Chapter 6

In less than an hour, the engines job was over. We were left with about a hundred bushels of shelled cobs. At fifty-five pounds per bushel of whole corn we shelled was about a ton and a half of corn. A ton was left bagged and the rest was cracked and ground into meal. All told we finished with a quarter ton of cracked corn and about twenty-five, ten-pound bags of corn meal. Not bad for a few hours of work. Word of my miraculous engine and mill would spread rapidly. The fact that I was willing to accept shelled corn in trade was a boon most farmers would appreciate. Those with cash would soon find me willing to sell refined grain to them at a small profit. After all, I was the owner who took the risk to purchase and operate the steam engine.

Corn wouldn’t be the only grains I could crush, roll, or grind. Each could be easily accommodated during their harvesting season. It was the other uses for the engine that caused me to scratch my head in frustration. Unlike in the piney woods of east Texas, running a sawmill was out of the question. There was simply no timber available to make lumber. Mesquite was too crooked and limited in length. Live oak forests were far and few between in this part of the state.

The generator set would power lighting and hand tools near the grain shed, but without power lines or commercial utilities being developed, the electrical grid was almost non-existent. Besides operating the steam engine to produce electrical power was very costly these days. Steam engines are very inefficient devices. They consumed enormous quantities of fuel to produce heat in which the mechanical energies of a spinning wheel accounted for only a small fraction of the total energy used.

Lost heat was the biggest waste. I needed to figure a way to use some of that wasted energy to dry grain, distil alcohol, or perhaps make mesquite charcoal. All in good time, or rather, whenever I could find the time and resources to make it happen. For the time being, I planned to operate the milling once a week as the demand justified. The steam engine also required routine maintenance, lubrication, spare parts, and lots of TLC; that only I could provide at the moment.

While owning it was great, it was not without problems. With time, I figured to solve all of them and turn my purchase into a thriving enterprise. I set my eye upon owning one of those traction engines as my next project. After seeing the wheeled tractor drag my skid-mounted steam engine all the way to my farm; I just had to have one too.

None was available locally, but as luck would have it; I discovered a tracked steam excavator being used to dig canals. Its boiler had burst, leaving it as practically useless. The owner was willing to trade it for grain and mesquite firewood, things that I could produce on my farm. We agreed on a price and I contracted to have beast ‘hauled’ to my farm. By removing the digging bucket, arm, and excavator frame; I was left with a tracked crawler, less the necessary steam boiler. Using a belt from the traction engine I’d contracted for to drive the transmission for the tracked remains of the excavator; both vehicles became self-propelled.

Once the chassis of the crawler tractor arrived, I located a used boiler that could be swapped out for the damaged one. A few weeks later I had my own traction engine. I sold the digging bucket, arm, and excavator frame to a contractor for spare parts making me more than I paid for the produce I bartered for the damaged excavator itself.

I could root plow two acres a day using my tractor and a special purpose ripper plough that I designed and made. A few more days and the same two acres would be tilled and prepared for seeding. An added benefit was the cable-operated blade that I designed to hold the ripper teeth. After ripping the roots out, I could pull the ‘teeth’ and pile up root wads and brush for later burning.

Thus, land clearing became a profitable sideline to my farming operations. The men I hired and trained to operate my steam engine at home, could easily take over the operation of the traction engine in the field. Thus, I had my pick of the best men in the area to hire as equipment operators and could train them on my farm until they learned the skills needed to operate the traction engine at any remote location that they were hired for land clearing or ploughing.

With irrigation being the primary means of extending the growing season and producing bountiful crops, my next development was a soil scraper and levelling plough. I made a forty foot long, dragged-frame with an adjustable blade in the middle. The traction engine would drag the blade over the high spots in a field and scrape the soil into any swales throughout the cleared field. I could even drag the implement along one side of the field to make a shallow, levelled ditch to feed irrigation water to the entire ploughed field.

It was slow and precise work but necessary to make efficient use of any irrigation water. The land was so flat around the Valley, that little additional effort was usually all it took to produce levelled fields. The total absence of rocks in the area made scraping soil relatively easy. Thus, I found a man who had and knew how to use a ‘dumpy’ level and hired him to survey and level fields. The surveying part was mostly to document each field and draw a map of its topography.

I heard about a caliche mine being dug a few miles north of my farm. One day I mounted my horse and explored in that direction. I introduced myself to the few ‘neighbours’ that I discovered and asked my way learning what was going on and where new development was taking place. In the afternoon I happened upon a new quarry being dug by several Mexican families living in the area. They were searching for clay to make a weak brick from the sandy soil they had encountered nearby. While excavating their strip mine, the caliche they dug was being loaded on wagons and hauled away making some rudimentary roads. Not knowing much about the poorly cemented rock that they were excavating I attempted to strike up a conversation with several of the men and got nowhere very fast. Instead, they pointed me to where their ‘patron’ lived. I learned that patron was a Mexican term meaning a landlord or maybe a ‘boss’. Regardless I was determined to meet this man and learn everything that I could from him.