The Romance of the Reaper Part 3

It was this inward spiritual force that made him irresistible. Small men shrivelled up when he spoke to them.

"The exhibition of his powerful will was at times actually terrible," said one of his attorneys. "If any other man on this earth ever had such a will, certainly I have not heard of it."

Small and easy undertakings had no interest for him whatever. It was the impossibility that enraged and inspired him. At the sight of an obstacle in his path, he rushed forward like a charge of cavalry. When the Civil War was at its height, he and Horace Greeley, who was very similar to him in this respect, actually believed that they could stop it. They had several long conferences in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, and McCormick went so far in 1864 as to prepare a statement of principles which he fully believed would restore peace and harmony between the North and the South.

Such was this ma.s.sive, unbendable American. As we shall see, he was far from being the only strong, picturesque figure in the industry. But it would make many a book to tell in detail the effect of his life work upon the progress of the United States. It was a New World, truly, that had been created, alike for the people of the farms and of the cities, in the year that the victorious old Reaper King was carried to his grave, with a sheaf of wheat on his breast.

What if there had been no reapers, and no hunger-insurance, and no cheap bread! What sort of an American nation would we have, if we were still using such food-implements as the sickle and the flail?

Could we have swung through four years of Civil War, as we did, without famine or national insolvency?

Could the West have risen toward its present greatness if its billion acres had to be harvested by hand?

Could the railways alone, which produce nothing, have given us more food for less work--the first necessity of a civilised democracy?

Would our manufacturers be creating new wealth at the rate of sixteen billions a year, if the reaper had not enriched the farmers and sent half the farm-hands into the factories?

And our towering cities--two of them more populous than the thirteen colonies were, how large would they be and how prosperous if bread were twenty cents a pound?

As Seward once said, it was the reaper that "pushed the American frontier westward at the rate of thirty miles a year." Most of the western railways were built to the wheat; and it was wheat money that paid for them. The reaper clicked ahead of the railroad, and civilisation followed the wheat, from Chicago to Puget Sound, just as the self-binder is leading the railroad to-day--three hundred miles in front in Western Canada, and eight hundred miles in Siberia. Even so unyielding a partisan of the railroads as Marvin Hughitt admitted to me that "the reaper has not yet received proper recognition for its development of the West."

During the Civil War the reaper was doing the work of a million men in the grain-fields of the North. It enabled a widow, with five sons, to send them all to the front, and yet gather every sheaf into the barn. It kept the wolf from the door, and more--it paid our European debts in wheat. It wiped out all necessity for Negro labour in the wheat States, just as a cotton-picker will, some day, in the South.

"The reaper is to the North what the slave is to the South," said Edwin M.

Stanton in 1861. "It releases our young men to do battle for the Union, and at the same time keeps up the supply of the nation's bread."

Lincoln called out every third man, yet the crops increased. Europeans could not believe it. They heard in 1861 that we were sending three times as much wheat to England as we had ever done before. They shook their heads and said--"Another American story!" when they were told that we were supporting two vast armies and yet selling other nations enough grain to feed thirty-five million people. Naturally, no country that clung to the sickle and flail could be convinced of such a preposterous miracle.

After the war, the mighty river of wheat that flowed from the West became so wide and so deep that it poured a yellow stream into every American home. It began to turn the wheels of fourteen thousand flour-mills. Rich cities sprang up, like Aladdin palaces, beside its banks--Chicago, St.

Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Paul, Omaha, Des Moines. All of these, and a hundred lesser ones, were nourished into prosperity by the rising current of reaper-wheat, as it moved from the Mississippi to the sea.

By 1876 we had become the champion food-producers of the world. A Kansas farmer was raising six bushels of wheat with as little labour as an Italian spent to produce one. And there was one doughty Scot--Dalrymple of Dakota, who was guillotining more wheat with four hundred labourers and three hundred harvesters, than five thousand peasants could garner by hand.

Inevitably, the American Farmer became a financier. In 1876 he earned twenty-four per cent. He had twenty-seven hundred millions to spend. By 1880 he had begun to buy so much store goods that the United States was able to write a Declaration of Industrial Independence. Steadily he has grown richer and wiser, until now he is the owner of a billion-acre farm, worth thirty dollars an acre, operated with farm machinery that cost him $900,000,000 and producing, in a single year, seven thousand times the value of a millionaire.

Such, in one country, is the amazing result which the Reaper has helped to create. And this is not all. It is now more necessary to the human race than the railway. It is fighting back famine in fifty countries. Its click has become the music of an International Anthem. The nations are feeding each other, in spite of their tariffs and armies. The whole world takes dinner at the one long table; and the fear of hunger is dying out of the hearts of men; and the prayer of the Christian centuries is answered--"Give us this day our daily bread."

CHAPTER II

THE STORY OF DEERING

Fifty years ago two young farmers named Marsh were cutting grain near DeKalb, Illinois. They were too intelligent--too American--to be fond of work for work's sake. And of all their drudgery, the everlasting stooping over bundles to bind them into sheaves galled them most. Such back-breaking toil, they thought, might be well enough for kangaroos, but it certainly was not suitable for an erect biped, like man.

"If I didn't have to walk from bundle to bundle, and hump myself like a horseshoe, I could do twice as much work," said one of the brothers.

"Well," said the other, "why can't we fix a platform on the reaper, and have the grain carried up to us?"

It was a brilliant idea and a new one. Neither of the young fellows had ever seen a reaper factory; but they were handy and self-reliant. By the next autumn they were in the field with their new machine, and as they had expected, they bound the grain twice as quickly as they had the year before.

So was born the famous Marsh harvester, which proved to be the half-way mark in the evolution of the grain-reaping machine. It was the child of the reaper and the parent of the self-binder. It cut in two the cost of binding grain. But it did more than this--it gave the farmer his first chance to stand erect, and forced him to be quick, for the two men who stood on the harvester were compelled to bind the grain as fast as it was cut. Thus it introduced the factory system, one might say, into the harvest-field. For the first time the Big Minute made its appearance on the farm.

The Marsh boys, never dreaming that they had helped to change the destinies of nations, took out a flimsy patent on their invention, and went on with their farm work. Two summers later, as they were at work with it, their home-made harvester broke down. A farmer from Plano, near DeKalb, named Lewis Steward, was riding by. He stopped, and, being a man of unusual abilities and discernment, he at once saw the value of the Marsh machine, even in its disabled state.

"Boys, you're on the right track," he said. "If you can run your machine ten rods, it can be made to run ten miles. It is superior to anything now in use."

Thus cheered, the Marsh brothers went to Plano, arranged a partners.h.i.+p with a clever mechanic named John F. Hollister, and began to make harvesters for sale. To their surprise the new machine was not welcomed.

It was received with an almost unanimous roar of disapproval. It was a "man-killer," said the farmers. Now, the Marsh brothers were quick, nervous men, and they had built a machine to suit themselves. But it was undeniably too fast and nerve-racking for most farmers. The labourers refused to work with it.

The Marshes overcame the obstacle in a very ingenious way. They put _girls_ on their harvesters, instead of men. Not ordinary girls, to be sure, but vigorous German maidens, who were swift and skilful binders.

Also, they had well-trained men, disguised as hoboes, who mingled in the crowd around the harvester at times of demonstration, and volunteered to get aboard of it. To see a girl or a "Weary Willie" binding grain on the new machine shamed the labourers into a surrender, and in 1864 two dozen of the Marsh harvesters were sold.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM DEERING]

In this year one of the Marshes performed a feat that seemed more appropriate for a circus than for a grain-field. Riding alone on a harvester, he bound a whole acre of wheat in fifty-five minutes. Little was heard of this amazing achievement at the time, as the national mind was distraught over the death grapple of Grant and Lee in Virginia.

But there was one quick-eyed man in Chicago named Gammon who heard of the event, and acted upon it so promptly that the G.o.ddess of prosperity picked him out as one of her favourites. Several years before, Gammon had been a Methodist preacher in Maine. A weak throat had brought his sermons to an end, and he became a reaper salesman in Chicago. He was shrewd and honest, and in 1864 his profits were very nearly forty thousand dollars.

When he heard that W. W. Marsh had bound an acre of grain in fifty-five minutes, on a new-fangled reaper, he caught the next train for DeKalb, and bought a licence to manufacture Marsh harvesters. He took in a partner--J. D. Easter--and the business inched ahead slowly, until in 1870 the sales rose to a thousand. Easter and Gammon were driving their small factory ahead at full speed. If they only could secure enough capital, they would surprise the world.

One evening, while Gammon was worrying over this lack, he heard a gentle knock at the door. He opened it to one of his old acquaintances from Maine.

"Mr. Gammon," said the visitor, "I have about forty thousand dollars of spare money that I would like to invest in Chicago real estate, and I want your advice as to the best place to buy."

"What!" said Gammon, springing to his feet in delight. "Have you money to invest? Give it to me and I'll pay you ten per cent. or make you a partner in the best business in Illinois."

The visitor, whose name was William Deering, knew nothing whatever about reapers nor wheat-fields. He had gained a fair-sized fortune in the wholesale dry-goods business. But he was a Methodist and had confidence in the ex-reverend E. H. Gammon; so he pa.s.sed his $40,000 across the table and the next day went home to Maine.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM N. WHITELEY Photo by Baumgardner, Springfield, O.

C. W. MARSH

JOHN F. APPLEBY Photo by Rice, Milwaukee

E. H. GAMMON]

Two years later Deering came down to see how Gammon and the $40,000 were faring. The books showed a profit of $80,000. So Deering requested that he be made a partner. A year afterward Gammon fell sick and begged Deering to come to Illinois and manage the business. Deering consented to be manager for one year only; but Gammon's sickness continued.

"So," said William Deering, who told me this story, "in that way I got into the harvester business and had to stay in. But I did not even know, at that time, the appearance of our own machine."

Deering's compet.i.tors at first called him a greenhorn. But they forgot that he was the only one among them who had been trained in the art of business. He was already a veteran--a prize winner--in the game of finance. For thirty years, ever since he began to earn $18 a month in his father's woolen mills, he had been a man of affairs. He had, in fact, established the wholesale dry-goods house of Deering, Milliken & Co., which still stands as one of the largest of its kind. This training was all the more valuable an a.s.set because of the conditions that prevailed when Deering entered the harvester trade. For he arrived in that worst of all years in the last century--1873. The Jay Cooke panic was at its height. The proudest corporations were falling like gra.s.s before a mower.