Any farmer who had a modicum of cash and who bore a reputation for thrift and honesty could purchase a reaper.

In payment he gave a series of notes, so timed that they fell due at the end of harvesting seasons.

Thus, as the money came in from successive harvests, the pioneer paid off the notes, taking two, three, or four years in the process.

In the sixties and seventies immigrants from the Eastern States and from Europe poured into the Mississippi Valley by the hundreds of thousands.

Almost the first person who greeted the astonished Dane, German, or Swede was an agent of the harvester company, offering to let him have one of these strange machines on these terms.