IAIowa History

The first reported decision of the supreme court of Iowa Territory, handed down in 1839, freed a man. Ralph Montgomery had agreed to buy himself from his Missouri owner for $550, crossed to Dubuque to mine lead, fell behind on the payments and was seized by bounty hunters. The court held that a person brought to free soil with his owner's consent could not be dragged back as property. That was 18 years before the United States Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion in Dred Scott.

Effigy mounds and the nations between two rivers

On the bluffs above the Mississippi near Marquette stand more than two hundred earthworks, some shaped as bears and birds, built between roughly 750 and 1400 CE. By the eighteenth century the Baxoje, the Ioway, held much of the interior and gave the state its name. Meskwaki and Sauk had been driven west from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, Otoe and Missouria lived toward the southwest, Omaha along the Missouri, and Dakota bands ranged the north. Iowa is the only state bounded on both sides by great rivers, the Mississippi on the east and the Missouri on the west.

A Spanish lead mine, a French sale, and the Black Hawk strip

Julien Dubuque obtained permission from Meskwaki leaders in 1788 to work the lead deposits on the west bank, and a Spanish land grant in 1796 confirmed him in what was called the Mines of Spain. Lead, not soil, brought the first Europeans who stayed. France had claimed the country as part of Louisiana, ceded it to Spain in 1762, taken it back in 1800 and sold it to the United States in 1803. Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of the Lewis and Clark expedition to die, was buried on a bluff at present day Sioux City on 20 August 1804.

After the Black Hawk War of 1832 the United States took the Black Hawk Purchase, a strip about fifty miles wide along the Mississippi amounting to roughly six million acres, opened to settlers on 1 June 1833. Further cessions followed until the Sauk and Meskwaki were removed to Kansas in 1845. Then the Meskwaki came back. In 1857 the legislature agreed they could buy land as private citizens, and they purchased eighty acres in Tama County with money raised among themselves. The Meskwaki Settlement is land the tribe owns outright rather than a reservation held in trust for it, which is unusual in the United States.

Territory, a bee tree war, and a free state in 1846

The region passed through Michigan and then Wisconsin Territory before Iowa Territory was organised on 4 July 1838, with Burlington and then Iowa City as capital. In 1839 a dispute with Missouri over a strip nine to eleven miles wide produced the Honey War: a sheriff collecting taxes cut down three hollow trees full of bees, both governors called out militia, and the forces went home without a shot. Congress passed a single act on 3 March 1845 admitting Florida as a slave state and Iowa as a free one, keeping the Senate balanced, but Iowa voters rejected the constitution because Congress had shrunk the boundaries they wanted, and the state did not actually enter until 28 December 1846, as the 29th. Des Moines took the capital in 1857, and the convention that year wrote the constitution still in use.

In Clark v. Board of Directors, decided in 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court ordered Muscatine to admit Susan Clark to its public school, 86 years before Brown v. Board of Education. John Brown wintered and drilled recruits at Springdale in 1857 and 1858 before Harpers Ferry. About 76,000 Iowans served in the Union Army out of a population near 675,000, among the highest rates of any state, and no battle was fought on Iowa ground.

Hybrid corn and the Wallace century

German Pietists calling themselves the Community of True Inspiration founded seven villages near the Iowa River in 1855 and held property in common for 77 years, until the Depression forced the Great Change of 1932 and the Amana Colonies reorganised as a company. Lincoln designated Council Bluffs in 1863 as the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad, and the rail network that followed turned prairie into corn and hogs moving east. Henry A. Wallace, editing his family's farm paper in Des Moines, founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company in 1926 to sell hybrid seed that farmers had to buy fresh every season rather than save. Iowa went from almost no hybrid acreage in 1933 to nearly all of it by 1943, an adoption curve sociologists still teach as the model case for how a technology spreads. Wallace became Secretary of Agriculture in 1933 and Vice President in 1941. Herbert Hoover had been born in a two room cottage at West Branch on 10 August 1874, the first president born west of the Mississippi. Not everyone prospered: in 1932 the Farmers' Holiday Association blockaded the roads into Sioux City to keep milk and livestock off the market.

The farm crisis and the decades after

Farmland values fell by roughly 60 percent between 1981 and 1986. Farmers who had borrowed to expand during the export boom of the 1970s were caught by high interest rates and collapsing prices, thousands lost their land, hundreds of rural banks failed, and the implement works at Waterloo and Des Moines shed thousands of jobs. Meatpacking moved the other way, out of unionised city plants into rural towns staffed heavily by immigrant workers, and the raid on the Agriprocessors plant at Postville on 12 May 2008 arrested 389 people, then the largest such raid in the country. Water has written the recent chapters: the Great Flood of 1993, the Cedar River cresting at 31.12 feet through Cedar Rapids on 13 June 2008, and the derecho of 10 August 2020, which crossed the state with winds measured up to 140 miles an hour and flattened roughly 850,000 acres of corn in a few hours. Iowa's caucuses became the opening contest of the presidential calendar in 1972, and Carter's 1976 showing made them a national institution. In Varnum v. Brien on 3 April 2009 a unanimous Iowa Supreme Court struck down the ban on same sex marriage, the third state to do so, and voters removed three of those justices in 2010.

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