" [Footnote:
"He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe wheat, for lack of
laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given Illinois five million
bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more than the sickle and the
scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to save the yellow affluence
from destruction. They worked by day and by night; and their wives and
children worked. But the tragic aspect of the grain crop is this--it must
be gathered quickly or it breaks down and decays. It will not wait. The
harvest season lasts from four to ten days only. And whoever cannot snatch
his grain from the field during this short period must lose it."--H. N.
Casson, "Cyrus Hall McCormick," pp. 65, 66.]
This precursor came with a sword, beaten not into a ploughshare but into a
something quite as indispensable, a sickle--a vibrating sickle driven by
horses, that would in a day do the work of a dozen, twenty, thirty, forty
men, women, children, and grandmothers. In his eastern home he had, like
La Salle, suffered from creditors, from jeering neighbors who thought him
visionary, if not crazed, and from fearful laborers who broke his
machines; but there in that golden western valley he found sympathy, and,
on the Chicago portage, a site for the making of his sickles, fitted into
machines called harvesters--there where the French precursor's boat and
sword were found not long ago.
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