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