Snow, and the movement of it, has made a lot of news lately. It seems some people are unhappy with the efforts to clear the streets of town after some of the recent storms.
This seems to be a problem of the modern age. If we go back a century or so there were few options as far dealing with snow. You could go over it or shovel it.
Well, I suppose there was a third option. You could just put up with it until spring when Mother Nature would take it away.
No snow blowers, at least not for the homeowner. The railroads had what they called rotary plows: a special steam engine with a rig on the front that blew snow and anything that else that may have blown onto the tracks.
Even with these rigs, which weighed hundreds of thousands of pounds, the snow could be too hard. After the blizzard of 1966 the late Jamestown resident E.W. Wiese was called in by the Northern Pacific to use dynamite to breakup hard packed snow banks.
Other times the railroad would turn to manpower. After any storm of that era the railroads would send out snow trains. This train would serve as a warm home, and a source for a hot meal, for a crew of men that would go out and shovel off the tracks for miles at a time.
This tells us a little about the economy of the region back then. A lot of men in the community didn’t have regular employment and worked at short term jobs as they became available. A man might work on some farmer’s hay crew in the summer, threshing crew in the fall and cutting ice during the winter and take any other jobs that came along through the year.
I believe the street crews worked on much the same principle; if it snowed the city, or the businesses along Main Street, hired people with shovels to clear as much of the snow as necessary for horse drawn sleighs and bobsleds. I’d also guess they probably handed a shovel to anyone in the city jail.
That was back in a time when muscle, whether man or horse, powered most endeavors.
In our modern time diesel fuel and snow plows have replaced muscle and shovel which is probably a good thing. And there have been other changes as well.
Few people don’t have commitments that require them to be at work at least five days per week even if none of those jobs involves shoveling snow. But maybe we can go back to having prisoners shovel out miles of roads.