CHAPTER V 



THE BUILDING OF THE REAPER BUSINESS 



all the cities that Cyrus McCormick had 

 seen in his 3,000-mile journey, Chicago 

 was unquestionably the youngest, the ugliest, 

 and the most forlorn. It lacked the comforts of 

 ordinary life, and many of the necessities. For 

 the most part, it was the residuum of a broken 

 land boom ; and most of its citizens were remain- 

 ing in the hope that they might persuade some 

 incoming stranger to buy them out. 



The little community, which had absurdly 

 been called a city ten years before, had at this 

 time barely ten thousand people as many as 

 are now employed by a couple of its department 

 stores. It was exhausted by a desperate struggle 

 with mud, dust, floods, droughts, cholera, debt, 

 panics, broken banks, and a slump in land 

 values. Other cities ridiculed its ambitions and 

 called it a mudhole. Its harbor, into which six 

 small schooners ventured in 1847, was ob- 

 structed by a sand-bar. And the entire region, 



[681 



