In some cases he lost heavily, as in Kansas and North Dakota, where the first settlers were driven off by drought. But as a rule he lost little by bad debts. Immigrants of twenty nationalities swarmed westward upon the free land offered to them by the United States Government, and usually each man found waiting for him at the nearest town one of the McCormick agents, ready to supply him with a Reaper, whether he had the money to pay for it or not. As may be imagined, the effect of this policy upon the settlement and welfare of the West was magical. There are to-day tens of thousands of Western farmers who date the era of their prosperity from the day when a McCormick Reaper arrived in all the glory of its red paint and shining blade, and held its first reception in the barn-yard. One instance of this deserves to be embodied in the history of the Reaper. In 1855 a poor tenant farmer, who had been evicted from his rented land in Ayrshire, Scotland, arrived with his family at the banks of the Mississippi. There was then no railroad nor stage-coach, so the whole family walked to a quarter section of land farther west, not far from where the city of Des Moines stands to-day. The first year they cut the wheat with the cradle and the scythe, and the following year they bought a McCormick Reaper. They prospered. The father went back for a visit to Ayrshire and paid all his creditors. And the eldest son, James, became first Speaker of the Iowa Legislature, then a professor in an agricultural college, and finally the founder of the Department of Agriculture in all its present completeness. To-day we know him as the Honorable James Wilson, the first official farmer of the United States. There was one other method in the marketing of farm machinery, which seems to have been originated by McCormick--the _Field Test_. As a means of stirring up interest in an indifferent community, this was the most electrical in its effects of any plan that has ever been devised. As a pioneering advertisement, it was unsurpassed. It was nothing less than a contest in a field of ripe grain between several machines that belonged to rival manufacturers. Sometimes there were only two machines, and in one grand tournament there were forty. And all the farmers in the county were invited to come and witness the battle free of charge. The first of these field tests occurred near Richmond in 1844. McCormick had challenged Obed Hussey, a Baltimore sailor who had invented a practical mowing-machine, and who was offering it for sale to cut grain as well as grass. In this instance McCormick won easily. The judges said that while the Hussey machine was stronger and simpler, having no reel nor divider, the McCormick Reaper was lighter, cheaper, scattered less grain, and was better at cutting grain that was wet and in its method of delivering the grain.