The Romance of the Reaper Part 9

The first American reapers that went to Europe were given a royal welcome.

There were two of them--one made by McCormick and one made by Hussey, and they were exhibited before Albert Edward, the Prince Consort of England, at a World's Fair in London in 1851.

There had been reapers invented in England before this date, but none of them would reap. All the inventors were mere theorists. They designed their reapers for ideal grain in ideal fields. One of them was a preacher, the Rev. Patrick Bell; another, Henry Ogle, was a school-teacher. James Dobbs, an actor, invented a machine that cut artificial grain on the stage. And a machinist named Gladstone made a reaper that also worked well until he tried it on real grain in a real field.

But the exhibition of the American reaper in London did not result in its immediate adoption. There was little demand for harvesters in England fifty years ago; and in other European countries there was none at all.

Farm labour was cheap--forty cents a day in England and five cents a day in Russia; and the rush of labourers into factory cities had not yet begun.

In the years following 1851, the American reaper did, however, become popular among the very rich. It became the toy of kings and t.i.tled landowners. By 1864 Europe was buying our farm machinery to the extent of $600,000. This was less than she buys to-day in a week; but it was a beginning. Several foreign manufacturers began at this time to make reapers, notably in Toronto, Sheffield, Paris, and Hamburg. This compet.i.tion spurred on the American reaper agents, who were already taking advantage of the interest shown by royalty in the American reaper. And from the close of the Civil War on, there was an exciting race, generally neck and neck, between Cyrus H. McCormick, Sr., and Walter A. Wood, to see who could vanquish the most of these foreign imitators, and bag the greatest number of kings and n.o.bilities.

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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 debut 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 a.s.semblage 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 sc.r.a.p 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 a.s.sumed 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 s.h.a.ggy 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!"

"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 compet.i.tion 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 s.h.i.+p 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 a.s.set.

"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, sc.r.a.pe 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 matinees 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 matinees 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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.

"Get ap!" said Dennis to the big German horses, and the grain fell in a wide swath over the clicking knife, swept upward on the canvas elevator into the swift steel arms and fingers, and was flung to the ground in a fusillade of sheaves, each bound tightly with a knotted string.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AMERICAN SELF-BINDERS ON THE ESTATE OF PRESIDENT FALLIERES, IN FRANCE]

The emperor was radiant with delight. Being somewhat of an expert himself, he rode here and there and showed, with many gestures, the differences between the old way and the new. Some of the grain had been blown down. Nothing but a sickle could cut it, in the belief, at that time, of the average German farmer. On the contrary, as the emperor pointed out to his ministers, the harvester was raising the fallen grain and cutting it without the waste of a handful while the women were trampling much of it under their bare feet, as they jostled one another in the stubbled field.

Most wonderful of all, the one machine was soon seen to be doing more work than the whole mob of women drudges. The field had been evenly divided before the race began, and there was some wheat still uncut on the women's side when Sam Dennis said "Whoa!" to his horses, and condescended to enter into a free and easy conversation with the distinguished onlookers.

For the forty Polish women, the new harvester meant a better life finally, although at the time they hated the red monster of a machine that was about to take their jobs. In payment for the long, sweating work of the harvest-field they received only twenty-five cents a day. Probably what some of those women did, when they saw themselves displaced, was to buy a steerage ticket to the country where the red harvester was made; at any rate I found two thousand women in the harvester factories of Chicago, earning $9 a week, and most of them, as it happened, were Polish.

Even Bismarck, the grim old unifier of Germany, yielded to general opinion a short time before his death, and bought an American self-binder. I was told of the incident by C. H. Haney, who made the sale, and who is to-day the head of the Foreign Department of the Harvester Company.

"Bismarck sat in his carriage," said Haney, "but he ordered his driver to follow the harvester as closely as possible. He looked very old and feeble. For quite a while he watched me operating the machine. Then he made a sign to me to stop."

"Let me see the thing that ties the knot," he said.

"I took off the knotter and brought it to his carriage. With a piece of string I showed him how the mechanism worked, and gave him a bound sheaf, so that he could see a knot that had been tied by the machine. The old man studied it for some time. Then he asked me--'Can these machines be made in Germany?'

"'No, your Excellency,' I said. 'They can be made only in America.'

"'Well,' said Bismarck, speaking very good English, 'you Yankees are ingenious fellows. This is a wonderful machine.'"

When Loubet was President of France, he and Seth Low, of New York, were walking together over the President's estate. Loubet pointed to a reaper which was being driven through a yellow wheat-field.

"Do you see that machine?" he remarked. "I bought it from an American company in 1870, and I have used it in every harvest since that time. I have four of those machines now, and I want to say to you that they are the most useful articles that come to us from the United States. I am stating no more than the simple truth when I tell you that without American harvesters, France would starve."

In still other countries the American reaper has been popular with kings and potentates. The Sultan of Turkey and the Shah of Persia each bought one during the Chicago World's Fair. And the young King of Spain, who ordered a mower in 1903, narrowly escaped being minced up by its knives.

Being an impulsive youth, he gave a cry of joy at sight of the handsome machine, sprang upon the seat, and lashed the horses without first laying hold of the reins. The horses leaped, and the seventeen-year-old Alphonso went sprawling. Twenty workmen ran to his help, and one level-headed American mechanic caught the reins; so the worst penalty that the boy king had to pay for his recklessness was a tumble and a bad scare.

In Russia, the Czar and the grand dukes at first bought reapers partly as toys and partly as strike-breakers. If the labourers on their estates demanded more pay than fifty cents a week, the manager would drive them in a body to his barn, then throw open the doors and show them five or six red harvesters.

"Do you see these American machines?" he would say. "Unless you go back to work at the same wages, I will reap the grain with these machines, and you will have no work at all, and no money." A look at these machine-devils has usually sent the cowed serfs back to their sickles. But here and there it has set them to wondering whether or not a fifty-cent-a-week job was worth having, and so has given them an A B C lesson in American doctrines.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KING ALPHONSO OF SPAIN DRIVING AN AMERICAN SEEDER]

Many of the Russian n.o.bility, too, have begun to learn a trifle about democracy from the American harvester agents. There is a certain young baron, for example, whose estate is not far from Riga. Last year, to be in fas.h.i.+on, he bought a Chicago self-binder. When it arrived, there came with it, as usual, an expert mechanic to set it up and start it in the field.

In this case, the mechanic was a big German-American named Lutfring, born in Wisconsin, of "Forty Eighter" stock.

The baron was evidently impressed by the manly and dignified bearing of Lutfring, who stood erect while the native workmen were bowing and cringing in obeisance. And when Lutfring said to him, "Now, Baron Hahn, we are all barons in my country, but you'll pardon me if I do this work in my s.h.i.+rt-sleeves," the baron was so taken by surprise that he offered to hold Lutfring's coat. Half an hour later he was at work himself, doing physical labour for the first time in his life. And when the harvester had been well launched upon its sea of yellow grain, he took Lutfring--the baron from Wisconsin--to dinner with him in the castle, and spent the greater part of the afternoon showing him the family portraits.