Already the West was in desperate need of a quicker way to cut grain. As McCormick rode through Illinois, he saw the most convincing argument in favor of his Reaper. He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe wheat, for lack of laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given Illinois five million bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more than the sickle and the scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to save the yellow affluence from destruction. They worked by day and by night; and their wives and children worked. But the tragic aspect of the grain crop is this—it must be gathered quickly or it breaks down and decays. It will not wait. The harvest season lasts from four to ten days only. And whoever cannot snatch his grain from the field during this short period must lose it.
Truly, the West needed the Reaper; and McCormick's first plan was to overcome the transportation obstacle by selling licenses to many manufacturers in many States. By 1846 he had, with herculean energy, started Fitch & Company and Seymour, Morgan & Company in Brockport, N. Y., Henry Bear in Missouri, Gray & Warner in Illinois, and A. C. Brown in Cincinnati. These manufacturers, and the McCormick family in Virginia, built 190 Reapers for the harvest of 1846. This was multiplying the business by four, very nearly, but the plan was not satisfactory. Some manufacturers used poor materials; some had unskilled workmen; and one became so absorbed in new experiments that when the harvest time arrived, his machines were not completed.
The new difficulty was not to get manufacturers to make Reapers, but to get them to make good Reapers. What was to be done? The thought of having defective Reapers scattered among the farmers was intolerable to Cyrus McCormick. He pondered deeply over the whole situation. He considered the fact that the supremacy in wheat was slowly passing from Virginia to Ohio. He took note of the railroads that were creeping westward. He remembered the limitless prairies, far out in the sunset country, that were still uncultivated. Plainly, he must make Reapers in a factory of his own, so as to have them made well, and he must locate that factory as near as possible to the prairies, at some point along the Great Lakes. With the most painstaking diligence he studied the map and finally he put his finger upon a town—a small new town, which bore the strange name of Chicago.
[CHAPTER V]
THE BUILDING OF THE REAPER BUSINESS
OF all the cities that Cyrus McCormick had seen in his 3,000-mile journey, Chicago was unquestionably the youngest, the ugliest, and the most forlorn. It lacked the comforts of ordinary life, and many of the necessities. For the most part, it was the residuum of a broken land boom; and most of its citizens were remaining in the hope that they might persuade some incoming stranger to buy them out.
The little community, which had absurdly been called a city ten years before, had at this time barely ten thousand people—as many as are now employed by a couple of its department stores. It was exhausted by a desperate struggle with mud, dust, floods, droughts, cholera, debt, panics, broken banks, and a slump in land values. Other cities ridiculed its ambitions and called it a mudhole. Its harbor, into which six small schooners ventured in 1847, was obstructed by a sand-bar. And the entire region, for miles back from the lake, was a dismal swamp—the natural home of frogs, wild ducks, and beavers.
The six years between 1837 and 1843 had been to Illinois a period of the deepest discouragement. There was little or no money that any one could accept with confidence. Trade was on a barter basis. The State was hopelessly in debt. It had borrowed $14,000,000 in the enthusiasm of its first land boom, and now had no money to pay the interest. Even as late as 1846 there was only $9,000 in the State treasury.
Buffalo was at this time the chief grain market of the United States. We were selling a little wheat to foreign countries—much less than is grown to-day in Oklahoma. Hulled corn was the staff of life in Iowa. The Mormons had just started from Illinois on their 1,500-mile pilgrimage to the West, through a country that had not a road, a village, a bridge, nor a well. The sewing-machine had recently been invented by Howe, and the use of ether had been announced by Dr. Morton; but there was no Hoe press, nor Bessemer steel, nor even so much as a postage stamp. And in the Old World the two most impressive figures, perhaps, were Livingstone, the missionary, who was groping his way to the heart of the Dark Continent, and DeLesseps, the master-builder of canals, who was now cutting a channel through the hot sand at Suez.