The Jungle, Chapter 22

During one harvest season, Jurgis finds himself in Missouri where the farmers must hire great numbers of men in order to harvest the fields. Men earn good wages during these weeks, and at the end of the season, Jurgis finds that he has a large sum of money in his pocket. Because he is a tramp and knows nothing of banks, he decides he should simply spend it all in a night of debauchery and drink in a saloon. There is a whole industry of prostitution that follows the migrant workers wherever they go during the season, and Jurgis takes one of these women. He feels bad after that night, but he quashes those feelings and sets off on the road again. One night, he finds the house of a farmer and immigrant Slav like himself. He and the man talk and Jurgis watches as the man’s wife bathes their one-year-old son. As he looks at the baby, Jurgis feels intense pain over the loss of his son and weeps and cries and leaves the house.

In Chapter 22, Jurgis works the harvest with other migrant workers. The hours and long and hard, as they work for 18 hours a day without break, The pay was great, but the work was hard. 

It was in the latter part of July, when Jurgis was in Missouri, that he came upon the harvest work. Here were crops that men had worked for three or four months to prepare, and of which they would lose nearly all unless they could find others to help them for a week or two. So all over the land there was a cry for labor--agencies were set up and all the cities were drained of men, even college boys were brought by the carload, and hordes of frantic farmers would hold up trains and carry off wagonloads of men by main force. Not that they did not pay them well--any man could get two dollars a day and his board, and the best men could get two dollars and a half or three.

The harvest-fever was in the very air, and no man with any spirit in him could be in that region and not catch it. Jurgis joined a gang and worked from dawn till dark, eighteen hours a day, for two weeks without a break.