Hearing Ed Hall berate a farmer who doubted
the practicability of the machine, Steve took him aside and talked to him.
"We're going to need live young men who know how to handle other men for
jobs as superintendent and things like that," he said. "I make no promises.
I only want to tell you that I like live young fellows who can see the hole
in a bushel basket. I like that kind. I like to see them get up in the
world."
Steve heard the farmers continually expressing their skepticism about
making the plants that had been set by the machine grow into maturity, and
had the carpenter build another tiny field in a side window of the store.
He had the machine moved and plants set in the new field. He let these
grow. When some of the plants showed signs of dying he came secretly at
night and replaced them with sturdier shoots so that the miniature field
showed always a brave, vigorous front to the world.
Bidwell became convinced that the most rigorous of all forms of human labor
practiced by its people was at an end. Steve made and had hung in the store
window a large sheet showing the relative cost of planting an acre of
cabbage with the machine, and by what was already called "the old way," by
hand. Then he formally announced that a stock company would be formed in
Bidwell and that every one would have a chance to get into it. He printed
an article in the weekly paper in which he said that many offers had come
to him to take his project to the city or to other and larger towns.
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