After the meat is prepared for the market, it is kept two days in a great chilling room where ten thousand sides of beef can be chilled at one time.
It was interesting to see the sausage meat being pressed into the intestines of the pigs, for the big machines can fill a mile of skins a minute. We saw them making lard, too, and are proud to say that American lard is shipped all over the world and is considered the best. The reason that American meat products are so good is because the inspectors do not allow any carelessness.
Chicago has so many fine sky-scrapers that we Berry Wagon Boys had almost passed the splendid Harvester Building with just a glance when the man we were with stopped us and said: "Take a good look at that building, for if a boy had not had ideas and perseverance, it would never have been built. His name was Cyrus McCormick, and he lived in Virginia. In the blacksmith shop on his father's farm, Cyrus and his father used to make lots of labor-saving things and the boy decided that he would invent a machine which would harvest the wheat better and more quickly than could be done by hand. He spent every spare minute working on the invention and was twenty-one years old when he saw his first reaper at work in the harvest field. He thought that every farmer would want to buy one, but it was ten years before he sold his first machine. Soon after this he sold another and after that, the orders came so fast that he went out west to the little city of Chicago, which was quite young in 1847, and built his first factory. This factory was the father of the nineteen huge factories in which the International Harvester Company now makes every machine that a farmer needs for any season and any crop." We saw only three of these plants, but when we had been through the McCormick Works, the Deering Works, and the steel mills and had seen all the wonderful things that are done in those factories, we did not wonder that America is famous for its farm implements.
People complain a lot about the high cost of living, but if the grain had to be planted and plowed and harvested by hand, I guess the American kiddies would have to eat their bread and jam without the bread.
We Berry Wagon Boys are visiting our Uncle Silas who owns a great farm of fifty thousand acres in the northwest. When we look out over the big wheat fields that stretch for miles, it is like looking out over a great yellow sea, only the waves are made of wheat instead of water.
Uncle Silas says that wheat is among the earliest known foods, and that bread is the earliest known cooked food. The people of Egypt were eating wheat bread four thousand years ago, only it was not like the bread we have today. It was called "koscoussoo," and consisted of flour and water cooked together in a basket over boiling water. Wheat was brought to America by our forefathers, and George Washington was a great wheat grower for those days. He had a mill at Mount Vernon and shipped flour to the West Indies.
When Uncle Silas and Aunt Mollie came west thirty years ago, this country was just bleak prairie and one could travel miles without seeing a sign of human life. They lived in a mover's wagon while building a sod house. After three years they built a four-room house and they were as proud as kings. As fast as they made any money they bought more land, so now they own miles of this wonderful country.
It is great to see the threshing machines out here. They mow down those wheat heads just as the great machine guns across the sea mow down the armies. Some of these machines are drawn by twenty or thirty horses, and it takes as good a horseman to handle all of those horses as to do chariot races at a circus. One of these threshers comes along through the grain like a great giant, and with its huge claws and arms and feet, it cuts the wheat, threshes it, puts it into bags, and weighs it.