July 23, 2026

The Man Who Left: The Untold Rise of John Deere

Show Notes
Transcript

Before the name meant green machines and polished steel, John Deere was just a man walking west — away from a small Vermont town, away from debts he couldn't pay and trouble closing in, away from a pregnant wife and a child left behind in the cold. Was it survival, or was it abandonment? This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast refuses to answer that question too cleanly, because the truth never did.

Born in 1804 and shadowed early by a father lost at sea, Deere became a skilled blacksmith who mastered steel but never mastered the ledger. Fire, debt, and the real threat of a debtor's cell cornered him — and in 1836 he left everything and headed for Illinois, alone, with everything to prove. There, on the rich but unforgiving prairie, he found the problem that would change his life: cast-iron plows that clogged in the sticky black soil. From a discarded, broken steel saw blade — scrap the world had thrown away — he forged a self-scouring plow that cut clean.

Demand exploded. He moved to Moline, built systems, and became almost fanatical about quality — a man who'd watched his own name turn to a liability, determined to build one worth trusting. His family eventually joined him; the distance closed. But the question lingers. Told straight, with full moral weight: greatness isn't always clean, and sometimes the path forward begins with a single, irreversible step away from everything behind you.

John Deere, John Deere history, who was John Deere, John Deere steel plow, self-scouring plow, broken saw blade plow, Grand Detour Illinois, Moline Illinois, Deere and Company history, prairie farming history, John Deere left Vermont, John Deere debt, blacksmith inventor, plow that broke the prairie, narrative history podcast, biography podcast, MR HANSoN Podcast, Empire Builders, greatness isn't clean, second chance story

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On a cold Vermont morning in the winter of eighteen

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thirty six, a man closes his door of his own

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house behind him and just starts walking west. He's not

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leaving a bad job, or a sour deal, or the

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kind of small failure a person can shake off and

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then begin again. He is leaving his life behind him.

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He leaves a wife, and she is carrying their child.

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He leaves the children already at home. He leaves debts

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that he cannot pay, creditors who are done waiting, and

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a name that has been curdled in his own small

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town into a word for unpaid bills and broken promises.

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Ahead of him, there is nothing certain at all. There's

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no work waiting, no welcome, no promise that he'll even return,

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or that there will be anything left to return to,

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Only distance and a question he does not dare say

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out loud, maybe not even to himself. Is this a

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man saving his family or abandoning them? The man walking

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west is a blacksmith. He works in fire and steel,

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and he knows better than most that iron can be

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heated and dent and made into something new. He also

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knows that some cuts, once made, cannot be uncut, and

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some things, once broken, never sit together again. He is

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about to break something, his own life as it stands,

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and he's going to gamble everything he has on the

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chance that he can forge it into something stronger on

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the far side. His name is John Deere, and before

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that name meant green machines and polished steel and a

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company that would help feed the world. It belonged to

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a man walking west in the cold, running from something,

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with no way of knowing whether he was headed toward

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a legacy or toward oblivion. The second word I did

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not choose lightly. A man who walks out on his

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family and then fail simply just disappears. There are no

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monuments to the one who left and never made it.

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For every John Deere, the frontier swallowed a thousand men

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who made the same desperate bet and were just never

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heard from again. Their families left watching an empty road

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on the morning he left. Nothing at all set them

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apart from any of the other. The difference came later,

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and it came hard. Experience chants the man who walked away.

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There was nothing heroic in the way that he left.

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He didn't ride west like a conqueror going to claim

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up bright and chosen destiny. He slipped out the way

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that a man slips when the people he owes are

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just closing in on him. And that's exactly where he was.

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In eighteen thirties. This was a recognizable kind of departure.

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Men went ahead of their families all the time. A

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man would go first find work, get a footing on

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the frontier, and then send for his wife and children

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once there was something to send them toward. Told that way,

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John Deere's leaving was ordinary, even sensible to a degree.

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There is another way to tell it, though, and it

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is just as true. A husband and a father left

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his pregnant wife and his children in the hard grip

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of a New England winner and turned his back into

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town where every soul knew his name, now in part

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to get out from under the men that he couldn't pay.

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But of those tellings are honest. Neither one orrass the other.

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Deer carried both of them west with him, and it

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is fair to guess that he never fully untangled which

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one was the truth. Not on the road, not in Illinois,

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maybe not on the last day of his life. The

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world he came from. You have to understand the man

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who could just walk away. You have to know the

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boy who was left. John Deere was born in eighteen

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oh four in Ruthven, Vermont, a cold, spare country where

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a living was scratched out of a stubborn ground in long,

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long winters. Nothing came easily, not to him, not to anyone.

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His father, William, was a tailor of a man who

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worked with his hands and almost like the way that

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his son would. One day, and when joh one was

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barely four years old, William dear did the thing that

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would shadow his son for the rest of his life.

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He simply left, not out of cruelty, or so the

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family always believed. Word had reached William of an inheritance

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waiting for him across the ocean in England, money that

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might at last lift them out of their hardship and poverty.

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And so he boarded a ship on the Connecticut coast

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and set sail to claim it. He made it as

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far as the crossing, somewhere out there on the great

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Atlantic water, he vanished, and no one ever learned how

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or where, wrecked, drowned, robbed, lost. The family was never

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told in the inheritance if it had ever been real

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at all, was never seen either. He was never heard

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from again. No letter, no word, no body, no grave,

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just no explanation, only an empty place at the table

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where the father had been, and a young mother, Sarah,

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was left to raise her children alone on what she

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could earn with the needle. The children learned early to

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work for their own keep, because there was no one

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left who could actually help them. The lesson of that

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absence went into John Deere early, and it went in deep.

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Men leave sometimes they walk out on an ordinary morning

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for reasons that seemed good and even necessary, and they

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just simply never come back. Life can force a departure

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and afterward refuse to let you undo it. He learned

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that lesson at four years old watching a road. His

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father never came up again, and it was still sitting

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inside him decades later, on the morning he became the

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man who left himself the blacksmith. The boy grew up

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poor and grew up working, and he found the trade

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that would shape his hands, and in the time the

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country he became a blacksmith. He apprenticed at seventeen to

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a village blacksmith and spent the next years learning the

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hard beauty of the craft. The forge, and the anvil,

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the hammer, the glowing steel. He learned to read the

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color of hot iron, and to know by its glow

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alone the exact instant it was ready to be worked.

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He learned to take a bar of cold, unyielding metal

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and bend it to his will. Through heat and force

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and patience. A frontiersmith was expected to make in men

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nearly anything. A community leaned on, the horseshoes, the wagon fittings,

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the chains, the farm tools. And Deer learned to make

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all of it. And he was good, not merely passable,

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genuinely gifted. As a young journeyman, moving from town to

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town across Vermont, he earned a particular reputation for one

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thing about all others. Polish. His hay forks and his

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shovels came off the andvil so smooth and so bright,

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so carefully finished, that farmers went out of their way

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to buy them, and paid a little more to even

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do it. Even then, years before any of it, John

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Deere could not leave a piece of steel rough if

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he had it in his power to make it shine.

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His hands could be trusted with the very tools of farming.

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Community lived or died by but a man can be

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the finest blacksmith for fifty miles and still go broke.

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He can do flawless work and still watch the numbers

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refuse to add up when the economy turns, when customers

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can't pay him, when the debts he took on to

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build his shop came do faster than the money. Well.

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John Deere had mastered the steel, he had never mastered

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the ledger, and in the lean, panicked years of the

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eighteen thirties, it was the ledger that came for the pressure.

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The trouble had arrived the way a lot of trouble

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usually arrives at little at a time, and then smash

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all at once. He had opened his shop, married a

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young woman named de Marius Lamb, and begun a family

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for a while, and held together. But Vermont in the

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eighteen thirties was hardening into a difficult place to be

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a man who owed money. The soil was worn thin,

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the young were already drifting west in search of better ground,

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and the whole New England economy was tightening toward the

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financial panic that would soon seize the entire country. The

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work was good, but the income was uneven. Money came

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in slowly, and left in a flurry. Fire took his shop,

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and by some accounts, took it more than once. And

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each time a man rebuilds from the ashes, he borrows

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to do it. Debt kept climbing higher than it ever

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stood before, and debt in the eighteen thirties America was

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not survivable paperwork. That was the thing that has become since.

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There was no clean bankruptcy to wipe a man's slate.

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Debt was literally a noose. A man who could not

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pay what he owed would be hauled into court, sued,

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and in the worst cases, locked inside a debtor's prison,

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jailed for the plain crime of being broke. The obligations

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climbed past anything this hammer could earn. There were legal

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troubles now tied to money he had no way to repay.

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And in a small Vermont town where every face is

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someone you know, that kind of trouble doesn't stay private.

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It becomes the thing quietly across encounters and in doorways.

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It becomes the first thing your name calls to mind.

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John Deere, the skilled and respected craftsman, the man who

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made the shovels that shown stood by and watched his

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own good reputation sour into something else completely, the man

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that you don't lend to, the man who owes everybody,

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the man whose work is fine but whose accounts are

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in ruin. Every door in that town was getting shut

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in front of him. The only one still standing open

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led to the west. The decision. It came down to

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two roads. He could stay and face the creditors and

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courts and the real possibility of a jail cell. He

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could endure the public slow humiliation of a debt that

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he had no way to pay in a town that

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he had already turned cold to him. Or he could

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go west to the opening frontier, where a man's past

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traveled less and it was usually behind him, where a

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fresh start was at least a possibility, where no one

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yet knew him as a man who owed money. But

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leaving was not simple, because John Deere was not a

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free man with nothing to lose. He had a wife, Demerius,

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and she was pregnant. He had children already, He had

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a life as troubled as it was. He went anyway,

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not with a grand speech about destiny, but quietly he

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settled what little he could settle, and he pointed himself

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towards Illinois, and he left his pregnant wife and his

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children stayed behind for the time being, on the promise

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spoken or unspoken, that he would send for them the

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moment that he had something worth sending them toward. It

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was that pattern of that age. He was also a

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man leaving his pregnant wife behind to go chase his

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own second chance. He rode west, carrying both of these

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truths and the whole crushing weight to them. He felt

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every mile of the way the road west. When John

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Deere finally reached Illinois, he had crossed the better part

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of a continent to get there, weeks of hard travel

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by wagon and water, hundreds of miles from everything and

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everyone he'd ever known. The place he stopped was a

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settlement called Grand Detour, on a wide bend on the

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Rock River. When Deer reached it, it was barely a

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settlement at all, a scatter of cabins and raw hope

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thrown up by other New Englanders chasing the very same

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second chance that he was. And he was nobody in it,

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not a visionary, not an inventor, not anything the world

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would one day carve into his memory. He was a

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man with the pass that he couldn't repair a family

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he had left behind and everything on earth to prove.

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He had carried his blacksmith's tools across half a continent

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and almost nothing else, and he had come to a

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place where no name of his had ever been spoken

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about at all, which was the entire point of coming,

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in the entire tear of it. But that raw little

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sediment was missing one thing it could not do without.

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It didn't have a blacksmith. And a frontier without a

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blacksmith is a frontier that cannot shoe a horse, or

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men have broken wagon wheel, or repair the tools that

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stood between a family and starvation. Within two days of

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unpacking his kit and lighting his fire, John Deere had

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a line of work standing at his door for the

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first time in a very long time. He was a

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man who was needed more than he was owed. There

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is something that his condition does to a person. It

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burns off every soft option. There is no fallback now,

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no net beneath the wire, no bridge still standing behind

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you to carry home. There is simply only forward. And

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it sharpens a man into a fine, dangerous point. For

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John Deere, standing in the black mud of the prairie,

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with his debts at his back and a family waiting

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on word that he had made it. Failure was no

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longer an outcome among several that he could even survive.

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Failure meant that he abandoned everything for nothing. Failure meant

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the question that he had carried the whole way from Vermont,

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was survival or was this abandonment? Well that would finally

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be answered in the cruelest way there was. So he

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just willed himself. He didn't let himself fail. He took

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all of it, the fear of the guilt, the weight,

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the whole thing, the future riding on him, and he

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bent it the way that he bent iron, into the

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most concentrated attention of his life. And he aimed that

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attention straight down at the ground beneath his boots, the

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problem that changed everything. The land around him was a paradox,

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and inside that paradox was his entire future. The prairie

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soil was one of the richest on the face of

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the earth, black and deep, almost bottomlessly fertile, ground that

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by every right should have made every farmer prosperous who

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turned to it. But it was cruel to work. Thick

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and heavy and sticky, black earth clung to everything that

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it touched. The plows the settlers had hauled out from

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back east, cast iron plows shaped for the light, sandy,

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crumbling soils of New England and the older States, were

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nearly useless against it. The rich prairie dirt on the

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rough iron and packed in heavy wet clods, would just

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not fall away. So a farmer would drive his plow

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a few feet and stop and scrape the baby cleaned by,

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and drive it a few more feet and stop and

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scrape it again, hour after hour, clod after clod, across

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fields that ran up horizon. It was slow, filthy, backbreaking,

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spirit killing work. And these were not lazy men. They

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had crossed one thousand miles on the promise of this

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black soil, so nearly everything they owned staked their families

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lives on a gamble. And now for the ground itself

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seemed to be mocking them. So rich it could grow

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almost anything, and so stubborn it would barely let them

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get a crop into it. Breaking the prairie had become

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a daily war against the very soil that was supposed

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to make these people rich, and most days the soil

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was winning. Most men just cursed the land. They blamed

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the dirt and the weather and their own poor luck.

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John Deere did not curse the land. He studied it.

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His hard life had beaten one habit into him so

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deep had become instinct. When a thing is not working,

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you don't just throw or muscle at it. You stop

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and you look, and you work out how to build it. Differently,

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he had been redesigned by his own circumstances for years now.

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He turned the same unforgiving eye on that piece of iron,

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the broken blade. Here the blacksmith saw what all the

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farmer's misery couldn't. The problem was not the strength of

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the plow. It was simply the surface. The rough, pitted

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face of that cast iron gave the wet soil one

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thousand tiny places to grip and hold and build. What

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the prairie needed was a plow so smooth and so

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hard that the black earth could not find anything to

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catch on it at all. A blade that would polish

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itself and clean with every single pass instead of cacking

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over within a few feet. For that, he needed the

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right steel, smooth and hard, bright, polished steel. And where

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he found it is the truest thing about this whole story.

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He found a saw blade, a broken one, a slab

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of steel discarded from a sawmill, cracked and cast aside,

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a scrap, the kind of ruined, finished thing that a

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man steps over on his way to build something. John

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Deere bent down and picked it up. He heated it

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and cut it and worked it over his forge, and

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he ground and polished his face to a hard mirror shine.

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And out of that failed thrown away blade he shaped

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the curved mold board of a pole unlike the world

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had ever seen. He mounted it on a frame. He

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hauled it out to a neighbor's field, and set its

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bright new edge against a blackground that defeated every other

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blade for one hundred miles. A broken blade rescued off

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the scrap heap and reforged by a man who was

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himself running from his own wreckage. It is hard not

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to hear the rhyme in that every farmer in that

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country had seen the broken saw blade scrap steel laying

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around every frontier sawmill. Everybody stepped over and just ignored.

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What set Deer apart was that he found the metal.

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It was that he could look at this thing that

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everyone else called garbage and say, waiting inside it the

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exact quality the whole world was missing, the plow that

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wouldn't stick. When John Deere set that polys steel plow

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into the prairie, it did the one thing that no

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other paw could do. It slid through the earth without sticking.

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The heavy black dirt had clotted and clung and maddened

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every farmer in the county. And it peeled up the

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bright smooth steel and just fell away clean behind the blade.

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And it just kept falling away, no stopping, no scraping,

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no fighting the ground. For every foot of it, a

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man could put his head down and cut one long,

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unbroken furrow clear across his field, the way that it

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was always supposed to work on this land, and somehow

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never had. And the farmer noticed that once, because this

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was not a slightly better version of the thing they

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already owned. It was a different kind of thing altogether,

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a tool that turned the impossible struggle into an ordinary

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morning's work, that took land which fought a man, and

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made it yield to him instead. Word of it moved

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across the prairie the way good news moves across desperate people,

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fast and by mouth, one neighbor telling the next there's

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a smith over in Grand Detour who's built a plow

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that won't stick. To men who had been quietly losing

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the war against the soil, Now that one sentence sounded

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very close to deliverance, and the man who had walked

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away from everything had suddenly held his hands on the

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one thing that would change the frontier forever. In the

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first year, he only made a handful of plows, one

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or two at a time, whenever a farmer could scrape

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together the money to pay for one. The next year

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it was dozens. The year after that, it was more

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than he could keep up with a loan. John Deere

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had stumbled onto something that the entire prairie had been

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waiting for, without ever knowing what to ask for, And

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now it existed. The waiting was over the return of control,

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and here, for the first time in years, the current

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of his life was reversed. For so long, he had

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been the one reacting to debts and to fire, to

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creditors and counts and every circumstance that shoved him from behind.

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He had been a man that things happened to forever,

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backing away and fleeing and surviving. Now all at once

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he was the one setting things in motion. Demand for

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the plow outran everything else he could make, and the

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corner debtor stepped into a part that he had never

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once been permitted to play. The owner. He made more

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and then more again, chasing a hunger that only grew

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the more that he fed it. He drove himself over

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the quality of each plow, the sameness of one to

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the next, the promise that this one would be every

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bit as good as the last. By the middle of

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the eighteen forties, he was turning out hundreds of plows

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a year, and the little shop at Grand Detour could

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no longer hold the work or move the freight as

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fast as it needed to keep up. So in eighteen

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forty eight he pulled the whole enterprise up by the

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roots and moved it to Mowley on the banks of

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the Mississippi, a place chosen with a clear and sober

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eye for the great river's water power and for the

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boats that could carry his own plows, carry them across

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a country expanding faster than anyone could even believe. Within

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a few short years, the shop had once made ten

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plows a season, was making them by the thousand. He

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was rebuilding out there. He was never only a business

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back in Vermont. His name had become a warning that

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people handed quietly to each other in Illinois, by nothing

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but his own relentless work. That same name was slowly

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turning into something people look for, and they sought out,

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they leaned on, and trusted with their families lives. He

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was not only making a living on that river, he

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was reaching back across half the country and rewriting the

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verdict his old town and passed on him unbreakable plow

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at a time, the standard. John Deere had learned the

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deepest lesson of his ruined early life, and he built

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his entire second life around it. He became almost fanatical

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about the quality of what he made. He's remembered for

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a vow that fit the hole Man exactly, that he

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would never put his name on anything that did not

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carry it in the best work he had to give.

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Think about that for a moment, for who was making

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that vow? A man whose name had once meant failure,

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A man who had watched his own reputation rot in

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a small town until he had no choice left but

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to run from it. He knew more intimately than almost

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anyone alive precisely what it felt like to have your

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name turn into a liability that dragged you down from

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everywhere you went. When the Frontier handed him a second

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chance to build a name from nothing, he guarded it

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the way only a man who has already lost one

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ever could. He refused to coast. The stubborn heart of

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The Man Who Left: The Untold Rise of John Deere

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