Today we head to Grinnell, Iowa, a town of 9000 to play the
Grinnell College Pioneers tomorrow. Grinnell College was founded in 1846 and
is now one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. It is also in the
middle of a lot of corn and not much else.
Grinnell is one of two schools in our conference that call
themselves the “Pioneers.” Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin is the other
one. So now, a little about Pioneers in Iowa.
The first official white settlement in Iowa began in 1833 in
land taken from Chief Blackhawk and the Sauk during the Black Hawk War of 1832
(Abraham Lincoln joined fought the Sauk during this war as he was living in
Illinois at the time.) Most of Iowa’s first white settlers came from Ohio,
Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Kentucky, and Virginia in family units. What
they discovered was land far different than that further east. Most of the land
in the eastern United States was heavily forested. Naturalist John Madson
wrote: “It is said that grey squirrel could travel inland from the Atlantic
Coast for nearly a thousand miles and never touch the ground.”
By the time settlers reached northern Illinois and Iowa,
however, they had left the forests behind and entered the American
prairies—huge swathes of treelass grasslands that covered the middle and
western portions of the country. Settlers depended on the forests for building
homes, barns, fences, and providing fuel for warmth and cooking. Without trees
they were reduced to building sod houses and living like moles.
Not only that but grasses in parts of Iowa could grow to 7-8
feet high. Cattle would get lost. Prairie fires were a constant danger as one
lightning strike could start of wall of flames that would sweep through the dry
grass and overtake anything in its path. Even plowing was different and more
difficult than it had been in the east. The roots of the native grasses were so
tough that it could take 3-4 teams of oxen to plow them up on a new farm. Even
once plowed initially by oxen the pioneers had issues as the rich Iowa soil
clung to their traditional iron plows and soon the plow would be mired in mud
in a field. An Illinois blacksmith by the name of John Deere invented a steel
plowshare that was smooth enough that the soil fell from it instead of
clinging. It made plowing much much easier and made John Deere into a brand
recognized worldwide.
By 1870 the lumber problem on the prairie had been solved by
the railroads. The white pine forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin were chopped
down, floated down rivers to sawmills along the Mississippi, the Great Lakes,
and especially Chicago. Selling lumber to prairie farmers was so lucrative that
Chicago boasted that it had more millionaires per population than any other
city in the country.
By 1880 there were settlers from the Mississippi River to
the Missouri river and the pioneer days were over. Many families had begun
their Iowa farms growing and selling wheat, which they ground into flour for
baking or shipped it down the rivers. But because wheat was so heavy, it was
costly to transport and farmers soon discovered that they could earn more
growing corn. They would feed the corn to hogs and sell the hogs at market.
(Again Chicago was a huge part in this and became known as the “hog butcher to
the world.)
It only took about 40 years for the prisitine prairies of
the Native Americans to be covered in small farms. Most of the native plants
disappeared and were replaced by corn, which now we get to drive through for five hours on our way west.
Luckily, tomorrow we do not have to spend our time at the sawmill buying fence posts, or sweeping out the sod house, or sod busting so we can grow corn to feed our hogs. We get to play a game on some beautiful green grass out here on the wide open prairie.
