The Romance of the Reaper

by Herbert Newton Casson

“That young fellow is ahead of me,” said the amazed teacher.

At fifteen Cyrus had invented a new grain cradle. At twenty-one he improved a machine which his father had made to break hemp. And at twenty-two this young country-boy, who had never seen a college, a city, or a railroad, constructed the first practical American reaper. It was a clumsy makeshift—as crude as a Red River ox-cart; but it was built on the right lines. It was not at all handsome or well made or satisfactory; but it was a reaper that reaped.

But McCormick soon discovered that it was not enough to invent a reaper. What the world needed was a man who was strong and dominating enough to force his reaper upon the unwilling labourers of the harvest fields.

Tenacity! Absolute indifference to defeat! The lust for victory that makes a man unconscious of the blows he gives or takes! This was what was needed, and what Cyrus McCormick possessed, to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other man in American history.

Tenacity! It was in his blood. Back of him was the hardiest breed that was ever mixed into the American blend—the pick of the Scots who fought their way to the United States by way of Ireland. These Irish Scots, few as they were, led the way across the Alleghanies, founded Pittsburgh, made a trail to Texas, and put five Presidents in the White House.

And tenacity was bred, as well as born, into Cyrus McCormick. He went barefooted as a boy, not for lack of shoes, but to make him tough. “I want my boys to know how to endure hardship,” said his mother. He sat on a slab bench in the little log school house and learned to read from the Book of Genesis. He sang Psalms with forty verses, on Sundays, and sat as still as a graven image during the three-hour sermons, for his father was a Presbyterian of the old Covenanter brand.

So it came to pass that Cyrus McCormick clung to his reaper, as John Knox had to his Bible. “His whole soul was wrapped up in it,” said one of his neighbours. He grew as indifferent to the rough jokes of the farmers as Martin Luther was to the sneers of the village priests. The making of reapers became more than a business. It was a creed—a religion—a new eleventh commandment.

By the time he was thirty, he had become a nineteenth century Mohammed, ready for a world crusade. His war-cry was—Great is the Reaper, and McCormick is its prophet.

Like Mohammed, he had his visions of future glory. On one occasion, while riding on horseback through a wilderness path, the dazzling thought flashed upon his mind—“Perhaps I may make a million dollars from this reaper.” This idea remained for years the driving wheel of his brain.

“The thought was so enormous,” he said afterward, “that it seemed like a dream—like dwelling in the clouds—so remote, so unattainable, so exalted, so visionary.”