The Best and Most Reliable Pickers to Be Obtained
Hop tying and strawberry picking brought cash onto the reservation and goods into Yakima's stores — and the growers knew exactly whose labor they were counting on.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Indians of the reservation adjoining Yakima Valley have been enjoying their old-time prosperity in the last few weeks by reason of the demand for their labor in tying and training hops. The merchants report increased sales of handkerchiefs, blankets, etc., as a result. The demand for horses, which seems to be livening up, has also given a number of them quite a little of the circulating medium. Many of them are now journeying to Hood River overland, where they get employment picking strawberries. The growers say that the Indians are the best and most reliable pickers to be obtained. The following little item from the Hood River Glacier shows how the labor of the Indian pickers is appreciated: "It is to be hoped the measles will not attack the Indians. Hood River depends on the noble red man and his family more than upon any other class, for strawberry pickers, and if measles were to break out among them just at this time, our strawberry growers would be in hard luck."
“The growers say that the Indians are the best and most reliable pickers to be obtained.”
For a few weeks each season the hop yards and berry fields around Yakima ran on Native families from the reservation — the very workers the growers called the best and most reliable to be had. The paper's racial mockery sits beside a plain economic fact: the valley's harvest depended on labor the valley neither housed nor especially cared for, valued mainly for showing up. Yakima's orchards and hop yards are still picked by people who travel in for the season, and the argument over who does that work, and on what terms, has not gone away.
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