HOME! Welcome to Iowa, Part I

When I start seeing Casey's General Store signs, I know I'm getting close to home.  But I was a little surprised on this trip when I started finding them just north of Fort Smith, Arkansas.  But this was the first sign I saw in Iowa, close enough to lunch time to stop for a pizza

Iowa became the 29th state Dec 28, 1846. Native Americans had been in the area for 13,000 years, but written history began when explorers arrived in the 1680s. 

With  the area a French holding, the earliest non-Native settlers were French. They came to trade fur, preach, discover mines, and explore.  The first to make contact with Indigenous Peoples were probably Frenchmen Louis Joliet and Pere Jacques Marquette. While conducting their mission, to discover the Mississipi River, they made contact with the Illinois tribes in eastern Iowa in 1673.  The first settler appears to have been Julien Dubuque, a French-Canadian who arrived at the lead mines near modern-day Dubuque in 1787. He obtained permission to mine the land from the Meskwaki. A few others secured land grants from France.

When the American Indians first arrived in what is now Iowa, they were hunters and gatherers living in a glacial landscape. More than 3,000 years ago, they were domesticating plants. By the time explorers came Iowa, the Natives were settled and farming with economic, social, and political systems in place. The European traders brought, not only trade goods, but disease; disease that drastically upset the population balance. The arrival of new tribes into the area from other lands brought further social and economic distress. 

Approximately 15000 individual groups or settlements of Native Americans inhabited Iowa.  Others, the Illinois, Sauk, Meskwaki, came due to warfare with other tribes or the French. In early and mid-19th century the Potawatomi and Winnebago moved into Iowa.

By 1804, the Sauk and Meskwaki were on the eastern edge of Iowa along the Mississippi; the Ioway along the bank of the Des Moines River; the Oto, Missouri, and Omaha along the Missouri River; the Sioux in the northern and western parts of the state, and the Pawnee on the western border. 

In 1829, the federal government claimed ownership of the Illinois land in Quashquame's Treaty of 1804 and forced the Illinois, and the Sauk and Meskwaki, to leave their villages in western Illinois and move into Iowa. 

The move was made but not without protest; Sauk leader, Black Hawk, protested the move. In 1832 he returned to reclaim the Illinois village of Saukenuk. For the next 3 months, the Illinois militia pursued Black Hawk and his band of 400 north along the east side of the Mississippi River. Their numbers down to about 200, they surrendered at the Bad Axe River, Wisconsin. Known as the Black Hawk War, the price for this resistance was the surrender of their lands in eastern Iowa.

Called the Black Hawk Purchase, the 50 mile wide strip of land, from the Missouri border to northastern Iowa along the Mississippi River was surrendered. The land originally belonging to the Sauk, Meskwaki and Winnebago was acquired by treaty. The purchase was made for $640,000 on Sep 21, 1832.  Black Hawk was held prisoner at the time the purchase was completed. The Black Hawk Purchase contained an area of 6 million acres and the price was equivalent to 11 cents per acre.

There were additional land surrenders by the Sauk and Meskwaki.  In 1837, the Second Black Hawk Purchase and in 1842, the New Purchase, meant that by 1845 nearly all Sauk and Meskwaki had left Iowa. 

Other groups gave up their Iowa land through treaties. A group of Missouri, Omaha and Oto gave up their lands in western Iowa in 1830. The Ioway left the last of their lands in 1838. The Winnebago and Potawatomi, who had left Iowa once but returned, were again removed in 1846 and 1848. The last remaining group, the Sioux, ceded the last of their Iowa land in an 1851 treaty.

When the Winnebago were forced to leave their homeland in Wisconsin in 1840, the US government offered the tribe protection on their new temporary land in Iowa from other tribes and illegal settlers. Completed in 1842, Fort Atkinson was the only fort built to protect one Indian tribe from another. From 1840-1848, Fort Atkinson protected the Winnebago from their hostile neighbors, the Sioux to the north, and the Sac and Fox on the south. The ‘neutral ground’ was the legal land of the Winnebago. Although there were soldiers, traders, and government workers at the Turkey River Indian Subagency in the 1840s, no other settlers were authorized  in the ‘neutral ground’.  At the same time, this prevented the Winnebago from going beyond the limits of their reservation. 

Prior to Blackhawk's defeat in Wisconsin, he had "tangled" with the US Government at Fort Madison, Iowa. Fort Madison, built in 1808, was the first permanent US military facility on the upper Mississippi. Initially used to control trade along the river, after the War of 1812 it served to prevent the reoccupation of the area by the British. It is the site of Black Hawk's first battle against the US Government, the only true military battle fought west of the Mississippi.  Natives had allied with the British, during the War of 1812. 

The Sauk and Meskwaki were one of the largest tribes in the upper Mississippi River valley.  Originally from the area of Michigan, they moved into the Wisconsin area and by the 1730s they were living in Illinois along the Mississipi and Rock rivers. They lived in their villages a few months each year, then traveled through Iowa and Illinois hunting, fishing, gathering food. In the spring, they traveled to Minnesota, tapped maple trees and made syrup. 

Today, the Meskwaki reside on the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama County, IA. After they had been removed from the state, some members, along with a few Sauk, returned to hunt and fish in eastern Iowa. They approached Governor James Grimes with the request that they be allowed to purchase back some of their original land. They collected $735 for their first land purchase and eventually they bought back approximately 3,200 acres. 

The Black Hawk Purchase in 1832 opened up the lands to settlers. At the time, there were only 40-50 non-Natives settled in Iowa, most were trappers, traders or miners.  

Earliest settlers shipped their goods via steam boat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Chicago was becoming a rail road hub and by 1860, Chicago served by a dozen rail lines.  In the early 1850s, river communities of Dubuque, Clinton, Davenport, and Burlington began to form railroad companies. The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific would provide the nation's First Transcontinental Railroad; Council Bluffs was designated as the eastern terminus for the Union Pacific. A short time later a fifth railroad, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, also completed its line across the state.

Railroads provided year-round transportation for agriculture and made industry possible. Before 1870, Iowa had some manufacturing firms in river towns and most new industry was based on food processing: Quaker Oats, meat packing and processing. Railroads created a demand for coal; Iowa had coal and mines were opened. The railroads built branch lines into the coal towns. By 1919, Iowa had 240 mines that produced over 8 million tons of coal per year and employed about 15,000 men.