Prairie Pioneers

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.