Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1904-08-22

been gatnefd IN, DOtn city people and
country people in Kansas and western
Missouri indulge in fetes. The women
appear in costumes fashioned from
corn husks and tassels. Enterprising
shop keepers deck forth their windows
with corn products. The restaurants
serve with milk and syrup all possible
Gelicacies made from the corn kernel.
Orators are secured by the local bust
ness mems associations or boards of
trade to sound the praises of the all
puissant king. The railroad companies
help on the celebration. The entire
community goes corn mad. And,
maddest of all, the jolly old rogue of a
monarch himself often appears in ef-
fgy. seated on a corn-cob throne, ar
rayed in robes of husks and silk, his
arts and hands shaped of cobs, his
long beard fashioned of wavy silk and
a corn-cob pipe in his mouth. Even
his face is of papier mache made from
the corn stalk
Furthermore. there is accommodating
throughout the corn belt a wealth of
folk stories. always somewhat improb-
able, connected with the growing of
the corn. One fthese tales-presum-
ably a variant on the Jack-and-the-
Bean-Stalk yarn-is to the effect that
Kansas boy went forth one warm
morning in August into a cornfeld and
foolishly undertook to climb one of the
stalks. He got on all right but the
rapid growth of the stalk carried him
into the air faster than he could climb
down. The attention of his father and
brothers was attracted to his predica-
ment and they made an effort to cut
the stalk. The corn, however, continued
TO sprout upward so rapidly that no
body could strike the same place twice
so that his sorrowing relatives had to
leave the boy to his fate. The last
that was heard from him was that for
six weeks he had been up there with
nothing to eat but raw corn and that
during that time he had cast down four
bushels of cobs from which he had
gnowed the kernels.
Another bit of Kansas fiction tells OF
traveller from the east who shortly
u dANtA ANdN4nS Ndn0do SANg NhO
porter how long it would be before the
train emerged from the tunnel through
which it was passing. "Dis amt no
tunnel. sah." replied the porter yves
jes passin' fru de Kansas corn belt and
de tall stalks shuts out de sun. Yo'
won't see no mo- daylight for 200
miles"
Z MI ,,n;eor,. o.oo1ro,,oo 80 H. o1,,
crop as well as its marvellous growth
Is also one of the proud boasts of Kan
sa people. A leading store in town
near Kansas City last summer had a
corn display in one of it's windows of
which the most spectacular feature
was a lone "nubbin' bearing the fol-
low card: This curiosity is called
nubbin and it is the only one we have
been able to find in eastern Kansas.
/ This specimen was secured in one OF
the suburbs from a stalk which grew
out of the mortar in a brick wall. It's
surroundings and the fact that the stalk
was twice struck by lightning as it
lowered above the building probably
accounts for the dwarfed appearance OF
the ear"
Then, of course. there is the annual
crop of stories which are told every
summer of the necessity in certain To-
calities of using stepladders in harvest
ing the corn. One yarn to which cur
rency was given by the newspapers
year ago stated that in certain Kansas
townships the stalks grew so tall that
they brushed against the telephone
wires and interferd with the service
by grounding the circuit.
If these stories are somewhat to be
doubted, the solid facts about the i'm
Iportance of the corn crop are not to be
in any way discredited. The magni-
tude of the corn fields of the west and
southwest stagger the imagination. The
total yield for the United States in
1902. the banner year thus far, was
I2,244,176,125 bushels - two bushels
each, roughly speaking for each inhabi-
tant of the globe. On a single farm
at Tarllio in the northern part of the
state of Missouri David Rankin's great
bonanza corn plantation, the largest
in the world-about $4,000 acres are
annually sown in Indian corn. Here one
may look upon a single field of more
than 5000 acres.
Corn may make a metropolis. The
marvellous expansion of Kansas City In
the past two decades is due largely to
its position in the center of the corn
growing region. The hog. the steer and
the horse are fed by king corn. Time
was when Cincinnati was the great
packing center of the country but the
hog passed westward to root in the big
ger cornfields and Chicago became the
great packing town. Now Kansas City
lis a close second and Cincinnati has
practically gone out of the packing
business. Meantime the western Mis-
souri, metropolis each year strengthens
its position as caDital of king corn's