Harvesting ice on the Mississippi

IN spite of what we were told by our spiritual leaders when we were young, the practice of self-denial is of little or no value to a human being. Rewarding one for one’s efforts is not necessarily a bad thing. The only stipulation is that a person must not reward themselves for the efforts of others without consent.
One of the negative characteristics of the Irish people even in the recent past was their tendency to gain enjoyment from the failure of others. If the person of their derision failed a second or third time, their pleasure was doubled or tripled.
This unfortunate national characteristic prevented many people with foresight, imagination and vision trying out new ideas. Even the most thick-skinned person gets tired of being laughed at. It is so much easier to go along with the crowd. Many the plan died a sad death at the bottom of a porter glass.
We talk a lot about the Irish people who were forced to emigrate for economic and social reasons. There were many sad cases and there is little left to write on the subject.
However, little is written of the people who emigrated by choice. There were people, perhaps many more that we realise, who left of their own free will. Many were tired of the narrow-minded, church-ridden and unprogressive country that Ireland was.
Can you imagine a pair of brothers who earned a living repairing bicycles in say, Dundalk or Athenry, trying to build a flying machine in 1900? There is a good chance they would be locked up in the lunatic asylum with more of their kind.
It is highly unlikely Henry Ford would have succeeded in building a car for the general public if his people had stayed in Ireland. Who does he think he is and where does he think he is going?
I recently learned the art of ice harvesting. Yes, I walked upon the surface of the mighty Mississippi River and a man handed me a large saw. Under his guidance, I proceeded to saw a 143lb block of ice from the frozen surface. I then removed it from the water with a set of ice prongs.
Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the block of ice would have been stored in a warehouse and covered with sawdust. In the summer, an ice man would come along your street with his ice wagon. If you had a certain sign displayed on your window, he would take his ice tongs and haul a block of ice to the ice box in your house. Before the invention of the household refrigerator, that is how food was preserved in warm weather.
In the Mississippi town of Dubuque, Iowa, where I learned the art of ice harvesting, several large companies harvested ice for several years. They hired farmers and labourers, for whom the winter was a time of little employment, to cut the ice.
Sawing ice is somewhat akin to sawing trees, I can attest from my personal experience and how many people can say that? Large plough-like sawing equipment was fitted to spike-shod horses to make the work less labour-intensive and more productive. So much ice was harvested that it was transported to the Southern States by riverboats.
Ice harvesting is one of the many practices from America’s past that impresses me about its people. They invented new industries by providing people with something they needed. Frequently, people did not know they needed it until they saw it. They also constantly sought a better way of doing things. What a dynamic people they were.
“It was good enough for my father and his father before him and it is good enough for me,” said the Ould Lad.
That absurd expression, so frequently uttered in Ireland, is not something one heard in the United States. No, they were concerned as to how it could be made better, easier, more efficiently and with less physical labour.
Emigration is the best thing that happened to thousands of Irish people. It opened up new hope and possibilities for them. Contrary to popular folklore, they did not spend their time crying into their beer glass and singing songs about the wonderful place they left behind. If the colleen they left behind had any sense, she took off to the New World too.
The saddest phenomenon of Irish emigration was the fact so many settled in the large cities of the east. Most had never visited a city in their native land and were unsuited to urban life. Living in the Mid-West, I hear and learn about the immigrants who were brave enough and fortunate enough to continue further westwards.
Less than five miles from my home, there is a place called Irish Grove, where a large number of Irish people settled in the 1800s. There is still a small Catholic church there with old headstones featuring Irish names and mass is celebrated there every Sunday. The people who lived in Irish Grove were farmers and people who served the farming community. Some of their ancestors still live there, while others are in other parts of the States.
You can be certain some of the people in Irish Grove harvested ice from local rivers in wintertime. They would have used it to keep their milk and meat from going bad in the long, hot summer days that Mid-westerners enjoy. They invariably found it extremely pleasant to drop a piece of ice in a glass of water, milk or buttermilk on a hot day. There is little doubt they found a chunk of ice in their whiskey as they sat on the porch in the evening extremely pleasant.
What you can be certain is nobody laughed when someone said, “You know, I think I’ll build a windmill to pump water out to the cattle. It would beat hauling it out in pails.”
“I’ll give you a hand with that,” the neighbour would say, as he rose from his rocking chair and placed his empty glass on a tree stump used for a table.
“I gotta get up early tomorrow. Goin’ o’er to town to look at one of them new-fangled steam engines.”

PJ Francis, a native of Ballyvaughan, has been living in the US for many years.