“That was the first and only speech of my life,” said Mr. Marsh, when I saw him in his home as DeKalb, where he has retired from business. “But it certainly established my reputation as an orator in that region of Hungary.”
At one famous competition near Paris, in 1879, three reapers were set to work in fields of equal size. The French reaper led off and finished in seventy-two minutes. The English reaper followed and lumbered through in sixty-six minutes. Then came the American machine, and when it swept down its stretch of grain in twenty-two minutes, the judges were inclined to doubt either their watches or their eyesight.
Another of these tournaments, which also did much to advertise the United States as the only genuine and original reaper country, took place on an English estate in 1880. There was only one American reaper in the race, and in appearance it was the clown of the circus. The ship that carried it had been wrecked on the Irish coast, so that when it arrived the machine was rusted and dingy.
Cyrus H. McCormick, Jr., had it in charge. He was then a youth of twenty-one, and equally ready for an adventure or a sale. There was no time to repaint and polish the machine, so he resolved to convert its forlorn appearance into an asset.
“Oil her up so she’ll run like a watch,” he said to his experts. “But don’t improve her looks. If you find any paint, scrape it off. And go and hire the smallest, scrubbiest, toughest pair of horses you can find.”
The next day five or six foreign reapers were on hand, each glittering with newness and drawn by a stately team of big Norman horses. The shabby American reaper arrived last, and met a shout of ridicule as it rolled into its place. But in the race, “Old Rusty,” as the spectators called it, swept ahead of the others as though it were an enchanted chariot, winning the gold medal and an enviable prestige among British farmers.
In Germany, as in England, the reaper was introduced into general use through royalty. This was in 1871, when a New York Reaper King named Byron E. Huntley gave the German emperor and empress their first view of harvesting on the American plan. The exhibition took place in a grain-field that lay near the royal residence at Potsdam. At first, the empress watched the machine from a window; but soon she became so keenly interested that she went into the field to study it at closer range.
“I admire you Americans,” she said to the delighted Huntley. “You are so deft—so ingenious, to make a machine like this.”
The present Emperor of Germany is not merely interested in American harvesters; he is an enthusiast. On several occasions he has held harvester matinées for the benefit of his cabinet ministers, so that they could see with their own eyes the superiority of machinery to hand-labour. The first of these matinées was given on one of the Kaiser’s farms, near the ancient city of Bonn, in 1896; and I was told the story by Sam Dennis, the Illinois Irishman who was in charge of the harvester.
Dennis arranged a contest between his one machine and forty Polish women who cut the grain with old-fashioned sickles. As soon as the emperor and his retinue had arrived, all on horseback, a signal was given and the strange race began. On one side of the field were the forty women, bent and browned by many a day’s toil under the hot sun. On the other side was Sam Dennis, sitting on his showy harvester.