"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.