Next to Russia, in the list of countries that this army of experts has won
to the harvester, comes Canada. Like the trek of the Boers into the
Transvaal, and of the Japanese into Korea, there has been a trek of three
hundred thousand American farmers into Western Canada--into the new
forty-bushel-to-the-acre wheat-land of Alberta. Most of these emigrants
were Minnesotans and Dakotans; therefore they are not poor. They carried
two hundred millions across the border. And they are now uprearing a
harvester-based civilisation in a vast region that will probably some day
have a population of twenty-five million people.
That billiard-table country--Argentina--stands third among the foreign
patrons of our Harvester Kings. As a wheat nation it is little older than
Alberta. It was only about eighteen years ago, after three centuries of
revolution, that Argentina settled down to raise wheat and be good.
To-day the Argentinians raise more wheat than Germany, and their country
has become a land of milk and honey. It is a South American Minnesota, but
eleven times larger, made fertile by the slow-moving Platte River--a
hundred miles wide when it reaches the sea--which moves through its plains
like an irrigating canal.
The fourth in rank of our harvester buyers is Australia, which is now
sending a yearly tribute of more than a million to the International
Company. This profitable reciprocity between Chicago and the island
continent was greatly furthered when the International bought the
sixty-five-acre Osborne plant, at Auburn, New York, which had been
remarkably successful in its Australian, as well as its French, trade.
[Illustration: AN AMERICAN HARVESTER AT WORK IN ARGENTINA]
Ride along any of the historic roadways of the world and you will see the
painted automata from Chicago. "On the road to Mandalay," and along the
Appian Way, and the trail of death that marks the flight of Napoleon from
Moscow, you will find these indispensable machines. They are cutting grass
and wheat on the battle-fields of Austerlitz and Sedan and Waterloo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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