Mississippi River From Pike's Peak
Map of Western North America, ca. 1790
Europeans Come to Iowa
Influence of European Culture
Conflict Between Cultures
European Explorers Meet Early Iowans
Spanish Meet Indians
French and Early Iowans
Early French Explorers Visit Iowa
Explorers Meet Iowa Natives
La Salle Claims Land for France
Dubuque Seeks OpportunityEarly Explorers
In
the late 1600s European explorers began paddling up and down the Mississippi
River, passing along Iowa’s eastern border. The first two major expeditions
were by Frenchmen. In 1673 Louis Jolliet led a crew down the Fox River from
Lake Michigan. They crossed over to the Wisconsin River and sailed southwest
into uncharted territory. Father Marquette, a Catholic priest who accompanied
the expedition, kept a diary. On June 17 he recorded that the group reached
the mouth of the Wisconsin River where it flows into the Mississippi. Across
the river were high bluffs covered with heavy forests. Today that site includes
Pike’s Peak State Park near the town of McGregor.
Marquette and Joliet in Iowa
The Marquette and Joliet expedition were the first Europeans to visit Iowa. They came ashore on the west bank of the Mississippi farther downstream and met some Illinois Indians. The men continued down the Mississippi until they were certain that the river flowed into the Gulf of Mexico and not the Pacific Ocean. Fearing conflicts with the Spanish, the expedition turned around and returned to Canada to report their findings.
French Land Claims
Nine years later, René-Robert-Cavelier,
Sieur de La Salle, better known simply as La Salle, sailed from the Great
Lakes, up the St. Lawrence River, through the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico
to the mouth of the Mississippi River. There he raised a French flag and claimed
all of the lands drained by the Mississippi for France. That included all
the land from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian Mountains, from the Great
Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. He named the region Louisiana for the French
king, Louis XIV (Louis the Fourteenth).
Claiming this huge territory for France did not mean that the French wanted
to live there. A claim was a warning to other European nations to stay away.
It did not mean that the French wanted the Indians to leave. It declared that
France would not tolerate settlers from other countries living there or trading
with the Indians. European claims meant very little to the Indians living
there at the time, although they would become important in the future.
Trappers and traders began exploring the rivers that fed into the great Mississippi.
The French established some trading posts along the river that would grow
into towns and then cities. The names of these outposts reflect their French
roots—St. Paul, Prairie du Chien (Prairie of the Dog) and St. Louis.
British and French at War
In the 1700s Britain and France fought with each other as they attempted to establish worldwide empires. The British established colonies along the east coast of North America while the French settled along the St. Lawrence River in Canada. Both nations wanted to control the fur trade around the Great Lakes. In 1756 a war broke out between these two rivals. Fearing the loss of the entire region, France secretly transferred its claim to the lands west of the Mississippi (including Iowa) to Spain. With a final British victory in 1763, France gave up claim to lands in North America, but it prevented Britain from extending its empire across the continent.
Julien Dubuque's Lead Mines
In the 1780s a young Frenchman named
Julien Dubuque learned that there were rich deposits of lead ore on the west
side of the Mississippi near Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin. Lead was valuable
because it was used to make ammunition for guns and cannons. The Mesquakie
Indians owned the land. In exchange for gifts the Mesquakie allowed Dubuque
to live among them and to mine the ore. Dubuque set up lead mines near the
location of the city that bears his name. Women and old men from the Mesquakie
tribe dug the lead ore from the ground. Dubuque and his French assistants
melted the ore and poured it into metal bars called “pigs.” The
pigs were floated down the Mississippi and sold in St. Louis, along with furs.
When Dubuque died, he was buried near his Iowa home.
The American colonies revolted against Britain in 1776. With their victory
in 1781 a new nation emerged—the United States—that was not part
of any European empire. Its original boundaries extended west to the Mississippi
River. In 1803 the United States nearly doubled its size with the purchase
of the land from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. France, who had reclaimed
the land from Spain, sold this huge tract for $15 million.
Lewis and Clark
To learn more about the area, President
Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to sail up
the Missouri River and on to the Pacific Ocean. They set out from St. Louis
in the spring of 1804 with 29 men and Captain Lewis’s dog, Seaman. Their
orders were to record information about Indian tribes living in the area,
the best places for forts and trading posts, native plants and animals, and
the land. By summer they were traveling along the river’s twists and
turns on Iowa’s western border. Charles Floyd was a sergeant in the
expedition. Near the site of present-day Sioux City, Charles became very sick.
On August 20 he died and was buried in a gravesite overlooking the river.
He was the only man to die on the expedition.
Lewis and Clark pushed up to the mouth of the Missouri in present-day Montana.
There they portaged their supplies to the headwaters of a river flowing west
to the Pacific. On November 7, 1805, they got their first glimpse of the Pacific.
Clark wrote in his diary: “Ocean in view! O! The joy!” The crew
headed back in the spring of 1806 and arrived in St. Louis in September. They
had traveled over 8,000 miles. They became national heroes and the information
they brought back encouraged many more to head west.
Exploring Iowa—the Land of Strawberries and Cream
In 1805, while Lewis and Clark were
still out west, another American military officer set out to visit the northern
stretches of the Mississippi. Zebulon Pike left St. Louis and explored both
sides of the great river, past Iowa and into central Minnesota. He too identified
key points for forts and trading posts.
In the early summer of 1835, a small group of soldiers on horseback explored
the valley of the Des Moines River as far as present-day Des Moines and then
up to Ft. Dodge. Modern highway signs mark their route as the Dragoon Trail.
They took along a cow to provide milk and cream as they traveled. One day,
their horses rode through beds of ripe wild strawberries so thick that their
hooves were stained bright red at the end of the day. That night the soldiers
picked heaps of berries for supper and feasted on strawberries and fresh cream.
To some Iowa was a land of milk and honey. To those early soldiers it was
the land of strawberries and cream!
Rivers were the early highways bringing explorers, trappers, traders and then
settlers to Iowa. It would be almost 150 years after Marquette and Joliet
sailed down Iowa’s eastern border before white settlers began moving
inland to farm Iowa’s incredibly rich topsoil. Because Iowa is indeed
“the land between two rivers”—the Mississippi and Missouri
Rivers—the river borders were familiar long before settlers knew what
lay in the interior.
