By James Williams

    Every old settler knows it was a job to get wheat ready for the mill, but it was a bigger job to get it made into flour fit for bread. Just imagine, my young farmer friends, plowing your ground with a wooden mould board plow that would no more scour than a black oak log dragged down the road, then sowing seed by hand and covering with wooden tooth harrow, or dragging a big crab apple brush to cover it in the dry clods, and leaving it for rain and the virgin soil to do the rest, and if it rained, we usually got some wheat; if we had snow, when the grain began to get in a stiff dough, we'd cut it by hand with a grain cradle. I've cut many an acre of wheat and oats and bound it by hand. My, how sore our hands would get binding bearded wheat. We'd then •tack in a circle so we could put it on the ground in a circle and put horses on it and ride them around in a circle on it. We called this operation tramping out wheat.
    We kept stirring and turning the straw until about two-thirds of the wheat was on the ground. Some few had plank put down, but those plank floors were few and far between. We would use wooden forks and home made clumsy hand rakes to get as much of the straw out as possible. Then, we'd rake it in a big pile, chaff and wheat, and use an old clumsy wheat fan to clean it.
    When ready for the mill, it usually had about five per cent, or more, of grit, sand and dirt in it, and our little, old horse power mill, having no smut or other cleaning machinery, one can imagine how the flour looked when baked in bread. It was a fearful thing on teeth with all that sand in it, but it was a ground hog case; we had to eat it.

James Williams, moved to the Far West area in 1842

    In those old sweep power horse mills, we'd use two or four horses, and grind about six bushels with two, or ten to twelve bushels with four horses in eight to ten hours. We didn't bolt it at same operation of grinding. We took it up in a measure of some kind, carried it up a split pole ladder with round rungs for steps, put it on top in a big box that they called a "bolting 'chist',” which was 10 to 16 feet long, with a nicely made reel covered with fine silken gauze first two-thirds of its length, and a coarser cloth for shorts, the bran coming out at open back end of bolt. I think that all modern bolting machinery of the present day, is made on about the same principle of those old time bolting reels turned by hand with a crank. A knocking device was attached to jar the flour and keep it from clogging the bolting cloth. [William James, Seventy-Five Years on the Border (Kansas City, MO: Press of Standard Printing Company, 1912), 47-48].