that has prevailed in any American industry. For marketing his machine
McCormick developed a system almost as ingenious as the machine itself.
The popularization of so ungainly and expensive a contrivance as the
harvester proved a slow and difficult task. McCormick at first attempted
to build his product on his Virginia farm and for many years it was
known as the Virginia Reaper. Nearly ten years passed, however,
before he sold his first machine. The farmer first refused to take it
seriously. "It's a great invention," he would say, "but I'm running
a farm, not a circus." About 1847 McCormick decided that the Western
prairies offered the finest field for its activities, and established
his factory at Chicago, then an ugly little town on the borders of a
swamp. This selection proved to be a stroke of genius, for it placed the
harvesting factory right at the door of its largest market.

The price of the harvester, however, seemed an insurmountable obstacle
to its extensive use. The early settlers of the Western plains had
little more than their brawny hands as capital, and the homestead
law furnished them their land practically free. In the eyes of a
large-seeing pioneer like McCormick this was capital enough. He
determined that his reaper should develop this extensive domain,
and that the crops themselves should pay the cost. Selling expensive
articles on the installment plan now seems a commonplace of business,
but in those days it was practically unknown. McCormick was the first
to see its possibilities. He established an agent, usually the general
storekeeper, in every agricultural center. Any farmer who had a modicum
of cash and who bore a reputation for thrift and honesty could purchase
a reaper. In payment he gave a series of notes, so timed that they fell
due at the end of harvesting seasons. Thus, as the money came in from
successive harvests, the pioneer paid off the notes, taking two, three,
or four years in the process. In the sixties and seventies immigrants
from the Eastern States and from Europe poured into the Mississippi
Valley by the hundreds of thousands. Almost the first person who greeted
the astonished Dane, German, or Swede was an agent of the harvester
company, offering to let him have one of these strange machines on
these terms. Thus the harvester, under McCormick's comprehensive selling
plans, did as much as the homestead act in opening up this great farming
region.

McCormick covered the whole