USA > Iowa > Madison County > History of Madison County, Iowa, and its people, Volume I > Part 2
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The escarpment at the eastern edge of the limestone is one of the unique features of the geology of the county, and is the only one that I know of in lowa that marks the jump from one geological period to another. Just the moment you go out of the limestone you will notice that the country is lower, that the erosion has been greater, the hills longer, the ridges sharper, and the soil is different. The big flat topped divides, which are characteristic of the north- west part of the county, were saved to us by the limestone which resisted the action of the water.
In the western part of the county the glacial drift covered everything deep, and again the country is rough and the ridges sharp because the drift easily erodes. Adair County was covered deep by the drift, and that is what makes it so hilly.
You can trace how Middle River cut its way up the valley bench by bench on the sides of the ravines, for they plainly mark a period of rest from the cutting. One of these benches or terraces the Buffalo Road partially follows. It is very marked on the opposite side of the ravine.
Doubtless at the edge of that escarpment when the river commenced to cut
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HISTORY OF MADISON COUNTY
its way back through the limestone were fine waterfalls. I do not see how any such a place as the Devil's Backbone could have been cut without the presence of falls. But Middle River is now so old that where it cuts through the rock its passage over the different beds is marked only by riffles. Every riffle on a river marks a limestone crossing, or else a different clay bed.
THE GLACIER
And then, after it had cut its deep way through the county the whole North American continent got on a bender. A great climatic change came over it, or it rose up some two thousand feet or more. It was not a "hot time," but this continent certainly elevated itself at least that much more than it now lies above the level of the sea. Some geologists give it almost a mile. Again your guess is just as good as anyone's, and mine as good as that of the most learned geologist. A great ice sheet came pouring down over the country. It was not a glacier such as exists today, but a great ice cap like the one that covers Green- land, and which flows irresistibly like a river. It did things to this country. and to Middle River Valley, but it did not disfigure this section around Winterset anything like it did in other places.
Imagine a great wall of ice, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, two thousand feet thick, flowing down over a land, planing the surface off, obliterat- ing its hills, filling up its valleys, leveling it down like a huge King road drag does the street : that was the Kansan glacier, so called because it was the only one that crossed the Missouri River into Kansas. The continent was covered with successive ice sheets, but Calvin and Bain say that only one of them, the Kansan (it was the first), ever touched Madison County.
Imbedded in its body and on its surface, it bore a vast amount of material- dirt, sand, rock, that it tore from the country to the north. Whenever you find a big red or yellow boulder in this country, or for that matter any kind of a rock that is not limestone, you may be sure the glacier has been there. A boulder or niggerhead was brought here by the ice, and its parent ledge may be way up in Canada, in Minnesota or Northern Wisconsin. Tilton says that the country between Winterset and Peru looks surprisingly like a driftless country, but I have never yet found any great extent of country in the county that is free from glacial drift. What I never saw is a boulder up on top of Middle River's divide. One of the most interesting and exasperating geological problems that you meet in studying the surface of the county is to separate the drift clays from the clays that were left on top of the limestone, when the old carboniferous sea was here. But whenever you find the clay mixed with pebbles you instantly recognize the glacier's work.
If the Kansan glacier did not leave its mark on top of this ridge where Winterset stands it was all around it. The red "niggerheads" that came from Canada and Minnesota, or perhaps from further northeast, strew Buffalo Hollow and Kipp's Hollow is full of them. Cedar has plenty, Many of the surprises that come to the well diggers come from the freaks of that old glacier and it is never safe to count on anything when digging far down into the clays-the glacier may fool you.
HISTORY OF MADISON COUNTY
The drift deposited by the Kansan glacier here, was, to say the least, sur- prisingly thin. It covered the eastern part pretty deep, and the southwest part of the county to the depth of fifty to three or four hundred feet. But right near Winterset its work seems to have been largely confined to erosion. You can find the glacial scratches on the lime rocks, so "Skinner" Rodgers tells me, any place where you start a quarry and get far enough back so you do not hit the weathered rock. I never saw any of them, though when the old state quarry was opened down Kipp's Hollow, I spent all the time I could steal watching them uncover the top rock.
Middle River suffered little from the glacier. Like all the rest of the valleys of the county it lay nearly at right angles to the glacier's course. Calvin thought. and so did Tilton, that when the big glacier swooped down on the country it filled the valleys with ice and then flowed on over their tops. You do not find many big boulders down in the valley. You do find them in the ravines. On the hillside just west of the Hogback Bridge on North River is the biggest boukler I know of in the county. It must be half as large as this room. From the Backbone west the glacier must have plowed the valley full in places, for it is yet half filled. And from the western edge of the county in Adair the stream runs entirely over the drift.
If you are acquainted with the valley at all, you know "The Backbone." The next bridge over the river above it is Bertholf's. About half a mile below that bridge a considerable fork or branch bears off to the southwest. The whole valley is unusually wide at that place, and the limestone has been cut out wider there than any place on the upper valley. Evidently the river forked there once. and a far longer and larger stream bore off to the southwest. The glacier filled the valley completely and the stream now runs down over the drift. 1 called Prof. Calvin's attention to it in 1878 when he was here, and he looked at it with interest. Tilton traced that old valley clear to Macksburg and beyond into the present valley of Grand River, and says that if it was not the larger fork of the river once, it at least was one of considerable size.
When we commenced to improve our city we commenced by getting water works, and commenced right, for city water is essential in your house in this age. if you would live like white folks. But with the blind faith of the ignorant, and utter willingness to risk a $60,000 investment of tax payers' money, with- out the least scientific investigation, we contracted for two wells to be put down on my father's okl farm where a fair sized spring broke through.
That wonkl have been laughable indeed if the $60,000 and the water supply of the city had not depended on it! Water for a city! If it had not been for that old glacier we would not have had enough water in a dry time to water the town cow. The glacier saved the city from a monumental mistake.
When they dug those wells they struck a bed, an eight-foot bed of glacial sand. No one knew it was there before. I was raised on that farm and knew it was there and knew that it was glacial sand, and knew the spring came from it. but never for an instant supposed the sand was over six inches thick.
Go south from the wells down below the old pond known as Dabney's Lake. and to the little nook where the creek or gully turns north. You are in the rocks. The sides of the gully are all drift. It is boulder strewn. Some big
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HISTORY OF MADISON COUNTY
red Sioux quartzite boulders lie along its sides. All the little valley shows excessive glacial action, that is, for this country. In preglacial times the upper reach was doubtless much longer, and probably cut through the Cedar-Middle River Divide and it was probably wider from the rocks up. The glacier filled it up and the water running down over it, and under it when it commenced to recede left a glacial sand bank there. At least that is the way geologists account for other sand banks. Or it may be the shore of a small glacial lake. The sand is full of boulders-small niggerheads-some very odd ones too, and all the usual small pebbles. On its extent, depends whether we shall have a great abundance of that fine, pure water, or whether you will go down in your pockets and dig up another eight or ten thousand dollars to move your water supply. When you do go to investigating for water, I'd advise you to use your influence to get the opinion of some man who has knowledge of the drift, or who would at least use the auger test instead of depending on the bending of a hazel switch to tell him where the water lies.
And while we are talking of city improvements, I'll just say that we should have finished the waterworks, and solved the water problem, and put in sewers before we ever touched the paving of the residence portion of the streets.
If the city council tonight passes that resolution of necessity your taxes will be so high on account of the paving that you would feel like mobbing another that would tax you for sewers and for water supply. Turning a little town into a high class, boulevarded city, makes it very pretty, but it will put a decided crimp into the income of its owners.
When the Kansan glacier receded, Middle River commenced to cut down the drift that partially filled it, and it has done it fairly well, but from Rose- man Bridge it yet runs over the drift in many places, and from the western edge of the county entirely. Whether the upper valley ever had its rock exposed can only be guessed. Jowa was covered by several glaciers after that but none reached here. The last one, the Wisconsin, which must have come thousands of years after ours, came down to the Coon River and planed the country off as smooth as a big floor. Its western edge, the glacial moraine, is marked by great numbers of boulders. One could once almost walk on the boulders of that moraine from Panora to Storm Lake. If the Wisconsin glacier had come down over this country like it did over Dallas County, Middle River would not be here, and its deep valley would have been filled with drift.
THE LOESS
And now we have reached the top soil, the loess, the soil that gives us our corn, our clover, and our living. It is black on top, buff underneath, and covers the country to a depth of three to five feet everywhere. It is fine, without pebbles, contains no limestone, and is not stratified. It grows your roses, and your gardens, for it is rich in plant food. It is black because it has been exposed to the action of the sun and wind, the leaching of rains, and the mixture of humus or vegetable mold. Otherwise it might be yellow or buff, for that is and was its probable original color. It covers the country everywhere, and the rich- ness of your land depends on its thickness.
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HISTORY OF MADISON COUNTY
llow did it get here? Go up into your garret, or rather your garret's garret, the receptacle of your discarded finery, your husband's old trousers, the tomb of many of your financial mistakes, and freaks and fashions of other years. When you crawl into that cubby hole, what do you find? Dirt? Sure! Dust? Yes, certainly : a coating of fine, impalpable dust is over everything. The house has been reasonably well built, and the garret was fairly tight, but the dust is surely there.
Suppose you had let that dust accumulate a thousand years. llow thick would it have been ? Leave it a million years and I grant you that if the timbers retained their original strength, that the garret would be chuck full of dust and that the dust weight would break the joists.
Go out to where your snow bank lay all winter. When that bank disappeared it left on your grass a coating of dirt. Quite a bit more would come in the summer time. Repeat that process a thousand years, ten thousand, half a million years. Ilow thick a coat of dirt would you have? The wind would blow some away, the rain would wash some away, but on the whole you would have every year more than you lost. That is how the loess came here. The wind brought it. There is no other way to account for the loess. Examine it and it is composed of the very finest bits of sand, mostly glacial drift, but it is very fine and there is nothing in it except what the wind carried or could carry. It covers everything and is everywhere, except places where it has been washed away. For years and years it puzzled geologists, but Le Conte, and Calvin and Shimek of our state, all agree that our rich top soil, our good corn land, was brought here by the wind. Some of you remember how the dirt banked up against the hedge rows in the 'Sos in a three-day wind, and those banks are yet plainly visible.
Those of you who have seen the bad lands of Dakota have seen how the wind has cut the land into fantastic shapes and curious forms. In Nebraska 1 saw a sand hill of no mean proportions entirely disappear, and other small ones form. The loess covers the country very much deeper as you approach the Missouri River. The yellow bluffs that line the Missouri River on the eastern side are composed of it.
The loess is very thick in some parts of the county. It is thicker in Penn and Jackson townships than it is here. In parts of the county where the land has been subjected to much erosion on account of the character of the drift it is very thin. Wherever the loess is thin the land may be poor, because the plow either runs into the drift gravel or drift clays or the stubborn residual clays of the carboniferous.
CEMENT
The limestone rock of the county is the greatest asset, though we look at it with indifference. We have allowed the millionaire lumber thieves to steal the forests and cut them down in Minnesota and Wisconsin until they are all gone. Think of the far-sightedness of a Government that would trade magnificent forests of Norway pines for a few millionaires, and a few gaudy palaces they inhabit in St. Paul and Minneapolis and Chicago! They are cutting the hard pine forest of the South now, and it, too, will soon be gone.
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HISTORY OF MADISON COUNTY
In the search for new material with which to build, we have commenced to use cement, and the industry is growing by leaps and bounds. They are finding new uses for it every day. Its manufacture is bound to be the greatest industry in the state. In all the states, and in all the West, except at Bethany, Missouri, and Iola, Kansas, are no such beds of pure limestone as we have right here.
It makes cement that cannot be excelled. Already they have a monster plant in Des Moines and they are carrying fifty cars of rock and shale each day from our quarries on North Branch and making them into cement.
The industry is just begun. It takes no far-sighted person to see that before long every one of the rock exposures of the ravines of Middle River will be quarried for cement. In your lifetime, you will see great steam shovels tearing down the rock, and workmen delving in a dozen quarries. You will see great lime kilns, and dozens of machines crushing rock for Iowa's roads.
The advance in the price of stone land is just as sure to come as was the advance of the price of corn land when corn land was $30 an acre around Winter- set. It will come stealthily, but it will come, just as surely as the forests diminish, and the use of cement grows.
I am no land agent, and yet no boomer. But if you have an investment to make as you would invest in life insurance, or one for your children, go buy some of the stone land. It is our cheapest land. Agriculturally it will always be worth all the money you pay for it, and will be almost certain to increase without considering the rock. Some day the cement trust will buy you out, and if it cannot buy you out, it will find some way to pry you of your holdings.
I believe just as firmly as I believed in 1890 that corn land would be worth some day $100 an acre, that every acre of land that runs along a rock exposure will not only be worth $too an acre, but that it will be worth five times that amount, and sell readily for that.
There, at least, is an American reason for studying the geology of the county. Put on your old shoes, it won't hurt you to get your feet wet, if you take care of yourself, in spite of what the doctors say, and go study the rock exposures. Hunt them up, and see how much rock lies in sight, and how extensive the strip- ping would be. Or if you are not of a practical turn of mind, study the fossils of the different strata and you will grow intensely interested. If you are seeking a fortune, dig into the many shales and clays and burn them. In your experi- ments you might find a new china, or a new pottery, or even a superior brick, as I am almost sure you would. If you are just a student, and would make a name for yourself, study the drift in the county, map its depth, its extent, and tell of the ravages of that Kansan glacier. It has not yet been done, and you have almost a virgin field.
Anyhow, in doing it you have been out of doors with a delightfully interest- ing study, and if you come home with weary feet, and dog tired, you have not lost a day, but have added one to the length of your life.
CHAPTER II INDIANS AND THEIR VILLAGES IN MADISON COUNTY By .A. J. Hoisington
Were it possible by any system of investigation to find out the history of all the peoples who have occupied this country since the beginning of time, men would stand ready for the undertaking. Were it possible to trace an immigra- tion from the North, through British America, throughout our fields of gold and ice, beyond the Behring Straits, southward through Asian lands to some unknown Garden of Eden, as the home and birthspot of the Indian predecessors, men and money would not be wanting in the enterprise. But now it seems the origin of those people is a closed book and no one is found to break the seal thereof.
History, like Nature, has its hilltops, and though one's vision may be shaded by a misty past, much remains within the range of observation and research which may be classified, recorded and bequeathed to those who shall come after. This testament should convey not only the full complement of that which has been received but increased by the results of inquiry, of studies and observa- tions. The present generation stands today upon a natural promontory and the panorama of the past is largely presented in all directions to an extent not reviewed by its predecessors.
The North American Indian was a strange, somewhat contradictory char- acter; in war, daring, cunning, boastful, ruthless ; in peace, cheerful, dignified, superstitious, revengeful; clinging as far as possible to the customs of his fore- fathers. Civilization came as a destroyer. Future generations of the present race will come who shall know him only as a dim, historic figure, around which clusters the mythology of an ancient race.
The folk lore of the American Indians was charmingly rich in legend and tradition. Since the immemorial past those children of Nature read them in the leafy woodland, on the broad prairie, in the blue vault of heaven, in the crimson sunset, in the dark storm-threatening clouds, and in every gentle breeze or sweep- ing hurricane. Each story lived on in the hearts of its people. And here and there on earth's foundation rocks, or on some mighty forest tree, was borne a quaint inscription -
"Full of hope and yet of heart-break. Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter."
Briefly, in the way of introduction to the subject of Indian occupancy of this county, it may be said that before the coming of the Algonquin tribes-Sac,
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HISTORY OF MADISON COUNTY
Foxes and others-the Sioux family tribes roamed over lowa from Missouri to the far away and then unknown North. In the early portion of the last cen- tury, by a treaty of intermediation between the National Government and the then warring tribes-the Sioux tribes on one side and the Algonquin tribes of the other-this portion of lowa was allotted to the Sacs, Foxes and kindred tribes, and thereafter only occasional trouble occurred in this part of the state between the distinctive nations of Indians-the last great battle between them was during the early 'os in Dallas County.
The Sac and Fox tribes remained in exclusive possession of this part of the state but a comparatively short time, but as these tribes were here in occupancy when this region became familiar to large numbers of white people and were the next predecessors, nearly all direct interest in the Indian history of this region centers in them.
The Sac and Fox tribes ceded the last of their lands in Iowa to the United States, of date August 11, 1842, but the treaty of sale provided that they might retain the privilege of occupying all of it until May 1, 1843. And it further pro- vided that they might retain all the territory west of a line running between Wayne and Appanoose counties, between Lucas and Monroe, and through Jasper, Marion, Marshall and Hardin counties to their northern limits until October 11, 1845. Peacefully, quietly, these tribes, who scarce were aborigines, yet wholly alien to the Aryan forces that crowded them beyond the Missouri, as fades the mist of a summer morn, imperceptibly vanished from the fairest and richest lands beneath the circle of the sun. They left no track nor trace, nor impress in all of Madison County that once they owned its soil-that once they built their transient wig- wams along its streams, grew their corn, feasted upon the abundant deer and elk and wild turkey and fish and honey, and buried their dead upon its hills. Even their cemeteries are now almost legendary and the exact location of their villages nearly forgotten. It is indeed, a serious neglect that no writer of Madi- son County history has placed on record a single line concerning the local occu- pancy of those, or any other, tribes of Indians. Though more than sixty years have passed since those Indian days and very few, if any, of the members of those tribes yet live, and scarcely one of the half white trappers who dwelled or traded among them are left to tell their story, much can be gathered of the fragments by one who has the love and zeal for the work. Nowadays, and all hereafter, it is very interesting to peruse the story descriptive of their villages and burial places, their manner of living and the kind of Nature's children they were.
All primitive peoples seek for their more or less temporary abodes a combina- tion of convenient water, timber and meadow land for reasons that are obvious. Thus Madison County, before the devastating hand of the white man touched its Nature molded form, afforded all the Indian needed besides the fruitage of shrub and tree, the catch of its streams, the meats of the chase and the honeyed sweetness of the bee.
Thus the old Indian village on Cedar Creek, in Union Township, at the mouth of Lull's Branch, close north of the creek and west of the branch, on the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of section 21. The site of this village was then wooded without much underbrush, the high and almost sheer bluffs gave protection in winter from the icy blasts, and spring and running water
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HISTORY OF MADISON COUNTY
was abundant. There always was a bit of prairie meadow land in the creek bottom just above and near below, and upon the divide to the north extended. in those days, one of the loveliest prairies of the county. There was much clear timber miles about and the capture of deer and turkey was easy. In the early portion of the last century there were plenty of elk in this portion of the state and furred animals were abundant. This village was maintained all the year round for a long period of time. In the summer season, while the adult men were absent on the chase, or otherwise engaged, the squaws cultivated some corn near by. During the winter season, with the men of the band at home, the time was employed in trapping, caring for the ponies, practicing marksman- ship, but mainly utter idleness prevailed.
Toward the springtime the village would be visited by a fur trader, who was always a welcome visitor, for then he brought them gaudy trinkets and "fire- water" to exchange for furs.
The band of Indians who made this village their home was variously esti- mated at from one to two hundred. About this number was there during the '30s and as late as 1843, the year before the floods throughout the West. This village was abandoned some time before the spring of 1845. for a fur trader that winter found no Indians living or camped thereabouts. But he did find that winter Indians over on Middle River and on North River. He understood that the bands were preparing to move out of the country, because by their treaty they were to vacate by the fall of that year.
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