IOWA - Portrait of the Land - People Meet the Land

ANCIENT PEOPLES: THE FIRST IOWANS - From Siberia, nomadic people crossed into North America perhaps 15,000 years ago, no doubt following herds of caribou, musk oxen, and mammoths. They traversed a land bridge exposed when expanses of glacial ice had captured enough seawater to lower the ocean level. By 13,000 years ago, those Paleo-Indian people had found their way to Iowa, where they lived in what must have been harsh conditions alongside the remnants of glaciers. The warming climate eventually halted the glacial advances, however, and plants and animals quickly reoccupied the damp, dark, stony soils that formed on top of and at the edges of the decaying ice.

Those early Iowans moved about in cool, moist, spruce and fir forests interspersed with open meadows and wetlands. Hunters pursued mastodons, giant bison, and other big game, often working together to drive the animals over cliffs or into boggy mires where the prey could be attacked more easily. The Indians killed and butchered their quarry with effective stone spears and sharp tools painstakingly crafted from flint. People's lives were short, and populations were sparse, perhaps never reaching more than a few hundred at any one time.

This glacial scene resembles the wasting ice sheet present in north-central Iowa 13,500 to 12,000 years ago. The meltwater lake and its bordering coniferous trees are perched on the surface of glacial debris still underlain by whitish layers of ice (Klutlan Glacier, Yukon Territory, Canada). Photo by H. E. Wright Jr.

As the climate continued to warm about 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, more hardwood forests grew up, with prairies gradually pushing in from the south and west. Ancient Iowans followed the resources, camping near rivers to gather wild plants and hunt small game and often traveling to hunt bison. But the innovative native people also began using the atlatl, or spear thrower, to increase their hunting efficiency. They learned to grind and chip stone into tools, such as axes, knives, scrapers, and plant-milling devices. Evidence at numerous archaeological sites suggests that populations were growing, perhaps into the thousands.

From about 2,800 to 800 years ago, prehistoric Woodland Indians inhabited an Iowa landscape much like that visited by the first European explorers. Eastern forests met western prairies, with scattered trees on the savanna in between. The trees and shrubs marched out into the grasslands during wet cycles, then retreated to the valleys during droughts. Native Americans also set fires to kill the woody plants and improve prairie wildlife habitat.

The Woodland people are noted for their use of cultivated plants. The Indians grew corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, tobacco, marsh elder, goosefoot, and other crops to supplement their diet of wild game and plants. Bison remained a staple food in western Iowa. The animals' hides were used for clothing and shelter, and their bones served as tools. During the Woodland period, people used bows and arrows, made a variety of styles of pottery, and traded with other Indians across the Midwest. The population in what would become Iowa grew to an estimated 10,000 people.


Indian burial mounds were built on high bluffs or on terraces overlooking river valleys. The mounds also may have marked hunting territories, served as ceremonial centers, or embodied spiritual links with the earth (Fish Farm Mounds State Preserve, Allamakee County). Photo by Jean C. Prior.		Great bird mounds take clear shape when outlined with lime as part of a special study done in the 1970s. Iowa's effigy mounds represent creatures from the land, water, and sky. "The mounds and their builders have a message for us today - the human race must integrate itself with the rest of the living world." - R. Clark Mallam, 1986. Photo by R. Clark Mallam.

The best-known legacy of the Woodland people may be their intriguing mounds of earth. The earliest conical mounds apparently were for burials, but these and later mounds also may have served ceremonial functions. Effigy Mounds National Monument, near Marquette, protects nearly 200 mounds, including several in the form of bear or bird effigies built between 450 B.C. and A.D. 1300.

Native American populations in Iowa grew to tens of thousands by about A.D. 1600, but then numbers dropped, apparently due to deaths from warfare and the spread of European diseases. Before the population decline, however, large villages thrived in several parts of Iowa. One encampment ranged across the Big Sioux River valley at Blood Run in northwestern Iowa and southeastern South Dakota. Some communities included elaborate earth lodges, palisade fortifications, large storage pits, and longhouses.

We Indians respect our ancestors. They are present
in our ceremonies and we call upon them for help
to live our lives.

Many other Indian cultures also left physical remnants of their life in Iowa. Archaeological sites throughout the state include campsites, villages, quarries, workshops, rock carvings, mounds, and cemeteries.

1673: MARQUETTE AND JOLIET - When Iowans stand at one of our favorite spots, the overlook at Pike's Peak State Park south of McGregor, we see more than just a scenic vista. From that limestone blufftop, we can look back more than three centuries through history.

This panoramic view shows the historic entry of Marquette and Joliet (in two canoes) into the Upper Mississippi Valley via the Wisconsin River on June 17, 1673. Visitors to Pike's Peak State Park in Clayton County can see the same magnificent view today. This diorama is the centerpiece of Iowa Hall at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. Photo by Kay Irelan.

Just below lies the legendary Mississippi River, which drains the heartland of the nation, cradles cities, supports industries, carries twenty-first century commerce, delights recreationists, and nurtures fish and wildlife. From the east, flowing out of a wide valley to be swallowed up by the even-wider Mississippi, comes the Wisconsin.

On a misty morning, when the floodplain trees fade in and out of the fog, it's easy to picture that scene more than 300 years ago when Ioway Indians may have watched some of the first Europeans to visit Iowa. Explorer and fur trader Louis Joliet, along with missionary and Jesuit priest Father Jacques Marquette, paddled down the Wisconsin River, then entered the Mississippi on June 17, 1673. Sent by the Canadian governor to search for a route to the Pacific Ocean, they had begun at the Straits of Mackinac, then paddled across Lake Michigan, through Green Bay, and up the Fox River. After portaging overland to the Wisconsin River, they headed downstream to the Mississippi, where they found an imposing promontory we now know as Pike's Peak.

His party reached the Mississippi "with a joy I cannot express," Father Marquette later recalled. But his group of seven adventurers apparently did not go ashore in what is now Iowa. Several days later, on June 25, they landed south of present-day Keokuk, at the mouth of the Des Moines River. There they visited a village of Peoria Indians, who gave them a peace pipe and sent along the chief's ten-year-old son as a guide.

The contact between Marquette and Joliet and the Indians marked a milestone in a long period of interaction between the two cultures and the beginning of massive changes in Indian ways of life. The Europeans sought lead and furs, as well as access to the native people's lands. The Native Americans wanted the newcomers' metal tools, guns, and cloth. In the bargain, the Indians also got disease, alcohol, and the eventual loss of their land.

Marquette and Joliet barely touched the west bank of the Mississippi, just enough perhaps, to marvel at the abundant wildlife, forested bluffs, hilltop prairies and savannas, and diverse vegetation along the tributaries. Other Europeans would explore across what is now Iowa in the next 150 years.

In the Mississippi Valley itself, French voyageurs probably had begun mining lead and trapping animals for fur by the mid-1600s. In 1788, Julien Dubuque struck a deal with the Meskwakis to mine lead along the Mississippi River at the mouth of Catfish Creek near the city that would bear his name. By 1800, the Meskwakis asserted property rights over the Iowa River valley, but they were pressured into giving up parts of that land in 1804, 1832, 1836, 1837, and 1842 - each time moving farther up the river. They finally called a halt to the displacements in the 1850s, when tribal members still in Iowa and those who'd been moved to western reservations joined together to buy their own land in Tama County.

As contacts with Europeans increased in the early to mid-1700s, Indian cultures were changed. The Ioway and Oto moved west and south, pushed by colonial expansion and by the Sauk, Meskwaki, Ho-Chunk, and other people from the Great Lakes region.

1804: LEWIS AND CLARK - The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was followed the next year by Lewis and Clark's "Voyage of Discovery" up the Missouri River along what would become Iowa's western border. Although European traders, trappers, and explorers already had been prowling the land for years, the Louisiana Purchase marked the "official" beginning of Iowa's connection to the new nation that was emerging on the North American continent.

In stark contrast to the Mississippi River forests in eastern Iowa, trees were scarce along the Missouri River valley. At a site near the present Iowa-Missouri border, Clark described today's Loess Hills as " a range of Ball [bald] Hills parrelel to the river & at from 3 to 6 miles distant from it, and extends as far up & Down as I Can See." The short prairie grasses, predominantly little bluestem, made the hills look bare. "This prarie I call Bald pated Prarie," Clark wrote, suggesting emptiness. But the party later went hunting along a stream the Indians called "Neesh-nah-ba-to-na" (today's Nishnabotna River) and found the region far from barren. They killed four deer, and saw "oake, walnut & mulberry" trees.

All along the Iowa border, the explorers marveled at the bounty of wildlife in the valley. The hunters sometimes killed as many as five deer a day. The travelers caught their first channel catfish near present-day Council Bluffs, where they found the creatures "verry Common and easy taken." Around Onawa, Lewis didn't even try to count the number of pelicans, except to exclaim that their numbers "appear almost in credible." Near Sioux City, Clark commented on "verry plentiful" beaver, "very fat ducks," and plovers "of different Kinds."

The valley had become lush and productive since the last floods of glacial meltwater receded 10,000 years before. The Missouri River had settled down to a more stable pattern of high water in the spring, low flows in the summer and fall, and periodic wanderings across the wide flats. Over the centuries, the restless river cut new channels, left oxbows, created wetlands, built sandbars, toppled shoreline trees, and deposited layers of silt. Native Americans were drawn to the region to hunt, fish, and raise crops. This was the Missouri River that Lewis and Clark's party explored, and the valley that beckoned to pioneers pushing west across the continent.

Geologists are piecing together Iowa's Ice Age history, and archaeologists teach us about the 600 generations of people who were here before Europeans arrived. But the explorers of the 1700s and 1800s not only made history, they began to record it. Two colorful adventurers, German Prince Maximilian du Wied and Swiss painter Karl Bodmer, traveled the Missouri River in 1832 and 1833, gathering data for an account of America's land and its people. Bodmer's meticulous watercolors and Maximilian's scientific observations of natural and cultural history give us rich insights into this period.

In 1805, Zebulon Pike led a military exploration to the Mississippi Valley, where he suggested building a fort on a bluff near what is now McGregor. Pike's Peak is now a state park, although the proposed fort was built across the river in Wisconsin. Downstream along the Mississippi, in 1808, Fort Madison became a military outpost that eventually led to the territory being opened for non-Indian settlement.

This is the route of my forefathers. It is the lands that we have always claimed from old times. We have the history. We have always owned
this land. It is what bears our name.

- No Heart, Ioway Tribe, October 7, 1837

On October 7, 1837, No Heart and Moving Rain illustrated their Ioway land claims case before the Indian Commissioner in Washington, D.C., using this map drawn in charcoal. The Mississippi River flows from top center to the lower left corner. The map includes nearly sixty rivers and lakes, and extends from Lake Michigan on the east to the Niobrara and North Platte rivers on the west, and from southern Minnesota and Wisconsin on the north to the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi on the south. Portrayed are twenty-three village locations and the routes of movement between them. It is a remarkable map of historical memory, recording Ioway places throughout Iowa and surrounding states and events from 1830 back to the 1600s (William Green, State Archaeologist of Iowa). Photo by National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

When I am here, the spirits of our ancestors are all around me.

- Pete Fee, Ioway Tribe, New Albin, Iowa, September 15, 1999

Iowa was poised on the brink of change. Native Americans, who had harvested the fish and wildlife, farmed, quarried, built, and traded throughout the region, were about to be displaced. The Indian people had lived on and worked the land for 3,000 years. Yet they sketched their legacy lightly on the landscape. Soon their subtle portraits would be painted over by the heavier hands - and greater numbers - of explorers and settlers. The new "artists" looked at the earth differently than the native peoples had, and the newcomers would change that landscape forever.

Fort Atkinson was a military post built between 1840 and 1842 to enforce the removal of the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) Indians from Wisconsin into the Neutral Ground in Iowa. Then, in 1848, the Winnebago were removed from Iowa, and the last company of infantry left the fort in February 1849. Lt. A. W. Reynolds sketched this scene in 1843. Photo by State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City.