RED 4WD TRACTORS22 23

Adams built a four-wheel-drive tractor using a 401 GMC V-6 for power and two WD-9 rear ends for the drives. His son, Paul, said the tractor was at work in 1956. Multiple examples of similar machines live in private collectors’ hands.

Innovation like this was taking place all around the United States. Elmer Wagner and his brothers in Portland, Oregon, were surrounded by farm country peppered with big farms with heavy soil—conditions that demanded more power. They developed a four-wheel-drive tractor, which was patented in 1953, and formed the Wagner Tractor Company. In 1954, the company offered three four-wheel-drive models for sale, all powered by diesel engines with 114 to 165 horsepower.

While farmers such as Adams and innovators such as the Wagners cut and welded steel, International Harvester was making bank. The International tractors of the 1950s were mainly refined versions of old platforms, but the company’s sales reach, dealership network, and marketing were first class. In 1951, Harvester set a new all-time sales record with $1.28 billion in sales across all divisions.

That’s the largest dollar sale in history by the world’s largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery.

In 1950, rainy weather hammered Norman County in northwestern Minnesota. Oswald Dallenbach was the Minnesota extension agent for nearby Clay County, and more than decade later, he still recalled how a four-wheel-drive tractor made news in the area. In Beyond the

Furrow, historian Hiram Drache recounts Dallenbach’s tale of how the farmer’s Massey Harris Challenger four-wheel-drive tractor was able to work his land before any of his neighbors could venture into the muddy fields.

The dreamers, schemers, and astute farm observers of the 1950s were well aware of four-wheel-drive tractors. The ideas and early machines could be seen in farm journals, field demonstrations, and the eccentric home mechanic’s back pasture. And as Steiger’s first sales manager, Earl Christianson, astutely pointed out, 200-horsepower machines were moving dirt to build highways. Smart farmers quickly figured out that with a few modifications, the same size equipment could work farmland.

A few particularly adept farmers took the Frankenstein approach and melded parts from agricultural and construc-tion equipment with home-welded bits to create their own high-horsepower machines. In western Minnesota, Alan

Heavy Machinery

▲ By the 1950s and 1960s,

plenty of 200-horsepower

machines were working—but

not on the farm. They were

in the construction industry.

This Hough is shown in 1964.

Wisconsin Historical Society / 38127

Chapter Two

1950–1969 A POWERFUL DRIVEBy Lee Klancher

“In those days, they were moving dirt with 200 horsepower . . . yet we were farming with 100 horse.

Why can’t we move dirt with 200 horse and get more done?”

—Earl Christianson, original Steiger sales manager

▲ Inset: Steiger Family Collection

RED 4WD TRACTORS24 1950–1969 A POWERful DRivE 25

According to the report, Harvester executives had seen the experimental tractor in action and believed it could ready for market in less than a year.

The report also surveyed farmers, county extension agents, and specialists in farm management and agricultural engineering. The results showed that a significant number of American farmers were interested in more horsepower and four-wheel-drive tractors. Of farmers who owned 70- to 80- horsepower tractors—the largest of the time—35 percent of them were interested in a four-wheel-drive machine.

This report was one of a veritable blizzard of reports in the archives concerning Wagner tractors, the Hough experimental tractor, and the market for four-wheel-drive tractors. Another 1959 report shows evidence of considerably stronger sales of Wagner tractors, with H. W. Berry stating that a Wagner employee told him production in 1959 was between 300 and 400 units and was expected to be 600 to 800 units in 1960. The most popular model in the Portland area was the 160-horsepower TR-14, and it was, in fact, the only model sold in that region to the sales director’s knowledge.

and class-leading features, the largest model (the 560) offered only 59 horsepower. Harvester’s annual report promised the 75-horsepower IH 660 was “coming soon,” touting it as “the most powerful tractor ever offered by the company.”

Bear in mind the 73-horsepower Deere 820 had been around since 1956, and Oliver’s supercharged Model 995 produced 84 horsepower. And the Wagner four-wheel-drive tractor model line—introduced in 1954—started at 114 horsepower and went up to 160.

Harvester was behind the times, and the early success of the big four-wheel-drive Wagner tractor, in particular, made a significant impact on the world’s leading agricultural implement company.

A shake-up in management may have upgraded the level of urgency placed on increased horsepower and traction. In 1958, John McCaffrey retired as CEO, and Frank W. Jenks stepped up. McCaffrey’s focus was sales, and while he delivered on that front, he failed miserably to transform a heavy investment in development into meaningful traction in the industry.

Jenks would frankly not fare much better, but a rising star in the organization would start pushing the company in the right direction. Brooks McCormick, a direct descendant of Cyrus McCormick, the founder, was rising on the corporate ladder. He was an executive vice president in the late 1950s.

The Wagner tractor caught McCormick’s eye. He visited the Portland Harvester office on January 31, 1959, and personally requested that the district sales office find out exactly what was going on with the Wagner sales in the region. Exactly one week later, H. W. Berry reported that Wagner had been producing machines for four years and had sold none in Berry’s territory in 1958. Berry not only found out that five were sold in 1959, but he also supplied the names of all five customers.

Berry apparently knew that when a descendant of Cyrus McCormick and a senior vice president show up at your door, you don’t ask when to jump—you ask how high.

The notice of the Wagner coincided with a drive to get a high-horsepower machine on the market as quickly as possible. On February 20, 1959, an internal IH report was issued to the executive committee outlining a plan to introduce a Hough-built four-wheel-drive tractor with 90 to 100 horsepower.

the agricultural market, and decades of market domination created arrogance that made the company vulnerable.

The annual reports are telling on this front. Throughout the 1950s, Harvester’s reports to its investors highlighted new models and dollars pouring into research and development, at a time when the company was not doing enough R&D and the “new” models were evolutionary rather than truly innovative. In 1948, the company devoted $13 million to research and development. In 1956, Harvester spent $40 million on developing new products.

A portion of that was dedicated to the Farm Equipment Research and Engineering Center (FEREC) in Hinsdale, Illinois. This new building would be the largest engineering facility in Harvester history, and constructing it took four years and millions of dollars.

The annual reports show hyperbole replacing innovation in the tractor line. In 1954, the “new” hundred series tractors were touted as the first time in history an agricultural company released an entirely new line of machines at one time. The 1956 introduction of the “new” 350 and 450 were given equally laudatory language. Both releases were styling and equipment upgrades to a chassis first introduced in the Model H and M back in 1939.

By 1958, Harvester offered a truly new line of machines with the 460 and 560. While the machines had great styling

In 1955, Fortune magazine introduced the annual Fortune 500 list, which listed the top 100 American companies ranked by gross sales. Allis-Chalmers and Caterpillar were the nearest competitors to International, and both had gross revenues that were roughly half that of Harvester. (Allis-Chalmers reported $492 million, and Cat came in at $401 million.)

Harvester clocked in on the 1955 Fortune 500 list at No. 22. Harvester was not just the world’s largest agriculturalcompany—it was one of the most powerful companies in theworld, with annual earnings comparable to Shell Oil, Kraft,Boeing, and RCA.

That wasn’t to say all was well at Harvester. In fact, the booming sales were a distraction from the changing needs of

Four-Wheel-Drive Dreams▲ The demand for more

power and more traction

was well established by

the mid-1950s, and lots

of companies—including

International Harvester—

were experimenting with

four-wheel-drive machinery.

Wisconsin Historical Society /

130929

Elwood Big 4 Tractor

▲

In the late 1950s, a number of manufacturers were building four-

wheel-drive tractors. This Big 4 was built by Elwood, and these May

1957 photographs in the IH collection indicate the Big 4 was studied

and possibly tested by IH. The 8,800-pound tractor had four-wheel

drive, four-wheel power steering, and air brakes.

Wisconsin Historical Society / 24600

Hough 4WD-1▲ Frank G. Hough purchased

a heavy equipment company in

1931 and renamed it the Frank

G. Hough Company in 1933.

The company built PayLoader

construction equipment and

had a four-wheel-drive version

on the market in 1948. He sold

the company to IH in 1952

but remained an independent

subsidiary company. Hough

tested this four-wheel-drive

tractor in the 1950s, and IH

would introduce it as the 4300.

Wisconsin Historical Society / 130927

RED 4WD TRACTORS26 1950–1969 A POWERful DRivE 27

He reported strong interest in a smaller, more versatile four-wheel-drive tractor. “The largest demand is for FWD [four-wheel-drive] tractors is in the 110- to 120-drawbar horsepower class,” he wrote in his report.

Harvester responded quickly to this demand, and by the spring of 1963, engineer Harold Schramm was working to draw up the 4100. He did so in record time, mainly by creating what is known as a component-built tractor.

Building a new machine using existing components al-lows just about any company with a clever engineer and deep enough pockets to quickly create a machine using readily available parts. A frame can be designed and constructed, and common components such as engines, transmissions, ax-les, brakes, wheels, and tires can be ordered from a supplier. The advantage of such a machine is that it can be designed

The quest to fill the rapidly growing four-wheel-drive market continued. In November and December of 1962, V. O. Talbert spent four weeks visiting farms and IH dealerships from Kansas up to Minnesota and west to Oregon and Washington. His purpose was to measure demand for a high-horsepower, two-wheel-drive tractor like the newly introduced 109-drawbar-horsepower John Deere 5010 and for larger four-wheel-drive tractors.

Talbert reported that demand for the two-wheel-drive tractors was in the 80- to 90-horsepower range, as the 5010 owners he spoke to were experiencing significant wheel slippage with the 109-horsepower two-wheel-drive machine.

The interest in the large 4300 machine, according to Talbert, was low. “The 4300 size and price will seriously restrict its acceptance and potential,” he wrote.

The 4WD-1 weight was 1 ton heavier than the specifica-tion. The desired retail price of $8,500 would have to rise to $18,000. No adjustable wheel tread was possible, a front power take-off could not be added, and the hand clutch requested by farmers in the survey was “not necessary.”

The next memo in the archives from Hough to Harvester is a lavish proposal for the 4WD-3, “the world’s most powerful four-wheel-drive agricultural tractor.” Hough smelled opportunity and delivered a proposal that played up the high horsepower of the machine and also played on the fears at Harvester that Deere was going to beat Harvester to the punch.

Dated September 16, 1960, the cover of the proposal is leather stamped with the IH logo and large, gold letters reading “CONFIDENTIAL.” Along with pages of specifications of the machine, the document contains an evaluation of the John Deere 8010. The Deere machine, it said, was announced in the fall of 1959, but as of September 1960, it had not been made available.

The 8010 proved so problematic that John Deere held the models, rebuilt them, and released them as the 8020. At least one experimental John Deere 8010 survived and is in private hands, but the tractor never was released for full production.

The Harvester executives—eager to beat Deere to production—took the Hough bait hook, line, and sinker. They agreed to produce the machine, the 4300, for the 1961 season. Harvester was so enthralled with the tractor the company put it on the cover of the 1960 Annual Report. The caption boasted, “The world’s most powerful tractor!”

Sentiment in the company cooled, however, perhaps due to all the pricing and desired options that Hough was unable to deliver. The 4300 was introduced in 1961, but the star of the “world’s most powerful tractor” had fallen so dramatically that it wasn’t even mentioned in the 1961 Annual Report. The machine received little or no advertising support.

The sales performance of the big machine was horrific. In addition to being poorly promoted, the 214-horsepower beast wasn’t well suited to agriculture or industrial use. Between 1961 and 1967, fewer than 50 examples were built and sold. The most credible production number is 39 units, though even that number hasn’t been confirmed by factory build records.

Harvester representatives had spoken to farmers and discovered that the Wagners were replacing crawlers for two main reasons: one, the machines sat up higher than crawlers, so there was less dust; and two, farmers often had fields that were as much as 20 miles apart, and the wheeled Wagners could be driven on the road, while the crawlers had to be trailered.

Zone manager Bob Weatherson reported that he personally knew of 20 sales of International TD-15 and TD-20 crawlers that were lost to Wagner TR-14 tractors.

Harvester product planner R. I. Throckmorton reported that the market was demanding a 100-drawbar-horsepower, four-wheel-drive tractor. In an IH memo dated May 21, 1959, he stated that farmers using IH 660s were having troubles with inadequate traction. Larger-than-stock 18x26 tires cost double the stock 15x34s, and adding wheel weights (also an expensive option) proved inadequate.

Throckmorton also discovered concern about a rumored John Deere 100-horsepower tractor expected to be on the market for 1960. It was likely a reference to the John Deere 8010, a four-wheel-drive 100-horsepower machine that performed below expectations to say the least.

A June 19, 1959, report from Hough to Harvester spelled out the status with the Hough experimental tractor, which was dubbed the 4WD-1. In short, Hough was not able to meet many of the Harvester specifications for a four-wheel-drive tractor.

IH 4300 and 10-Bottom IH Plow▲ The 4300 was the most

powerful tractor on the market

when it was introduced, and

it was also a dismal sales

failure. Built by Hough for

IH, the tractor was heavier

and more expensive than

IH expected. Fewer than 50

4300s were built, and the rare

plow in this image is even

harder to find. As of 2017,

only one such plow is known

to exist. Wisconsin Historical

Society / 130930

Power Brokers

▲ The big farms of the

1960s were struggling to find

equipment with enough power,

comfort, and versatility to meet

their needs. The Harvester four-

wheel-drive tractors of the era

were particularly far behind

the curve, and each of them

had significant shortcomings.

The 4100 would be one of the

IH’s responses to the market,

and it was engineered and

built in a very short time span.

While the tractor proved a solid

performer, the lack of a three-

point hitch and other niceties

made it a modest sales success.

Wisconsin Historical Society / 130933

RED 4WD TRACTORS28 1950–1969 A POWERful DRivE 29

do most of the heavy tillage work.” Douglass made drawings of the machine of his dreams.

The rain and the low prices of 1956 and 1957 drove the Steigers to take action on their idea. The easiest solution would be to purchase a tractor, and, according to The Four-Wheel Drive by Hiram Drache, the Steigers purchased a Cat DW-15 scraper in 1957. The machine was powerful, but it wasn’t suited to farm work, so they turned to the next logical solution—a high-horsepower farm tractor.

“We looked at a Wagner tractor—the smaller ones,” Douglass said in the video 4WD Tractor Pioneers. According to Drache’s book Beyond the Furrow, the Steigers worked with two neighbors who agreed they would also purchase machines and approached Wagner with the idea of starting a dealership. Wagner turned them down.

The Wagner tractors were expensive at the time—selling from $18,000 to $24,000. Douglass Steiger wasn’t impressed with the originality of the Wagner design. “It was obvious when you looked at the Wagner that anyone could make one.”

The First Steiger TractorsBy Lee Klancher

On the night of June 28, 1957, Minnesota was battered with hail and heavy rains that flooded streets and forced evacuations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, triggered tornadoes in western Minnesota, and caused flooding across the state. The rain had been heavy in 1956 and 1957, and the precipitation pummeled the region and destroyed entire harvests with nearly as much vigor as the era’s crop surpluses that drove crop prices into the basement.

On a several-thousand-acre Minnesota farm situated between Red Lake Falls and St. Hilaire, John Steiger weathered the storms and hard times that drove rain and prices down. He and his sons, Douglass and Maurice, had a successful farming operation.

According to author Hiram Drache, John had come to the area in 1928 after failing to build a successful farm in Montana. He worked 160 acres owned by his father-in-law near Red Lake Falls and rented additional acreage. He cleared land to farm with a big Rumely tractor and built a successful blacksmith shop on his growing property. John had a reputation as a hard worker with a strong will. He also loved to tinker with equipment and hand built machinery for his farm.

John loved farming and supporting his two sons. John’s granddaughter, MaJeana Steiger Hallstrom, remembers him as a loving man who made sure she attended every single session of Sunday school and took great pride in his family and farm. Steiger sales manager and dealer Earl Christianson said that while John wasn’t very active drawing and building the machines, he played a more important role. “Their dad was very much an optimist and really believed in his two sons,” Christianson said. “I always really admired him.”

Douglass Steiger can remember his dad using horses in the early days. By the time Douglass and his older brother Maurice were old enough to work the farm, a Farmall F-20 provided power. In the 1950s, the work on the Steiger farm was done with three International Harvester tractors.

The family credits Douglass with coming up with the idea to build a larger tractor in order to farm more efficiently. “If we had a big enough tractor,” Douglass said. “My dad could

Harvester in the mid-1960s continued to develop in response to the market, and it all too often did so with third-party solutions and tacked-on fixes. The company would introduce a mechanical front wheel drive option for the 706 and 806, supplied by Coleman. While this did give Harvester a four-wheel-drive option, the execution was clunky and the option was expensive.

A positive for the Harvester team was the 99-horsepower, two-wheel-drive 1206, a machine that hit the market right on target and remains a highly desirable machine.

The Harvester field agents continued to report back on the progress made by the competitors, and a raft of reports show very similar feedback coming back from farmers. They consistently requested more power, comfort, traction, and versatility.

The unfortunate trend at Harvester in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly with four-wheel-drive tractors, was a knee-jerk response to feedback from the market. Pushing the 4300 to production despite it being poorly suited for the market and hastily building the 4100 are both good examples of this.

A 1962 IH report prepared for the Farm Equipment Product Planning Committee is particularly telling. The report summarized the results of a survey designed to predict future needs of farmers. The 21-page document is filled with charts, graphs, and figures detailing precisely what farmers required.

“It is highly significant that only 2 out of the 566 farmers who respond to this question indicated they wanted ‘less’ power in their future tractors,” the report stated.

This was 1962. Harvester internal memos and reports throughout the 1960s occupied hundreds of man-hours to research and produce with basically the same results.

While IH was busy drafting reports, congratulating itself on sales records, and building multi-million-dollar research facilities, three men in northern Minnesota needed a more powerful tractor to run their farm. Rather than write memos and do studies, the Steiger brothers cut plate steel, fired up the welder, and built their solution.

and built quickly, and manufacturers can make immediate changes. For example, if the brakes prove inadequate, they can switch to another supplier. The disadvantage is that the tractor is built with off-the-shelf parts that may or may not be ideally suited to the machine.

Component-built tractors were unusual for Harvester. The company built everything down to the bolts in-house and preferred engineering new machines from the ground up. Building a new machine required millions of dollars and several years—sometimes several decades, as was the case with the Axial-Flow combine—to do right.

In the four-wheel-drive market in the early 1960s, Harvester was caught flat-footed. The company didn’t have a good machine and hadn’t done much development. It was well aware of the interest in Wagner and knew John Deere had a machine in the works.

Harvester also had a senior vice president, Brooks McCormick, who had been fired up about four-wheel drives since 1959 and was driving his production team to produce.

The 4100 was introduced in 1963 after roughly nine months of development—an incredibly short production time. The machine was a solid performer but hardly a class leader, and it gave Harvester customers a more useful option than the oversized 4300.

Field reports from the time also specified that farmers wanted a better cab. A November 18, 1962, letter from William Bjarnson, a machinery department manager in Tangent, Oregon, stated that he lost a sale to a John Deere 4010. He detailed how his IH 660 had outperformed a John Deere 4010 in a field demonstration, but the farmer bought the Deere because it was easier to use—it handled like a smaller tractor, was more comfortable, and was easy to get on and off.

“It seems ridiculous,” Bjarnson wrote, “that International can build the Cadillac of the tractor industry and turn around and put Henry Ford’s Model T cab on it.”

Cabs would remain a sore point for Harvester for years to come.

The Barn▲ Steiger tractors were first

built in the winter of 1958

in this dairy barn near

St. Hilaire, Minnesota, by

Douglass and Maurice Steiger.

Their father, John, also worked

on the tractor. This is the first

machine they built, shown

after it was restored in

April 1975.

Steiger Family Collection

RED 4WD TRACTORS30 1950–1969 A POWERful DRivE 31

The Steigers had built s everal other pieces of e quipment for the farm, including two self-propelled swathers, a rock picker, and a 60-foot weed sprayer. The 24-year-old Douglass reasoned they could build their own four-wheel-drive tractor using used parts and a hand-built frame for about $10,000.

“We knew that if we could find the axles and the engine we wanted, we could build it,” Maurice Steiger told the Grand Forks Herald in 1958.

Douglass went to E. O. Peterson, the president of the Union State Bank in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, and presented his options to the banker. According to Douglass, the banker said, “I think you should try to build one,” and he set up the Steiger family with a loan.

The original intention had been to build a smaller tractor, but the plan evolved. “We really didn’t plan to build such a large one,” Douglass said. “But once we got started, we couldn’t seem to stop.”

FOR THE REST OF THE STEIGER STORY SEE THE BOOK, RED 4WD TRACTORS.

Steiger #1

▲

The Steiger #1 was built

with a hand-built power

divider and chassis fitted with

used parts scrounged from

mining and farm machines.

The 200-horsepower engine

is a used 426-cubic-inch GM

six-cylinder diesel two-stroke

salvaged from an Allis-

Chalmers HD-14 dozer.

Lee Klancher

Steiger #1

▲

The Steiger #1 was on the

Steiger farm from the spring

of 1958 to 1975, and John

Steiger put many hours on the

machine. This tractor is often

referred to as “Barney.” That

name was never used by the

Steiger family. “We called it

‘the Big Tractor,’” MaJeana

Steiger Hallstrom said, “or us

grandkids, referring to John,

called it ‘Grandpa’s tractor.’”

Steiger #1 (or Barney) has

many advanced features,

including a 120-gallon fuel

tank and tight 10-foot turning

radius. Lee Klancher