Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 June 1885 — Mexican Plowing. [ARTICLE]

Mexican Plowing.

The average Mexican peon is said not to be a success with a pair of five-liun-dred-pound steers hitched to a modern sulky plow. He reclines luxuriously in his seat, however, and tears up a furrow two inches deep—after a fashion. The ancient plow to whioh he is used, says a correspondent of the New York Evening Post, is a stick of hardwood four or five inches in diameter, sharpened at one end, which is sometimes shod with iron. About the middle of this the beam is attached, and at the back end a single handle. The beam has a cross-piece, to which the oxen’s horns are lashed with a rawhide. The peon then takes the handle in his right hand and a long goad-stick in his left. The plow makes a round-bottomed gutter in the ground two or three inches deep, sometimes deeper if the ground is in good condition. This gutter is about as straight as a rut in a New Jersey clay road, and varies about the same in depth. The ridge of hard earth that remains between these gutters varies in width from an inch to four or five inches at the top.—Chicago Tribune.