Well said, techno.  I don't remember such crews myself, but I heard the stories growing up.  One of my Dad's favorite stories from his childhood was of such a crew threshing wheat on my Grandfather's farm.  Gramp owned the thresher, a neighbor owned a steam engine.  Several other neighbors gathered to work together and it was a matter of some urgency to get everyone's fields harvested when the wheat was ready and the weather right.

One day the crew was working hard to finish a field, pushing the crew and the machines pretty hard.  Suddenly the pressure relief valve on the boiler began to pop off.  At the time Bill Reedy, the owner of the engine, was on the wagon feeding the thresher.  When he heard the relief valve pop, he knew that very soon a safety plug in the bottom of the boiler would blow out, relieving the pressure and blowing out the fire all at once.  It was a real safety feature.  It meant the crew was in no real danger, but it also meant the boiler, as well as the engine, the thresher, and more importantly the harvest, would be out of commission until a new plug could be installed.

Knowing he had very little time to intervene, he dropped his pitchfork, leaped off the wagon, and sprinted to the engine to manually relieve the pressure and shut down the engine.  In the ensuing silence, he looked around to find that he apparently had the entire wheat field to himself.

"Hey," he called, "where'd everybody go?"

Gradually the rest of the crew appeared from whatever cover they had ducked behind or under.  "What the hell is the matter with you guys?" Bill asked.

After looking around at the rest of the crew slowly gathering from their hiding places, my Grandfather said, "We all looked up and saw you running.  We figured if Bill Reedy was running, it was time to run."

We all bleed the same color.