Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1883 — Wheat “Plugging.” [ARTICLE]

Wheat “Plugging.”

“The wheat pluggers are about as plenty as the men who always get the best fruit on top of the half-bushel, the good eggs on top of the box, the best hay on the outside of the load, and so on. You see, we spend millions of dollars every year to convert the heathen in foreign lands, while the heathen at home are cheating their neighbors out of their boots. The word plug has reference to a way dishonest countrymen have in cheating grain shippers. They load the bottom of a car with chaff or bran or low-grade grain, and put good grain on top of it, and, as it is sold by sample, when it reaches its destination and the receiver discovers the cheat, the shipper has to make good the loss.” “Is there very much of this plugging done ?” “It is still very common, but not near so much as it used to be. There is never a man sharp enough to invent a trick but there is another one sharp enough to detect it. We drop ‘onto’ all their little games. And there are dozens, yes, hundreds of country shippers now who can’t imagine how we inspectors see the bottom of a car without unloading it. ” “Well, it is somewhat mysterious; how is it?” _ “You see this,” said ths dealer, unloosening a charm from his watchchain ; “this is the instrument we use in miniature. By forcing this down through a car of grain and then drawing out the piston we have a vacuum into which, through holes in the side, the grain falls. This gives us a sample of the grain in every inch of the car to the bottom.” “And yet there are still people who will put bad grain on the bottom?” “Yes, but the complaint is growing less. You see our orders are when we discover a plugged car to give it the lowest grade on our scale. That sickens them. Some time ago a man sent a car of grain in here, with orders to ship it to St. Louis if it didn’t grade so and so here. . Upon inspection I found, perhaps, two wagon loads of damaged wheat spread over the car about a foot from the top,so it was sent to St. Louis. The inspector passed it. A short time after I heard from the shipper. He said it was loaded just as I said it was, but he thought he would run the risk c£ its passing here or St. Louis. ” “What are some of the other plans used to deceive the alert Inspector?” “Well, they will put damaged grain all around the edges, for instance, and put little layers here and there through the car. There is a chance of distributing a wagon load of bad wheat through a car so that the Inspector misses it, and, like the men above, they run the risk.” “What is the best trick, in your opinion, you ever discovered?” “About the cutest thing I have ever

seen, I believe, was this: Eastern shippers would fill sacks with bad wheat and distribute them about the car, standing them on the mouth of the sack, and fill up the car. When they got the sacks covered they would then pull them out, leaving the bad wheat standing in a column just the size of the sacks, you know, and an Inspector might probe all day with his gauge without touching one of those pillars.” “Do you hope to break up this practice in time ?” “We can hardly hope to do that altogether, but we can keep the evil at its minimum, which is about what we are doing now.”— Kansas City Journal.