He was a child of that pioneering Scotch-Irish race which contributed so greatly to the settlement of this region and which afterward made such inestimable additions to American citizenship.

The country in which he grew up was rough and, so far as the conventionalities go, uncivilized; the family homestead was little more than a log cabin; and existence meant a continual struggle with a not particularly fruitful soil.

The most remarkable figure in the McCormick home circle, and the one whose every-day life exerted the greatest influence on the boy, was his father.

The older McCormick had one obsessing idea that made him the favorite butt of the local humorists.

He believed that the labor spent in reaping grain was a useless expenditure of human effort and that machinery might be made to do the work.