This incoming flood of wheat gave Chicago its start as a railway and shipping centre. Chicago was never obliged to give money, or to lend it, to railroad companies. The railroads came into Chicago without the inducement of subsidies, because they wanted to carry its wheat. And ships, too, came more and more readily to Chicago when they found that they could be sure of a return cargo. The choice of Chicago as his centre of operations was one of the master-strokes of McCormick's career. At that time, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Louis were more prosperous cities; but McCormick considered one thing only--the making and selling of his Reaper, and he saw that Chicago, with all its mud and shabbiness, was the link between the Great Lakes and the Great West. Here he could best assemble his materials--steel from Sheffield, pig iron from Scotland and Pittsburg, and white ash from Michigan. And here he could best ship his finished machines to both East and West. Chicago, in fact, and the McCormick Reaper, had many characteristics in common. Both were born at very nearly the same time. Both were cradled in adversity. Both were unsightly to the artistic eye. Both were linked closely with the development of the West. And both inevitably achieved success, because they were fundamentally right--Chicago in location and the Reaper in design. At the time that he began to build his Chicago factory, Cyrus McCormick was no longer a country youth. He was thirty-eight years of age, and a tall powerful Titan of a man, with a massive head and broad shoulders. His upper lip was clean-shaven, but he had a thick, well-trimmed beard, and dark, wavy hair, worn fairly long. His nose was straight and well-shaped, his mouth firm, and his eyes brown-gray and piercing. In manner he was resolute and prompt, with a rigid insistence that could not be turned aside. He had won the prize in the contest of reaper-inventors; and he was now about to enter a second contest, against overwhelming odds, with a number of aggressive and competent business men who had determined that, by right or by might, they would manufacture McCormick Reapers and sell them to the farmers. As McCormick had neither money nor credit, it was evident to him that his first step in business-building must be to secure a partner who had both of these. He looked about him and selected the man who was unquestionably the first citizen of Chicago--William B. Ogden. Ogden had been the first mayor of the little city. He had been from the beginning its natural leader. He had built the first handsome house, promoted the first canal, and was now busy in the building of the first railroad from Chicago to Galena.