The Romance of the Reaper

by Herbert Newton Casson

Also, like Mohammed, he had a period of preparatory solitude. Soon after the first exhibition of his reaper, he bought a tract of land and farmed it alone, with two aged Negroes as housekeepers. Here he lived for more than a year with no companion except his reaper. He seemed at this time, too, to have resolved upon a life of celibacy, for I find in one of his letters an allusion to two young ladies of unusual attractiveness. “They are pretty, smart and rich,” he writes, “but alas, I have other business to attend to!”

THE VIRGINIAN BIRTHPLACE OF THE McCORMICK REAPER.

The two things of which he stood most in need were money and cheaper iron. So, after thinking over the situation in his lonely cabin, he decided to build a furnace and make his own iron. His father and a neighbour joined him in the enterprise. They built the furnace, made the iron, and might have forgotten the reaper, if the financial earthquake of 1839 had not shaken them down into the general wreckage. The neighbour who had been made a partner signed over his property to his mother, and threw the whole burden of the bankruptcy upon the McCormick family, crushing them for a time into an abyss of debt and poverty.

Cyrus McCormick gave up everything he owned to the creditors—everything except his reaper, which nobody wanted. So far his vision of wealth was still a dream. Instead of being the possessor of a million, he was eight years older, and penniless.

There were four sons and three daughters in the family, and the nine of them slaved for five years to save the homestead from the auctioneer. Once the sheriff rode up with a writ, but was so deeply impressed with their energy and uprightness that he rode away with the dreaded paper still in his pocket.

Up to this time Cyrus had not sold one reaper. As Mohammed preached for ten years without converting anyone except his own relatives, so Cyrus McCormick preached the gospel of the reaper for ten years without success. Then, in 1841, he sold two for $100 apiece. The next year seven daring farmers came to the McCormick homestead, each with $100 in his hands.

This brilliant success brought the whole family into line behind Cyrus, and the farm was transformed into a reaper factory. Twenty-nine machines, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” were sold in 1843, and fifty in 1844. There were troubles, of course. Some buyers failed to pay. A workman who was sent out on horseback to collect $300, ran away with horse, money and all. But none of these things moved Cyrus. At last, after thirteen years of delay, he was selling reapers.

Best of all, an order for eight had come from Cincinnati. These were the first reapers that were sold outside of Virginia. They were seen by the more enterprising farmers of Ohio and created a sensation wherever they were used. Cyrus, who was now a powerful, broad-chested man of thirty-six, caught a glimpse of his opportunity and sprang to seize it. He saw that the time had come to leave the backwoods farm—forty miles from a blacksmith—sixty miles from a canal—one hundred miles from a railway. So, with $300 in his belt, he set out on horseback for the West.

Here he saw the prairies. To a man who had spent his life in a hollow of the Alleghanies, the West was a new world. It was the natural home of the reaper. The farmers of Virginia might continue forever to harvest their small, hilly fields by hand, but here—in this vast land ocean, with few labourers and an infinity of acres, the reaper was as indispensable as the plough. To reap even one of these new States by hand would require the whole working population of the country.