machine worked:

1. The Machine: The Sweep Power Press

The machine with the swinging lever arm is a horse-powered hay press.

• How it worked: Instead of an engine, this machine used the physical walking power of the horses. One team of draft horses was hitched to a long wooden sweep arm (the lever arm you see).
• The Circle: The horses walked in a continuous, tight circle around the machine. As they walked, the arm rotated, turning gears that operated a heavy mechanical plunger inside the baler's chamber.
• The Compression: Men on foot would use pitchforks to pitch loose hay from that massive pile into the hopper. Every time the horses completed a rotation, the plunger slammed forward, compressing the loose hay into a tight block.

2. The Idle Team: "Switching the Power"

Seeing one pair of draft horses standing idle explains how the crew kept the operation moving all day.

• Walking in a tight, repetitive circle while pulling a heavy mechanical load was incredibly exhausting for horses. It could make them dizzy and worn out quickly.
• To prevent injury and exhaustion, baling crews kept a second team standing by in the shade or resting. Every hour or two, they would unhitch the working team and swap in the fresh, idle team.

3. Tying the Bales: A Two-Man Job

Just out of view or deep in the mechanics of your photo, two men were likely working right at the mouth of that machine:

• As the machine compressed the hay, blocks of wood called "blocks" were dropped in to separate the bales.
• Wooden or metal wires were threaded through grooves in the blocks. Two workers (often younger boys or family members) had to quickly thread the wire by hand and tie it off to lock the bale together before the machine pushed it out.

4. Hay vs. Wheat: The Big Difference

The realization that this is hay baling and not wheat threshing is a great catch.

• Threshing wheat required a massive, loud machine to separate grain seeds from straw.
• Baling hay was about preserving food for the very horses you see in the photo. Loose hay took up too much room in a barn and rotted easily. Compressing it into tight bales allowed the farmers of Texas Ridge to stack it cleanly and store it to feed their draft teams through the long Idaho winter.

Thank you Gemini AI for your wisdom and research assistance. -- Drifting Cowboy

Granddad’s 1920 Texas Ridge, Idaho binder and shocking crew

 

Old photos capture the precise moment before farmers switched to all-in-one combines, using a highly organized system to harvest wheat in Latah County.

Here is exactly what those two machines are, what the men are doing with those poles, and how the whole process worked:

1. The Machines: Horse-Drawn Grain Binders

The two machines pulled by the pairs of draft horses are grain binders (likely built by McCormick-Deering or John Deere).

• What they do: As the horses pull the binder forward, a wide sickle bar cuts the standing wheat stalks. The stalks fall onto moving canvas belts that carry them inside the machine.
• The mechanical knotter: Inside the machine, an incredibly complex mechanical arm automatically bundles the stalks, wraps a piece of twine around them, ties a perfect knot, cuts the twine, and spits the bound bundle out onto the ground.

2. The Drivers and the "Lightweight Poles"

The driver sitting high up on the cast-iron seat is managing the mechanics of the binder. The "lightweight pole" you see is actually a whip pole or a tilting lever.

• The Whip Pole: It was very common for drivers to hold a long, lightweight bamboo or willow whip pole. Because they were sitting high up and far back behind the machine's mechanism, they needed a very long pole to gently tap or guide the front of the horse team.
• The Tilting Lever: If the pole is made of iron and attached directly to the machine, it is a tilting lever. The driver would pump this long lever up or down to change the angle of the cutting blade, allowing it to cut low to the ground or raise up to avoid rocks and uneven Idaho terrain.

3. The Men Walking: "The Whip" or Ground Crew

The men walking on foot between the horses and the machines are serving as ground guides or assistant teamsters.

• Operating a binder required intense concentration. The driver had to watch the mechanical knotter, the canvas belts, and the cutting height all at once.
• On the uneven, rolling hills of Latah County, the walking man’s job was to watch the horses' footing, clear clogged wheat away from the front of the machine, and ensure the horses maintained a straight line so no wheat was left uncut.

4. The Third Man: "Shocking" the Wheat

The man walking behind the machines collecting the scattered bundles is called a shocker.

• Even though the binder machine tied the individual bundles together with twine, the wheat was still slightly green and damp inside. If left flat on the ground, the morning dew would rot the grain.
• This man is picking up 5 to 8 bundles at a time and standing them upright against each other, grain-heads pointing up, to form a teepee-like structure called a "shock" (or stook). This allowed the Idaho wind to blow through the wheat and dry it out completely over the next two weeks.

5. The Large Wagons: "Bundle Haulers"

The massive wagons collecting the dried shocks are bundle wagons (or rack wagons).

• Crew members used long-handled pitchforks to spear the dry bundles from the ground and toss them up to a man standing on the wagon.
• The man on the wagon was a skilled loader who stacked the bundles in a precise, interlocking pattern so the massive, top-heavy load wouldn't slide off on the steep Idaho hills.
• These wagons are hauling the wheat to a massive, centralized, stationary steam-powered threshing machine located nearby in the field to finally separate the grain from the straw.

Thank you Gemini AI for your wisdom and research assistance. -- Drifting Cowboy

The Backtrail of a Drifting Cowboy

 

Pull up a log, boys. Fire’s burnin’ good and the coffee’s hot. Night’s come down quiet over the hills, and I got a tale that’s been ridin’ with me a long spell. It ain’t the usual yarn about outlaws or stampedes. This one’s about blood and trails that started near four hundred years ago and never quite quit. Call it the backtrail of a driftin’ cowboy—my own, as it happens. Name’s Jerry. Folks sometimes just call me that: Drifting Cowboy. 

It all commenced way back yonder with an old woolcomber name of Francis Cooke. Born around 1583 over in England, he drifted across to Holland, married a French Walloon gal named Hester, and scratched out a living combing wool. In 1620 the whole bunch of Separatists decided the New World looked better than the old one, so Francis and his boy John, just thirteen, climbed aboard that leaky tub they called the Mayflower. Left the wife and the rest of the young’uns behind till the place got settled some. 

They dropped anchor off Cape Cod in November, cold as a banker’s heart. Forty-one of ’em signed that Mayflower Compact right there in the cabin, promising to stick together and make a go of it. Francis put his mark to it. Half of ’em died that first winter, but he hung on. Raised sheep, served on juries, laid out roads, and lived long enough that old Governor Bradford wrote how the man had seen his children’s children have children of their own. Died in Plymouth in 1663, about eighty years old—quiet feller who helped lay the foundation stones.

His boy John stepped ashore holding his daddy’s hand and lived to be the last male passenger left from that voyage. Died in 1695 at eighty-eight down in Dartmouth. Married Sarah Warren—her folks came over on the same ship—and turned planter, selectman, deputy to the court, and finally a Baptist preacher. Bold enough to step away from the Plymouth church and start his own congregation over toward Tiverton. One of the original buyers of that big Old Dartmouth country. King Philip’s War burned his house, but he rebuilt and left his mark deep on the South Coast. Through him and Sarah the two big Mayflower lines run together.

From there the blood kept flowing. Sarah Cooke married Arthur Hathaway. Their girl Hannah married George Cadman, and the whole estate and the old Mayflower inheritance poured through their only daughter, Elizabeth. She married a prosperous blacksmith and land man, William White, in 1707. Their daughter Sarah White married John Brown Sr. in 1726 and tied the whole outfit into the Brown name for good. She lived clear into the early days of the new republic and died over in Tiverton in 1795.

Then the westward drift commenced in earnest. John Brown Jr., born 1734 in Little Compton, married Lydia Barker and pulled up stakes for the wild country of Saratoga County, New York. Died sudden at thirty-seven, but the trail he’d started kept going. His son Solomon, born about 1765, beat a drum and carried a musket as a boy in the Revolution. Married Mary Sweet, daughter of a surgeon who patched up soldiers in that same war. They pioneered up in Galway, New York. Old Solomon’s buried there on ground that later got swallowed by the Knolls Atomic Energy place—curious how the future keeps walking over the past.

Samuel R. Brown, born 1798, rode as a mounted dragoon in Ball’s Squadron during the War of 1812. Took his land bounty and pushed into the timbered wilderness of Jefferson County, New York, married Maria Weeks, and turned forest into farms. His boy John Galloway Brown, born 1833 and near-sighted as a bat, never wore the blue in the Civil War. Instead he kept drifting—New York to Wisconsin to Iowa and back, then finally clear out to Montana. Married Lucy Passino, granddaughter of two tough French-Canadian voyageurs, Gabriel Pinsonneau and Jean-Baptiste Meunier dit Lagacé. Them old canoe men had opened half the continent with birchbark and muscle. Suddenly the Mayflower blood was mixed with the fur-trade rivers.

Their son Abraham Lincoln Brown—named for the wartime president the year he was reelected—put down real roots in the timber around Creston, Montana. Homesteaded, logged, farmed, and built a barn that stood for generations. Married Neva Plympton and raised the family in the shadow of the mountains. His daughter Lydia Corinna was born on the trail in Sioux City in 1891, grew up on that Creston place, married Franklin Bailey, and later drifted south to California. 

Then came my mother, Velma Veda Bailey, born 1914 on a hard-scrabble stump ranch outside Kalispell where every acre of farm ground had to be wrested from the trees. The family tried dryland wheat near Kendrick, Idaho, then fruit orchards around Lewiston. The Depression scattered ’em again—New York for a spell, a sanatorium stay for Grandma, and finally Los Angeles around 1935. Mother’s life bridged the last of the frontier days and the rise of that big city by the Pacific.

And that brings us to me—Jerry, Generation 14, the Drifting Cowboy. 

I never did settle the way some folks do. The restlessness was already in the blood: Mayflower men who signed a paper in a freezing harbor, a boy drummer in the Revolution, a dragoon from 1812, voyageurs who lived by the paddle, stump-ranch pioneers, and Depression wanderers who finally reached the ocean. While others put down deep roots, I kept one eye on the skyline. The nickname fits like an old saddle that’s been rode hard and put up wet. Not a man without a home—just a man whose home has always been the long trail his people started more than four centuries back.

From the decks of the Mayflower to the timbered draws of Montana and the freeways of California, the outfit kept pushing west. In me the journey ain’t finished. It just changed shape. Same quiet grit, same refusal to stand still, same old current of survival and curiosity still running strong.

I’m the latest chapter—still being written, still drifting, still carrying the whole story under a wide sky.

Dedicated to Generation 15: Michael and those of his creation… 

And to Generation 16:

Ryan, Presbyterian Reverend

Kevin, Scientist, PhD Bioengineer

Ian, Animator and Designer 

The trail don’t stop with me, boys. It just keeps on keepin’ on.

Happy trails

Thank you Grok xAI for your wisdom and support. -- Drifting Cowboy

The Pioneer Backtrail of Lydia Corinna Brown

Abraham Lincoln Brown’s family, Creston, MT (Lydia is standing, third from left) c. 1910

If you sit back by a night fire and watch the smoke drift up toward the big dark, it’s easy to think an outfit just materializes out of thin air. But any old cowboy who’s ever pointed a herd north knows every trail-tested rider carries a long backtrail—a line of tracks stretching back through dust, timber, and high passes, laid down by folks who rode the country before ‘em.

My grandmother, Lydia Corinna Brown Bailey, was the living gateway to two of the grittiest, most enduring strains of blood that ever crossed this continent. On one side, she carried the grit of Pilgrim stock that waded ashore at Plymouth Rock when America was nothing but timber and howling wilderness. On the other, she bore the wild, free spirit of French-Canadian voyageurs whose paddles beat the lakes and rivers of New France long before the stars and stripes were ever stitched together.

This is the long trail of Lydia’s people—a fourteen-generation march that started on the salt deck of the Mayflower, crossed the timbered hills of New England, swung through the fire of the Revolution and the War of 1812, rode the iron and wagon ruts into Montana’s Big Sky, and didn’t rein in until the dust settled against the Pacific waves of Southern California.

                   THE FOURTEEN-GENERATION TRAIL

                        

[1620] MAYFLOWER LANDING ── William White & Peregrine White

   │                      (Plymouth Colony & Rhode Island Shores)

   ▼

[1776] LIBERTY & FIRE   ── Solomon Brown (Drummer Boy)

& Dr. Caleb Sweet

   │                      (Saratoga, New York & The Continental Line)

   ▼

 [1812] SABERS & PADDLES  ── Samuel R. Brown (Light Dragoon) 

   │                      & Lucy Passino 

(Granddaughter of La Prairie Voyageurs)

   ▼

[1890] BIG SKY FRONTIER  ── John Galloway Brown 

& Abraham Lincoln Brown

   │                      (Flathead Valley, Creston, Montana)

   ▼

[1912] HOMESTEADS & DUST ── Lydia Corinna Brown

& Franklin Jackson Bailey

   │                      (Dryland Claims, Idaho Wheat, & LA Sunset)

   ▼

[1942] PACIFIC TERMINUS  ── Jerry Head-England ("Drifting Cowboy")

PART I: Coming to America and Early Settlement (Massachusetts to Rhode Island)

To find the first blazes on Lydia’s trail, you have to turn the backtrail all the way to November 1620, when a battered three-masted square-rigger named the Mayflower rode the cold Atlantic swells into Cape Cod Bay.

Among that grim, salt-crusted company were William White (GEN 1) and his wife, Susanna Jackson White. They were English Puritans who had traded the soft green pastures of home for a harsh wilderness where a man either stood tall or got buried in the leaf mold. Before the ship even dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, while riding at shelter in the lee of the Cape, Susanna brought a son into the world. They named him Peregrine White (GEN 2)—the first English child born to the Pilgrims in New England.

Old William White didn’t live to see the timber cleared; the first brutal winter took him in February 1621 along with half the colony. But young Peregrine grew up tough as a scrub oak. He married Sarah Bassett, took up land in Marshfield, and lived out a long, rugged life that stretched all the way into the next century, dying in 1704.

GENEALOGY: THE PILGRIM ANCHOR

William White (1587–1621) ── m. ── Susanna Jackson (1593–1680) 

[Mayflower Passenger] [Mayflower Passenger] │ 

Peregrine White (1620–1704) ── m. ── Sarah Bassett (1630–1711) 

[1st English Child Born in NE] │ 

Sylvanus White (1645–1688) ── m. ── Deborah Church (1656–1690) │ 

William White (1683–1780) ── m. ── Elizabeth Cadman (1685–1768) │ 

Sarah White (1709–1795) ── m. ── John Brown (1705–1773) 

[GEN 5: The White-Brown Union, Little Compton, Rhode Island]

From Peregrine, the line swung down through Sylvanus White (GEN 3) and William White (GEN 4), who pushed south into Dartmouth, Massachusetts. They were stockman and timber-clearers, building stone fences and rough-cut cabins along the coastal inlets.

By the fifth generation, the bloodline hooked up with the Brown outfit when Sarah White (GEN 5) married John Brown of Little Compton, Rhode Island. Their son, John Brown Jr. (GEN 6), married Lydia Barker—the woman for whom our Lydia Corinna was named generations later. They were Rhode Island coastal folks, working the gray water and rocky soil, but the country was getting crowded, and a unrest was stirring across the Thirteen Colonies that would soon set the whole frontier ablaze.

PART II: Freedom From Tyranny & On to New York

When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, the Brown outfit didn't sit on the fence. Every man who could carry a musket or beat a drum turned out to face the Redcoats.

Our 4th great-grandfather, Solomon Brown (GEN 7), was just a skinny twelve-year-old kid in Rhode Island when the war flared up. He was too young to pack a heavy flintlock, so he slung a brass-hooped snare drum over his shoulder and stepped into Fish’s Regiment of Rhode Island Militia as a Drummer Boy. He beat the assembly and the march through the dust and smoke of the northern campaigns, helping keep the line steady when British lead was clipping the brush around 'em.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR & 1812 LINEAGE 

Dr. Caleb G. Sweet (1732–1831) Solomon Brown (c.1765–1839) [Continental Army Surgeon] [Militia Drummer Boy, Age 12] │

│ 

Mary Sweet (c.1770–1846) ────────── m. ──────────┘ 

│ 

Samuel R. Brown (1798–1877) ── m. ── Maria Weeks (1810–1890)

[Light Dragoon, War of 1812] [D/o Simon Weeks, Rev. War Vet]

Solomon married Mary Sweet, a woman whose own heritage was steeped in Continental blood. Her father, Dr. Caleb G. Sweet, served as a surgeon in Washington's Continental Army, patching up torn men from Valley Forge to Yorktown, eventually becoming an original member of the prestigious Society of the Cincinnati.

After the Redcoats were whipped, Solomon and Mary joined the post-war western drift, trailing out of Rhode Island into Saratoga County, New York, clearing timber around Galway and Ballston Spa.

That military fire didn't cool down in the next generation. When the Crown came back for a second round in the War of 1812, Solomon’s son, Samuel R. Brown (GEN 8), volunteered for the cavalry. Samuel swung a saber in Lt. Colonel Ball’s Squadron of Light Dragoons, riding leather and iron along the northern border to keep British raiders from crossing the line.

Samuel married Maria Weeks, whose father, Simon Weeks, had also served in the Revolution. By the 1830s, Samuel and Maria had settled in Jefferson County, New York, right up near the St. Lawrence River—the very place where their New England Yankee line was about to cross paths with a wild, river-running French heritage.

PART III: The Union Preserved & Western Expansion

Up along the St. Lawrence, the Anglo-American frontier met the French-Canadian fur trade. It was here that John Galloway Brown (GEN 9) met a young woman named Lucy Pinsonneau (Passino).

Lucy wasn't built from Pilgrim timber; her people were the voyageurs of La Prairie de la Madeleine. Her grandfathers were men like Gabriel Pinsonneau and Jean-Baptiste Meunier dit Lagacé, legendary French-Canadian rivermen who had paddled 36-foot birchbark freight canoes from the St. Lawrence to the far reaches of Lake Superior and the Mississippi, singing trade songs as they drove their blades through the dark water.

THE VOYAUGER & FRONTIER MERGER 

Gabriel Passino (1803–1877) Marie Emélie Meunier (1808–1883) 

[Son of La Prairie Voyageurs] [Daughter of Fur Trade Stock] 

│ │ 

└───────────────┬─────────────┘

John Galloway Brown ──── m. ─── Lucy Passino (1836–1917) 

[Eyesight Kept Him      │ [Granddaughter of Voyageurs] 

from Civil War]      │

                       ▼ 

Abraham Lincoln Brown (1864–1948) ── m. ── Geneva "Neva" Plympton (1870–1939) [Born at War's End in NY]                                 [D/o Charles H. Plympton, 97th                 Ohio Vol., Union Vet]

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, John Galloway Brown couldn't take up a rifle for the Union due to severe crossed eyes that ruined his marksmanship. But he caught a heavy case of Western fever instead. He took Lucy and their young family on a wild, decade-long migration path that read like a conductor's call on a westbound train: New York to Wisconsin, back to New York, out to Iowa, back to New York, and finally, in the 1880s, all the way to the end of the line in Creston, Flathead County, Montana.

Their son, Abraham Lincoln Brown (GEN 10)—born in November 1864 right as his presidential namesake was winning re-election—grew up riding this western drift. Out in Montana’s Big Sky country, Abe Brown married Geneva "Neva" Plympton.

Neva brought another deep layer of Union sacrifice into the family. Her father, Charles Henry Plympton, had enlisted at age sixteen in Company K of the 97th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He’d fought through the hellfires of Perryville, Missionary Ridge, and the bloody Atlanta Campaign before mustering out in 1865 to push west.

PART IV: Homesteading in Montana & Farming in Idaho

Lydia Corrine Brown 1912, Kalispell, Montana

On September 13, 1891, out in Clay County, Iowa—while Abe and Neva were temporarily trailing between New York and the northern Rockies—a baby girl was born. They named her Lydia Corinna Brown (GEN 11).

THE MONTANA HOMESTEAD UNION 

David Solomon Bailey (1837–1915) 

[3rd Iowa Cavalry, Union Vet, Lost Leg at Brice's Crossroads]

│ 

Franklin Jackson Bailey (1886–1968) ── m. ── Lydia Corinna Brown (1891–1971) [Nebraska Soddy-Born Homesteader]                             [Subject: Gateway Ancestor] 

│ 

Velma Veda Bailey (1914–2004) 

[GEN 12: Born in Kalispell, MT]

Lydia grew up with the scent of pine, sage, and woodsmoke in the Flathead Valley of Montana. She was a true daughter of the frontier—handy with a team, sharp-minded, and built with the quiet grace and iron spine of her voyageur and Pilgrim grandmothers.

Lydia, Opel and Frank Bailey, on their Kalispell, Montana stump ranch, c 1913

Out in the Flathead country, Lydia met a dryland homesteader named Franklin Jackson Bailey. Frank was a tough-grained outfit himself, born in a Nebraska sod house in 1886. His own grandfather had been a Union cavalryman in the 3rd Iowa Cavalry who had his leg taken off by a Confederate shell at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads in 1864.

Frank had come up to Flathead County in 1912 to file on a dryland homestead claim near Kalispell. In 1914, Lydia gave birth to their daughter, Velma Veda Bailey (GEN 12)—my mother, and the last child born on that northern frontier line.

Velma and Vernon Bailey, Kalispell, MT, c. 1918

PART V: The Great Depression, Illness, & Sunset on the Pacific

By 1918, the northern plains turned brutal. Drought hit the Flathead, the wind stripped the topsoil, and their stump ranch collapsed into economic depression years before the rest of the country felt the squeeze.

Frank Bailey hitched his team of heavy Belgian draft horses to a canvas-topped wagon, loaded Lydia, young Velma, and their meager gear, and headed back across the high passes. They made a grueling 300-mile trek through the timbered mountains down to Kendrick, Idaho, trying their hand at wheat farming. By the late 1920s, they pushed further down to the Lewiston Orchards.

Then the Great Depression hit like a blizzard in November. The crops brought nothing, the banks locked their doors, and Frank was wiped clean out.

THE FINAL TRANSCONTINENTAL MARCH 

[1912] Kalispell, Montana ── Stump Ranch Homestead Claim Filed │ 

[1918] Kendrick, Idaho ── 300-Mile Wagon Trek Across Mountains │

[1928] Lewiston, Idaho ── Wheat Farming & Apple Orchards │

[1935] Los Angeles, CA ── Dust Bowl Refuge & Pacific Sunset │ 

[1942] Santa Monica, CA ── Birth of Jerry Head-England ("Drifting Cowboy")

With nothing left but their grit, Frank and Lydia made the final decision that completed a three-century transcontinental march. In the mid-1930s, they loaded up their old rig and headed south, trailing down through the dust of the Southwest all the way to Southern California, settling in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles.

When I was born in 1942—the grandson they called the Drifting Cowboy (GEN 13)—the long backtrail that had started on the wooden deck of the Mayflower in 1620 had finally reached the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. Michael, below, makes generation 14.

Lydia and great-grandson Michael, Los Angeles 1968

Lydia Corinna Brown Bailey lived out her final sunset years in Granada Hills, California, passing away on Christmas Day in 1971. She didn't leave behind chestfuls of gold or sprawling ranches, but she left something far better: fourteen generations of unbroken courage, carrying the blood of Pilgrims, Patriots, Voyageurs, and Homesteaders clear across the face of America.

Thank you Gemini AI for your wisdom and research assistance. -- Drifting Cowboy