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.