It was a contest that not only resulted in the triumph of the American reaper, but also brought the Reaper Kings recognition and reputation abroad. In 1867 both McCormick and Wood were decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon III.; and later they stood side by side to receive the Imperial Cross from the hand of the Austrian emperor. Hundreds of medals and honours were showered upon these two inventor mechanics; and the French Academy of Science, in a blaze of Gallic enthusiasm, elected McCormick one of its members, because he had “done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man.”
Many and strange were the exploits of the American Reaper Kings at the courts and royal farms of the real kings. Unable to speak any language but their own, unused to pomp and pageantry, breezily independent in the American fashion, the Reaper Kings plunged from adventure to adventure, absolutely indifferent to everything but their reapers and success.
“There is to be a trial of reapers at Rome next June,” wrote David M. Osborne, a New Yorker who began to export reapers to Europe in 1862. “Think of invading the sacred precincts of that ancient place with Yankee harvesters. We will wake up the dry bones of these old countries, and civilise and Christianise them with our farm machinery.”
C. W. Marsh, inventor of the Marsh Harvester, made a sensational début in Hungary in 1870. Several grand dukes had arranged for a great contest of the various sorts of reapers on one of the royal farms in Hungary, so that the Minister of Agriculture might take notice. When the day arrived, there were nine reapers at the farm, mostly of European design.
Marsh’s strange-looking machine seemed to be a combination of reaper and workbench. But ten minutes after the contest began, Marsh had the race won. His machine was a new type, the forerunner of the modern self-binder. It was so made that two men could stand upon it and bind the grain as fast as it was cut. But on this occasion Marsh could hire no farmer to help him and was obliged to do the work alone. The judges were stunned with amazement, therefore, when they found that he had bound three-quarters of an acre in twenty-eight minutes. Here was a man who could do in half an hour what few Hungarian peasants could finish in less than a day!
“He is an athlete,” said one. “A wizard,” said another.
Before they could recover from their astonishment, Marsh had stored his harvester, pocketed the prize of forty golden ducats, and hurried away to his hotel, eager for a bath and a chance to pick the thistles out of his hands.
But the grand dukes and miscellaneous dignitaries were not to be escaped so easily. An officer in gorgeous uniform was sent to find Marsh and bring him forthwith to the main dining-hall of the city. Here a banquet was prepared, and a throng of high personages sat down, with Marsh at the head of the table, cursing his luck and nursing his sore fingers.
At the close of the banquet, amid great applause, a medal was pinned upon his coat, and the whole assemblage hushed to hear his reply. Now Marsh, like two-thirds of the Reaper Kings, could no more make a speech than walk a rope. On only one previous occasion had he faced an audience, and that was at the age of twelve, when he had recited a scrap from the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” at a school entertainment. As he rose to his feet, this poetic fragment came into his mind; and so, half in fun and half in desperation, Marsh assumed the pose of a Demosthenes and addressed the banqueters as follows:
“O Caledonia! Stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! What mortal hand
Can e’er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand!”