The Lumber Mill at Astoria
The indebted farmer who went to an Oregon lumber mill for wages and came back to overthrow an empire
Sohan Singh Bhakna sailed for America in 1909 to clear a three thousand rupee mortgage on his family land. In the mill towns of the Columbia River he learned that a man without a country of his own is protected by nobody, and in 1912 a room of Punjabi workers elected him president of what became the Ghadar Party. This lesson follows him from the Monarch mill to the Finnish Socialist Hall at Astoria, to a death sentence in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, sixteen years in jail, and a second life organising farmers.
The Man Who Came to Pay a Debt
In the spring of 1909, a forty-year-old Punjabi farmer stood on a dock at Seattle with almost nothing in his pockets. His name was Sohan Singh, and back home he was known by his village, Bhakna, sixteen kilometres southwest of Amritsar. He had landed on 4 April. He had come for one reason, and it was not freedom.
He had come for three thousand rupees.
That was the debt on his father's land. Karam Singh had left his son sixty-five acres, watered by wells, the largest holding in the village. Sohan Singh had spent much of it. He had mortgaged field after field, first on a careless youth and later on festivals and pilgrims he fed at his own expense. Before he sailed he went to his teacher, Baba Kesar Singh, and asked permission to go. In his own account of that conversation, he wrote what he told the old man:
"I incurred a debt of Rs.3000 over my head. The estate had already been mortgaged and it was quite difficult for me to bear the household expenditure."
A devotee sitting nearby offered to clear the whole debt. There was one condition: Sohan Singh must sign over the credit for every service he had ever done. He refused. "I did not want to sell my Dharma for few coins."
So he went to America to work. Within four years this indebted farmer would be elected president of a party built to overthrow the British Empire by force. What changed him was not a book. It was a lumber mill.
The Mill and the Bunkhouse
Bhakna took work at the Monarch Lumber Mill in Portland, Oregon. The pay was better than any Punjabi field. The work was wet, loud, and constant: green fir coming off the Columbia, saws running all day, the smell of cut timber and river water.