ought by McCormick and Hussey, each claiming to have
been the Christopher Columbus of the business. After the gold-rush of 1849
new types of reapers sprang up on all sides. The crude machines that
merely cut the grain were driven out by others that automatically raked
the cut grain into bundles. These were soon followed by a combined reaper
and mower, which held the field until the Marsh harvester was invented, as
we have seen, at the close of the Civil War.

Among these different types of reapers, and the numerous variations of
each type, the bitterest rivalries prevailed. There was no pool, no
"gentlemen's agreement," no "community of interest." Indeed, the
"harvester business" was not business. It was a riotous game of "Farmer,
farmer, who gets the farmer?" The excited players cared less for the
profits than for the victories. As fast as they made money, they threw it
back into the game. Mechanics became millionaires, and millionaires became
mechanics. The whole trade was tense with risk and rivalry and excitement,
as though it were a search for gold along the high plateaus of the Rand.
And this in spite of the fact that, with the exception of McCormick,
Osborne, and Whiteley, the men who came to be known as reaper kings were
not naturally fighters. No business men were ever gentler than Deering,
Glessner, Warder, Adriance, and Huntley. But the making of reapers was a
new trade. It was like a vast, unfenced prairie, where every settler owned
as much ground as he could defend.

Each step ahead meant a struggle for patents. Whoever built a reaper had
to defend himself in the courts as well as approve himself in the
harvest-fields. Cyrus H. McCormick, especially, as William Deering soon
learned, wielded the Big Stick against every man who dared to make
reapers. He was the old veteran of the trade, and he gave battle to his
competitors as though they were a horde of trespassers. He was their
common enemy, and the reaper money that was squandered on lawsuits brought
a golden era of prosperity to the lawyers.

Some of these patent wars shook the country with the crash of hostile
forces. The tide of battle rolled up to the Supreme Court and even into
the halls of Congress. Once, in 1855 when McCormick charged full tilt upon
John H. Manny, who was making reapers at Rockford, Illinois, a three-year
struggle began that was the most noted legal duel of the day.

McCormick, to make sure of his victory, went into the fight with