[Thomas Sheldon Andrews] "Ira Andrews & Ann Hopkinson, Their Ancestors and Posterity" (1879):

"Now, when I was a boy [in the 1840s], I used to hear a song, a part of the first verse of which I still retain in my memory, and it is as follows:

                Tune— 'Captain Kidd.'
      Potatoes they grow small, in Maumee, in Maumee,
      The gals eat them tops and all, in Maumee.

But I assure you the 'Superior 'was not a 'small potato' steamer...."

(Small-potato = insignificant, inconsequential.)

This "Maumee" version, which long antedates those with "Kansas," seems to have been rather familiar for decades in the Midwest. It could account for mutations into "Bombay" and "Mobile."