THE CORN CROP.
Chicago is the entrepôt for the great prairie region spreading from the Alleghenies westward beyond the Mississippi. Here grows the grain making the wealth of the land, and feeding the cattle, hogs and sheep that are poured so liberally into the Union Stock Yards of the Lake City. Upon the crops of this vast prairie land depends the prosperity of the country. Wall Street in New York and the Chicago Board of Trade are the market barometers of this prosperity, for the prairie farmer, as he may be rich and able to spend money, or poor so that he cannot even pay his debts, controls the financial outlook in America. The traveller, as he glides upon this universal prairie land, east, south and west of Chicago, viewing its limitless fertility seen far away in every direction over the monotonous level, as if looking across an ocean, cannot help recalling Wordsworth's pleasant lines:
"The streams with softest sound are flowing,
The grass you almost hear it growing,
You hear it now, if e'er you can."
Then, as the crops ripen and are garnered, and the wealth of the prairie is turned into food for the world, there comes with the advancing autumn the ripening of the greatest crop of America, and the mainstay of the country, the Indian corn. It is wonderful to think that the first corn crop of the United States planted by white men at Jamestown, Virginia, on a field of forty acres in 1608, has grown to an annual yield approximating twenty-three hundred million bushels. This prolific crop is the banner product of the great prairie, and Whittier in his "Corn Song" has recorded its glories:
"Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard!
Heap high the golden corn!
No richer gift has autumn poured