Thanksgiving Day, Nineteen Oh Four

It was Thanksgiving morning, nineteen oh four, and Benjamin Holt was standing in a muddy field on Roberts Island watching a machine he had built attempt to do something no machine had done before.

Holt was the president of Holt Manufacturing Company, which had been making steam-powered grain harvesters in Stockton since the eighteen eighties. The problem he was trying to solve was fundamental: the San Joaquin Delta's peat soil was so soft that any wheeled tractor of sufficient weight to pull a large load simply sank. He had experimented for years with steam engines mounted on wider and wider wheels. It wasn't working.

What he tried on that November morning was a different approach. He had removed the rear drive wheels from a forty-horsepower steam tractor and replaced them with a continuous track, wooden planks bolted to chains that ran in a loop, spreading the machine's weight over a much larger surface area. The contraption looked improbable. It worked.

The company photographer, a man named Charles Clements, was watching through his lens as the machine moved across the wet delta soil. He said afterward that the track rising and falling over the carrier rollers looked like a caterpillar moving. Holt liked the image. 'Caterpillar it is,' he reportedly said. 'That's the name for it.'

Within a decade, Holt was shipping his track-type tractors to the armies of Britain, France, and Russia. Military engineers recognized that a machine designed for soft delta mud worked equally well in the mud of Flanders and the Somme. Thousands of Caterpillar tractors served the Allied forces in the First World War, hauling artillery across ground that broke wheeled vehicles.

In nineteen twenty-five, Holt's company merged with its chief rival, the C. L. Best company, to form Caterpillar Tractor Company. The Stockton factory was where it all began.