Before becoming a full time farmer my dad tried a variety of jobs. He was born in Greermount, Que. (a mountainous region nine miles north of Shawville) the fourth child in a family of ten.
He helped on the little farm where their main income was maple syrup in the spring. Today the little fields between the mountains are all grown up with natural reforestation. I’m sure the occasional hunter who stumbles through the farm wonders why there are stone piles and stone fences all through the bush.
The boys in the family went to the shanties and made a few dollars cutting trees in the winter. Dad was musical like most of the family and made a few bucks playing for dances in every dance hall in the county. His best paying job came when electricity came to the valley and he worked for the Lang and Ross Company constructing towers and high tension power lines throughout the Gatineau and Pontiac Valleys.
When the crash of 1929 hit North America and all construction came to a halt he went from making 85 cents an hour to 35 cents a week, plus his room and board working on a small farm in Clarendon where after working all day, he used to hoe a few rows of field corn every night after supper.
Dad’s uncle Harry and family lived in California, but came back to Pontiac every summer because it was less expensive to live here when there were lay-offs in California. When Harry and the family came north the car was packed with the family plus enough clothing, bedding and other supplies to do until they went back to California.
During the 1930s, jobs were hard to find but Harry told dad that there were always jobs in the mines in New Mexico. When Harry and his family went back to California, my dad went with them.
Crossing the US border would have been impossible for my dad because there was just as big a job shortage in the US as in Canada. His uncle Harry had a plan. Before they arrived at the US border my dad was placed on the floor of the back seat and all the clothes, bedding and extra luggage was piled on top of him. In 1930 there were no X-ray cameras checking vehicles at the border. After a regular border check, Harry, his family and dad who was hidden away on the floor of the back seat, all rolled into the United States.
After arriving in Los Angeles, Harry took my dad to New Mexico and dad got a job working for the Hydalgo Mining Company. Although there were many men out of jobs in L.A., most of them didn’t want hard jobs like mining or farm work. Dad told me that most of the mine workers were Mexican.
Dad said that every night when the shift was over, the US border patrol was waiting for Mexicans to come out the gate and loaded them onto a truck which took them back to a bridge across the Mexican border. The US border patrol tolerated this because the mine couldn’t run without this Mexican labour.
Many of the US dairy farms, vegetable farms, chicken farms, meat plants, and even some manufacturing plants couldn’t operate today without cheap illegal Mexican labour.
The mine in New Mexico didn’t operate on Sunday so for amusement dad used to put on his mining helmet with the miner’s light on it and take a baseball bat into a mine shaft and swing at some of the thousands of bats that flew through the mine shafts.
Some Sundays, he and some chums would walk into the desert to just look around. It was on one of these Sunday desert strolls that his friend said don’t move a muscle. His friend pulled the .45 out of the holster on his hip and shot a rattle snake dead which was only five feet in front of dad and curled to pounce. From that day on my dad had an understanding of why some people keep a loaded six-shooter on their hip.
After working for Hydalgo for about a year and a half, he was called to the office one day. He was met in the office by two armed border patrol officers who cuffed him and immediately gave dad a free ride back to the Detroit border.
They took a very nice picture of dad and stapled it on the wall with all the other illegal aliens. Dad was told to never return to the US again. It was 25 years later that he nervously took my mom and me to visit the US, but just for a day.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
