Various great railways bound to the West cross the Missouri in its
lower course. The river flows between Kansas and Missouri, and here
are St. Joseph with sixty thousand people, immense railway and
stock-yards, and many factories; and Atchison with twenty thousand
population and large flouring-mills, where the Atchison railway system
formerly had its initial point, though now it traverses the country
from Chicago southwest to Santa Fe and the Pacific Ocean. Leavenworth,
a city of twenty-five thousand, has grown at the site of Fort
Leavenworth, one of the important early posts on the Missouri. To the
southward the Kaw or Kansas River flows in, the Indian "Smoky Water,"
coming from the west, draining the greater part of the State which it
names. Upon this river is Lawrence, the seat of the Kansas State
University, having a thousand students, and of Haskell Institute, a
Government training-school for Indian boys and girls. Westward along
the Kansas River broadly spread the vast and fertile prairies making
the agricultural wealth of the State, and sixty-seven miles from the
Missouri, built on both sides of the river, is Topeka, the capital,
having thirty-five thousand people, large mills and an extensive trade
with the surrounding farm district. In this eastern portion of Kansas,
prior to the Civil War, was fought, often with bloodshed, the
protracted border contest between the free-soil and pro-slavery
parties for the possession of the State, that had so much to do with
bringing on the greater conflict. When Congress passed the bill in
1854 organizing Nebraska and Kansas into territories, an effort began
to establish slavery, and the Missourians coming over the border tried
to control. They founded Atchison and other places and sent in
settlers. At the same time Aid Societies for anti-slavery emigrants
began colonizing from New England, large numbers thus coming to
preëmpt lands. During four years the contests went on, Lawrence and
other towns being besieged and burnt. The first Free-State
Constitution was framed at Topeka in 1855, which Congress would not
approve, and the following year the pro-slavery Constitution was
enacted at Lecompton, which the people rejected. After the Civil War
began, Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861 with slavery
prohibited. Among the free-soilers who went out to engage in these
Kansas conflicts was old John Brown. Near the Missouri border, to the
southward of Kansas River, is the little town of Osowatomie, in the
early settlement of which Brown took part. Here he had his fights with
the slavery invaders who came over from Missouri, finally burning the
place and killing Brown's son, a tragedy said to have inspired his
subsequent crusade against Harper's Ferry, which practically opened
the Civil War. A monument is erected to John Brown's memory at
Osawatomie. The New England emigration to Kansas in those momentous
times inspired Whittier's poem, _The Kansas Emigrants_:
"We cross the prairie as of old
The Pilgrims crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free!
"We go to rear a wall of men
On Freedom's southern line,
And plant beside the cotton-tree
The rugged Northern pine!
"We're flowing from our native hills
As our free rivers flow;
The blessing of our Mother-land
Is on us as we go.
"We go to plant her common schools
On distant prairie swells,
And give the Sabbaths of the wild
The music of her bells.
"Upbearing, like the Ark of old,
The Bible in our van,
We go to test the truth of God
Against the fraud of man.
"No pause nor rest, save where the streams
That feed the Kansas run,
Save where our Pilgrim gonfalon
Shall flout the setting sun!
"We'll tread the prairie as of old
Our fathers sailed the sea,
And make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free!"
The Civil War ended all these conflicts, and since then Kansas has
been eminently peaceful. It is now the leading State of the corn belt
which broadly crosses the middle of the United States. Its vast corn
crops make the wealth of the people, and as they may be good or poor,
the Kansan is in joy or despair. One year the farmers will be
overwhelmed with debt; the next brings an ample crop, and they pay
their debts and are in affluence. Thus throbs the pulse as the
sunshine and rains may make a corn crop in the State that sometimes
exceeds three hundred millions of bushels; and then there are not
enough railway cars available to carry away the product. In a good
crop the cornstalks grow to enormous heights, sometimes reaching
twenty feet to the surmounting tassel, and a tall man on tip-toe can
about touch the ears, while a two-pound ear is a customary weight,
with thirty-five ears to a bushel. These vast cornfields, watched
year by year and crop after crop by the hard-working wife of a Kansas
farmer, caused her to write the touching lyric which has become the
Kansas national hymn, Mrs. Ellen P. Allerton's "Walls of Corn":
"Smiling and beautiful, heaven's dome
Bends softly over our prairie home.
"But the wide, wide lands that stretched away
Before my eyes in the days of May;
"The rolling prairie's billowy swell,
Breezy upland and timbered dell;
"Stately mansion and hut forlorn--
All are hidden by walls of corn.
"All the wide world is narrowed down
To walls of corn, now sere and brown.
"What do they hold--these walls of corn,
Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn?
"He who questions may soon be told--
A great State's wealth these walls enfold.
"No sentinels guard these walls of corn,
Never is sounded the warder's horn;
"Yet the pillars are hung with gleaming gold,
Left all unbarred, though thieves are bold.
"Clothes and food for the toiling poor;
Wealth to heap at the rich man's door;
"Meat for the healthy, and balm for him
Who moans and tosses in chamber dim;
"Shoes for the barefoot; pearls to twine
In the scented tresses of ladies fine;
"Things of use for the lowly cot
Where (bless the corn!) want cometh not;
"Luxuries rare for the mansion grand,
Booty for thieves that rob the land--
"All these things, and so many more
It would fill a book but to name them o'er,
"Are hid and held in these walls of corn
Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn.
"Where do they stand, these walls of corn,
Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn?
"Open the atlas, conned by rule,
In the olden days of the district school.
"Point to this rich and bounteous land
That yields such fruits to the toiler's hand.
"'Treeless desert,' they called it then,
Haunted by beasts and forsook by men.
"Little they knew what wealth untold
Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled.
"Who would have dared, with brush or pen,
As this land is now, to paint it then?
"And how would the wise ones have laughed in scorn
Had prophet foretold these walls of corn
Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn."
The Kansas River flows into the Missouri at Kansas City, the chief
settlement of the Missouri Valley, entirely the growth of the period
since the Civil War, through the prodigious development of the
railways. There are two cities where the Missouri is crossed by three
fine bridges, and having two hundred thousand people, the larger being
Kansas City in Missouri, on the southern river bank, and the other
adjoining is Kansas City or Wyandotte, the largest city in Kansas,
through which the Kansas River flows. The two cities are separated by
the State boundary between Kansas and Missouri. Next to Chicago, this
place has the largest stock-yards and packing-house plants, and does
an enormous trade in cattle, meats and grain, many railroads radiating
in all directions. The site was originally the home of the Wyandotte
Indians who were removed here from Ohio in 1843. The town of Wyandotte
had a small population prior to the Civil War, but the growth did not
begin until after the close of that conflict had stimulated railway
building and western colonization, and being on the trail from the
Missouri River to the southwest, this gave the first impetus. These
cities now have a rapid expansion, and are the greatest railway
centres west of the Mississippi River, their lines going to the Gulf
of Mexico and the Pacific through sections of country which are
rapidly populating and developing vast agricultural and mineral
products.
The Missouri River traverses the entire State of Missouri in winding,
turbid current from west to east. It passes Jefferson City, the State
Capital, having about seven thousand people, and just below receives
the Osage River coming up from the southwest. At Chillicothe to the
northwest is buried Nelson Kneiss, who composed the music for Thomas
Dunn English's popular ballad of _Ben Bolt_; and at Florida, to the
northeast, was born in November, 1835, the humorist, Samuel L.
Clemens, _Mark Twain_. Captain Sellers, who furnished river news to
the New Orleans _Picayune_, had used this _nom-de-plume_, and dying in
1863, Clemens adopted it. Twenty miles above St. Louis the Missouri
flows into the Mississippi, contributing the greater volume of water
to the joint stream, the clear Mississippi waters, pushed over to the
eastern bank, refusing for a long distance below to mingle with the
turbid flood of the Missouri.