Family Labor
by In this day and age the fact that most of the settlers in the wild west had to depend on their children to get what ever labor was needed done. I kind of learned this by being the eldist grand child while my grand father still owned a diary farm.
Back in the eighteen hundreds the population in states like Texas and Colorado was so small all the settlers back then had to use their kids to get the chores done. That is why is was a very important thing to go ahead and have some children.
One must understand that adulthood was reached earlier the further back in time one looks. Romeo and Juliet were just thirteen and the old prince in that play was an old man in his twenties.
That is probably why nobody thought it was an evil thing to do when you sent your oldest son out to do something like hunt deer. That is even why such a young man as Billy the Kid could get away with so much before he was finally taken down by an older man.
This tendency held true up into the twentieth century. It just had to be done on a lessor basis. Your kids could only get summers off from school. You could never keep them at the diary farm milking your stock in the winter while school was going on.
In many places in the south west there were several farms that still used their sons as summer time labor. You could get them out in the alfalfa fields to load the bales of hay onto some trailer and haul it to where ever the hay stacks were. This was a very cheep way to get your sons in good enough shape to play high school football and it could allow you to purchase them some kind of pickup to get to school in.
Unfortunately for the young folk in the eighties adulthood was delayed. In most of the states one couldn’t legally drink any alcohol untilyou were eighteen. A few states had gone ahead and rose the legal drinking age to twenty one. When one looks back to the generations just before this you can see how folk were made adults a bit quicker in the four-ties. All them young men had been drafted when they reached eighteen.
Unfortunately the younger folk today are being treated along a split-line. They can still get drafted when they reach eighteen but they can not drink legally off base until they reach twenty one in just about every state. Who knows how their kids are going to be treated? Is it going to be illegal to get married until you reach thirty or something like that?
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