The Mills
FROM the car-windows, as the train crosses the arched stone bridge, you can see the mills piled high above the south bank of the river. Vast and dingy, the broken roofline notches high against the blue Minnesota sky. Like the battlements of some feudal castle, the stone and brick walls tower upward, here and there the square shaft of a grain-storage tank rising turretlike above the roofs. At the foot of the cliff, although the mills seem to rise abruptly from the very edge of the water, the river courses in bent and broken streams, diverted and trained in the harness of industry; through a hundred mill-races in thick black torrents; a white blue shimmer over the apron-dam across the river.
Gathering strength in every mile of its course, the great river, rising in the silent waters of Itasca to pour a torrent twenty-five hundred miles away into the Gulf of Mexico, pauses here for a brief minute to stroke into life the mighty turbines of the hour-mills. Above the dams that hold the river in check, the water, deep and silent, floods back between wide banks; below the tail-races of the mills it spurts noisily in a shallow bed, far down between high bluffs of weathered stone. But at the falls the mills, silent and apparently devoid of life or activity, mark the measure of its flow. And from that ceaseless flowing energy comes the power to grind the grain for a nation’s bread.
Like a shelf against a wall the railroad tracks cling to the cliff. Above the clanking of freight cars and the mutter of the river, a vibrant murmur of myriad muffled wheels fills the shadow of the mills. Beside the tracks thin streaks of wheat gleam yellow on the grimy ballast. Here two great floods are meeting! From the flat reaches of the Dakotas, from the wheat lands of Minnesota and the rolling fields of Montana, from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the banks of the Athabaska, the tide of grain is at the flood. Unceasing, mightier by far than the ‘father of waters,’ one hundred thousand freight cars, fat and heavy with their rich lading, are emptying the season’s harvest. And from the shipping platforms fifteen million barrels of flour go out each year into the markets of the world.
The freight cars are unloading. From the wide doors the scoops are pushing a stream of yellow grain. Like liquid it pours over the car-sills and down between the steel grills beside the tracks. Never has the touch of human hands defiled it. Born of the soil, it has been reaped and winnowed by the clean blades of wood and steel; never in the long process which will transform it into flour, will the touch of man’s hand stain its perfect purity.
From bins below the tracks, endless conveyors were already gathering the grain in a long flow upward, up above the mill-roofs, far up to the tops of giant elevators, there to fall, a vast measured treasure, into the storage tanks beneath. With the assistant head miller, I climbed slowly to the top. The windows were misted with the dust of harvest, and even at that great height there was a fine powder of ivory flour on the floor and ledges. He pushed up a window. In the warm afternoon sunlight the mill-roofs lay below me. Far down beyond, the river, blue and sparkling, swirled in soft eddies about the dams and forebays. Beyond, the city stretched away to the rolling green of the low hills. And above was the blue of a cloudless sky.
Here, almost two hundred and fifty years ago, the captive Hennepin dedicated to his patron, St. Anthony of Padua, these falls where for so many years, in a cavern beneath, had dwelt that Great Unk-te-hee who created both man and earth. Gone is the guileful father of the Recollets; gone are the Sioux, whose tepees clustered about the cataract; gone even is that sheer leap of the river down forty feet, where now the low slant of the apron-dam smoothes the water in its descent. The ranges of the buffalo are rich with golden grain. It pours through the grills beside the elevators. From the skein of mazing tracks the wail of a freight engine shrills loud and clamorous.
A conveyor was lifting grain from one of the tanks; on an endless belt it passed through a long high-swung gallery from the elevators to the mill. We followed to watch its progress. At the far end of the gallery the crawling belt with its steady rivulet of grain entered the top floor of the mill and disappeared in a ponderous machine. Above the roar of belts and wheels the miller called to me. His hand was filled with stones and nails and little flakes of wood, a heterogeneous mass of refuse. Here the grain was cleaned, all foreign impurities removed. Across the low ceiling, up and down, slanting at every angle, the ’legs,’ long boxlike tubes through which the flour is carried from floor to floor, cluttered the great room. Down the centre a battery of strange objects, bristling with rings of pipes like spokes in a row of rimless wheels, fluttered with unseen life. They looked like a misshapen organ, and I half expected to hear the notes of some strange music echo from the pipes. The dust-collectors.
On the floor below, the maze of the legs grew more bewildering. Here the purifiers were ranged in mighty companies, and the fine white smoke of flour tinged the air. Like soft snow it dusted my shoulders. The miller pushed back a slide in one of the machines; within, a reel of silk was slowly turning, and through its fine meshes the flour sifted continuously. He scooped up a handful and held it out to me. It seemed fine and white, but the grinding and purifying were only half completed.
Every machine was in quiet motion. But the mill seemed deserted. On the vast floors a few men wandered in and out among the machines. In the mellow half-light and the comparative stillness, unaided, almost unattended, these stolid workers of wood and steel performed their laborious functions. In the apparent confusion of a perfect system, all natural order seemed reversed: up a floor or two through the twisting legs, the flour flowed to the next machine, then back again, and again up to a higher floor. It was incomprehensible. The scheme was lost in the multiplicity of operations.
The monotony of the murmuring machines was suddenly broken. Wearied of only the silent turning of hidden wheels, a roomful of huge barrel-like creatures suspended between roof and floor had burst suddenly into impassioned life. Reeling and swaying like drunken dancers, the bolters vibrated with angry tumult. In their allotted places they dizzily shook their dusty sides, flinging madly about in a rotary motion.
The days of the big mill-stones have vanished; corrugated steel-rolls have usurped their places. In aisles, the roller-mills filled the floor, like stocky pianos in a salesroom. Between the fine teeth of the long steel rolls, the clean grain flaked to flour. Here a scries crushed the outer husk of the wheat berry; another battery ground fine the clean meal; and still others there were, each grinding finer and finer, endlessly. And between these grindings came the processes I had seen above, scouring, bolting, separating, and purifying.
Beyond the open doors of the shipping platforms long lines of freight cars were waiting, half filled with sacks and barrels of flour. Here at last was life and activity. In white caps and uniforms the millers were packing the finished product. Between high-piled sacks, trucks trundled noisily. The floor was white with flour. On slowmoving belts the filled sacks passed out from beneath machines which filled and weighed the contents to the fraction of an ounce. With long looping stitches the sewers fastened the tops.
Beside the door two huge mill-stones lay half buried in the earth. With the wandering father of the Recollets, they were already but memories of a mighty past. Behind the city the sun had set in a strong clear yellow light. Up in the mill-windows, electric lights were twinkling. The night run had begun. Ceaselessly, day and night, forever, to grind corn for a nation’s bread.