I guess this beats shucking by hand out of corn shocks, and chopping fodder with a corn knife, but it still ain't easy! Holy Cow, farming is hard work! This is a Rosenthal Corn Shucker and Shredder, and you had to bring the corn shocks to it. You still had to put the ears in the crib, and then you still had to shell the corn off the cobs. Mechanical corn pickers were a real game changer on the farm.
Interesting video, but there is something else. You are seeing a glimpse into the reason for the near fatal decline of the buffalo on the American frontier. It has to do with that long fan belt.
ReplyDeleteI knew a guy, Jim, who worked with VISTA living with the Navaho people. He is mentioned in the forward of the great book on the last wild Indian in North America, "Ishi in Two Worlds," so he knows of what he speaks. Jim told me that all the stuff we hear about how the white settlers and railroads killed off the buffalo is crap. So is the "great noble savage" image of the Indians as using every part of an animal they killed. Bull hockey. Indians are people just like us and, like us, they can be wasteful in times of plenty. But that is another story.
Anyhow, as the industrial revolution was growing, manufactories in the east used water powered wheels to turn long logs as spindles. In turn, long fan belts ran from these spindles to power machines, rather like this shucker, but muuuuch larger. They used cowhide, but that stretches. Guess what does not stretch nearly as much? Buffalo hide. So, the white traders paid the Indians, in one way or another, to bring them hides. And they, the Indians, massacred huge numbers of buffalo well before white settlement became large in the west. Whites pretty much put the finish on what the Indians started, but fortunately whites also has a sensibility about preserving much that was being lost of the old west. In concert with some tribes, men like Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and later Gifford Pinchot strove to preserve and protect. Lucky for us.
Thus endth the lesson for today.