Review by Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West by Mark Wyman

Authors

Mary Lyons-Barrett, University of Nebraska at OmahaFollow

Date of this Version

Summer 2011

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 31:3 (Summer 2011).

Comments

Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

Mark Wyman presents the conflicting and often contradictory ways our government has dealt with immigration to satisfy the demands of western growers who have claimed since the late 1880s that there was a shortage of available labor to harvest crops. In the process of meeting the challenge of ripe crops going to waste, local entities used children from reform schools and Native Americans from boarding schools to perform agricultural labor cheaply. Congress, in banning Chinese immigration under the Exclusion Act of 1882, kept the door cracked open to admit Japanese and Hindu workers to do some of the more advanced tasks in viniculture such as pruning and carefully picking delicate fruit without bruising the skin.