Iowa geography and history

Contour farming enhances the rolling landscape.

Pure American Prairie  As you slip south of the Great Lakes, traveling west, somewhere in Illinois you all of a sudden realize that the woods are receding and the groves are farther apart. The trees look shorter, the sky looks bigger, and the horizon looks farther away. This Illini prairie wedge is preparing your senses for the "splendor in the grassland" that is Iowa (... apologies to Elia Kazan)!

Boundaries defined by the two great Western rivers  Iowa looks more like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle than most states. If the states were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Iowa's squiggly left and right sides would squeeze between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, fitting snugly on top of Missouri, and capped by Minnesota. Did you notice that Iowa is bordered by four "m" words?

This breadbasket has fed billions  "Rolling prairie, the homesteaders called it. Part of the greatest unbroken, unspoiled expanse of land found anywhere in the world -- that area of this wonderfully new, pure continent that was to become the breadbasket of the world. A land distinguished by the wonderfully rich soil that would feed billions. A land nurtured by its native peoples. Absolutely unspoiled.... One can still see the land as the pioneers saw it. Marvelous. Quiet. Stretching endlessly. Verdant. Grasses swaying in the ever-present wind. Having come from the worn-out lands of Europe, how wonderful this rolling prairie must have seemed to those people of no fear." ~Kent Baker, "A Stroll across Hillside Farm," in Glimpses: Iowa's Rural Legacy, p. 72.

90 percent of Iowa's landscape is devoted to agriculture. Contour farming magnifies the visual impact of a rolling landscape, as this aerial photo from the archives of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service shows.

The greatest story never told  Apropos of our Iowa breadbasket, Dumas Malone, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Thomas Jefferson, once told journalist Hugh Sidey, "So much of recorded history is about the struggle of individuals and families to feed themselves. That changed dramatically in this country. The greatness of this country was rooted in the fact that a single farmer could produce an abundance of food the likes of which the world had never seen or imagined and so free the energies of countless others to do other things." It's the greatest story never told, in Hugh Sidey's opinion.

Iowa's changing landscape since the early 1800s  The Iowa that Lewis and Clark encountered in their journey up the Missouri River was carpeted by prairie grasses so dense that there was no room for bushes or trees to take advantage of the unbroken soil. Periodic fires swept through the grasslands, keeping bushes and trees at bay. Since the Corps of Discovery went through the region, Iowa's landscape has gone through three overlapping transformations.

• Settlement: In the early 1830s, the territory was opened by Congress for settlement. The surveyors' straight chain was imposed on the rolling landscape. Land rushes resulted in pioneers churning up the tall-grass prairie, transforming the rolling hills into angular croplands. There were few conservation measures, and much rich, black topsoil ended up washing downstream into the Gulf of Mexico, where it found its graveyard in the Mississippi River Delta. 
• The New Deal: One hundred years later, the New Deal brought widespread conservation measures to the Hawkeye State. Contour farming became the practice. Rows of trees were planted to act as windbreaks. It's surprising to see how many old trees still grow at the edges of fields. Farmers needed shade from the scorching summers and windbreaks from the freezing winters, as Kent Baker notes [p. 73]. The lack of prairie fires that once swept through the region also allowed the trees to persist.
• Turning silos into smokestacks: The family farm has been disappearing, replaced in recent decades by agribusiness and factories. In Waterloo, for example, you can see John Deere tractors being assembled. John Deere, the world’s leading manufacturer of agricultural tractors, is the sole tractor manufacturing plant left in the world that retains its founder’s name. 



Native Iowan Henry A. Wallace

Henry A. Wallace  This native son of Adair County took his degree from Iowa State University, where he was trained as a plant scientist. In rapid succession he served as FDR's secretary of agriculture, secretary of commerce, and second vice president -- before running for president in his own right in 1948. Words associated with the Secretary of Agriculture (from an Iowa monument to their native son): prairie restoration, terracing, contours, erosion control, soil restitution, crop rotation, single-cross hybrid seed, farm ponds, woodland restoration, first U.S. Soil Conservation District.

Big tractors, corn, soybeans, hay -- that's Iowa, which bills itself the "Food Capital of the World." It's the kind of place where, if you spend any time there, you should know the difference between a John Deere A and a John Deere B.

At the edge of a rural neighborhood.

Transformation of farms  If you talk to people whose families have farmed in Iowa a long time, you learn that two twentieth-century developments made all the difference in rural America: technologically, tractors replaced horses by the end of World War II, bringing much more power to farming; genetically, hybrids replaced older plants, producing superior crops that could grow through disease, drought, and grasshoppers. ~Neil E. Harl, Introduction, Glimpses, pp. 7-8.

Neighboring skills  Iowa is the kind of place where a lot of people live in identifiable rural neighborhoods. (Think about that word -- an area where people know each other by name and sight and are often "neighborly.") Traditionally at the center of an Iowan rural neighborhood were two institutions: a one-room schoolhouse and a church. A 4-H club might meet nearby. Rural sociologists, studying the cooperative nature of these remote neighborhoods, have observed the "little platoons" people form to help one another. But in recent decades the decline of "neighboring skills" has been noticeable. ~Jack Van Laar, "Maple Grove -- A Rural Neighborhood," in Glimpses, pp. 13-16.

Land of rural towns  People justifiably think of Iowa as an agricultural state. Yet, improbably, Iowa lays claim to 950 towns and small cities -- more than any state but Texas. [LaVon Griffieon, "Let's Keep the 'I' in Iowa," in Glimpses, p. 118.] I don't believe it. As I travel I-80, the nation's greatest, most historic, east-west transportation corridor, I just don't see that many towns.

In the case of I-80, the kitsch is countered by a historic transportation corridor that follows the journey of the American Dream into the West. The Mormon Handcart Trail was blazed across Iowa near I-80, and it approximates the later Lincoln Highway, the nation's first coast-to-coast road. West of the Missouri River, I-80 approximates the Oregon and California trails, and is associated with the first Transcontinental Railroad.

I-80  It is fashionable to blast travel by interstate as kitschy, soul-sucking monotony. But the Interstate-80 corridor, connecting New York and San Francisco via Chicagoland, is one of the great conduits through which our nation's history has pulsed. America's second-longest interstate highway, I-80 most closely approximates the route of the historic Lincoln Highway, the first road across America; and it roughly traces other historically significant travel routes into the West: the Oregon Trail, California Trail, Mormon Trail, Pony Express, and first Transcontinental Railroad.

Cities  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010 the United States had 275 cities with a population of more than 100,000 people. Iowa has only two cities that make the list: Des Moines is ranked 106th with 203,000 people; and Cedar Rapids is 196th with 126,000 people.

Iconic Iowa: Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

American Gothic  Speaking of which, Cedar Rapids is famous for the most iconic work of art ever associated with Iowa. Grant Wood's American Gothic, one of the most parodied paintings of the 20th century, was created in 1930. A product of the Great Depression, American Gothic depicts an Iowa father and his daughter (modeled after Wood's dentist and sister) expressing grim determination to get through hard times. Many modernist critics believed the painting's "deeper" meaning amounted to a satire of the Midwest's provincial lifeways, but apparently Wood was not aiming at social criticism. You can decide for yourself if you go to the Art Institute of Chicago to see the painting.

Hawkeyes  The logo on Iowa football helmets is called the Tigerhawk. The mascot is named "Herky the Hawk." Both are traditions that developed after World War II. But the nickname "Hawkeye" was actually coined in the 1830s to commemorate Chief Black Hawk of Black Hawk War fame.

Pie shakes  An Iowa original. Can't miss 'em!

Iowa's Loess Hills present some of the best loess (windblown silt) topography in the world. You can see picturesque landforms carved out of loess on the western rim of the state above the Missouri River floodplain in places like Council Bluffs and Sioux City. (Again, the Plains are not flat!) Abraham Lincoln ascended Council Bluffs to inspect a potential site for the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad. And Sargeant Charles Floyd, the only fatality in Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery, was buried in the Loess Hills above Sioux City. The silty deposits came about during the Pleistocene, when continental glaciers ground down rocks to the consistency of flour. When the glaciers retreated and the vast meltwater lakes receded, winds blew the floury silt that had lined the lakebeds into dunes mostly on the east side of the Missouri River floodplain. In many places, the silt deposits are more than 90 feet thick, and erosion has sculpted the loess into fantastic ridges.

Splendor in the Grassland

Iowa in August  County fairs, butter cows, bikers on their way to Sturgis (South Dakota), and the quadrennial straw poll mark the waning days of summer in the Hawkeye state.

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Bibliography  Iowans have great pride in their landscape, which is one of the reasons I enjoy visiting the Hawkeye State. Two gems edited by Robert F. Sayre include, Take This Exit: Rediscovering the Iowa Landscape (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989); and Take the Next Exit: New Views of the Iowa Landscape (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000).

Another little gem I found, on the Mississippi River overlook near the Quad Cities, is Glimpses: Iowa's Rural Legacy (Ames: Iowa Farm Business Association, 2004).

Great Plains geography 4

The loneliness of the land: Rick Dunn's photograph of the Pawnee Buttes, east of Fort Collins, Colorado. Although Colorado is regarded as the Rocky Mountain state, almost half of it extends into the Great Plains. (See Rick Dunn's essay that accompanies this photo.)


The best synonyms for the "Great Plains" are "High Plains" and "western sea of grass." James Fenimore Cooper referred to the region as "the Great Prairies west of the Mississippi" [The Last of the Mohicans, 1826, Introduction]. Other synonyms are sometimes used in popular parlance but they don't work well:

Misleading characterization 1: Great Plains = Great American Desert
The Great Plains go through periodic droughts that seem to turn the region into a wasteland. West Texas is experiencing such a drought as I write. [See article here.] But humans have also contributed to the catastrophes of the last 150 years, especially because of the over-extension of grazing and of deep plowing. As a result, ordinary drought cycles such as occurred in the second half of the 19th century were magnified during the first half of the twentieth century. One catastrophe was the so-called Dust Bowl. Such catastrophes are relatively rare. In most years since Anglo-American encroachment, the Great Plains have received adequate rainfall during the growing season to support a harvest of wheat. The eastern part of the region is wetter, an ecological garden, a veritable breadbasket. So where did the term, "Great American Desert," come from? In 1819 President James Monroe sent an American explorer named Stephen Long to explore the west. He trekked through the Great Plains in a dry spell and believed the land was inhospitable, and so labeled the region west of the 98th Meridian the Great American Desert. The moniker lasted from the 1820s to the 1870s. It's another way an early president of our nation had a surprising impact, this time on the perception of the Great Plains.

Major Stephen Long's 1820 map of the "Great American Desert." The Great Plains comprise the easternmost third of the arid Great American Desert and Great Basin.

Dust Bowl

Misleading characterization 2: Great Plains = the prairie
It would be more accurate to say that the Great Plains = shortgrass prairie. As the map below shows, the vast prairies of North America are not coterminous with the Great Plains but extend considerably to the east of the region. At the time of Columbus, the famous "prairie wedge" speared east of the Mississippi River into Illinois. In addition, there were numerous prairies islands east of the Mississippi River. But Illinois's prairie wedge and the prairie islands farther east should not be considered High Plains. Note on the map below the curious extent of prairie in Michigan, where tallgrass prairies thrived in glacially deposited, sandy, outwash plains in Newago County where the Muskegon River flows. Eventually it morphed into the so-called Big Prairie Desert because of the extent of sand and sparce vegetation. It is misleadingly regarded as the largest "desert" east of the Mississippi River.

Extent of indigenous shortgrass prairie (light green), mixed prairie grasses, and tallgrass prairie (dark green) at the time of Europeans' arrival in the Americas. A safe generalization is that the eastern extent of the Great Plains began where the tallgrass prairie ended. The climate is wetter where the tallgrass prairie thrives, and drier where the shortgrass prairie grows.

Misleading characterization 3: Great Plains = Tornado Alley
Children who see the classic, The Wizard of Oz, know Kansas has killer tornadoes. Among Great Plains states, Oklahoma is even more torn up by twisters than Kansas is. But the farther north and west one travels on the High Plains, the more rare tornadoes are. Indeed, the northern Great Plains are one of the safer places to live east of the Rockies if you are lilapsophobic.

The U.S. has at least four Tornado Alleys. The one on the Great Plains goes from north-south -- down through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. An even deadlier alley straddles the Deep South -- extending east-west across Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Note that the Great Plains state of Oklahoma is the junction of these deadly Tornado Alleys. But the farther north one goes on the High Plains, the rarer tornadoes are. Boston, Massachusetts, has far more tornadoes than Billings, Montana.  

There are far more night twisters in the Deep South's Tornado Alley than in the Great Plains' Tornado Alley.

Misleading characterization 4: Great Plains = Corn Belt

Although the Corn Palace is in Mitchell, South Dakota, corn only thrives in the bottomlands and irrigated tracts of the High Plains. True, the eastern part of the Great Plains has the climate, soil, and water to grow robust harvests of corn. Yet the High Plains are better known for spring and winter wheat. They are really part of the wheat belt because wheat can withstand arid conditions better than corn can. And because wheat grows here, there are cattle -- lots of cattle. Great Plains wheat sustained the long cattle drives after the Civil War. Not many people know that Theodore Roosevelt spent time as a cattleman on the Great Plains. Retreating from civilization after the deaths of his wife and mother on Valentine's Day, 1884, TR resigned from the New York Assembly and went to Dakota Territory where he invested in two ranches and worked as a cowboy.

Corn grows well in the eastern parts of the Great Plains, as well as in the bottomlands of the High Plains, but the region is better known for wheat and the cattle fattened by it.



Misleading characterization 5: Great Plains = Midwest
For the practical needs of the classroom, teachers break down the Continental U.S. into manageable chunks of states. Somewhat arbitrarily, they have drawn a line around a bloc of 12 states in the north-central part of the nation -- from Ohio and Michigan in the east to Kansas and North Dakota in the west -- and labeled them "the Midwest." Only four of the Great Plains states are technically in the Midwest: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. Even these states have more of a western than a midwestern feel, what with their rodeos and rangeland the closer one gets to the Rockies. The High Plains also extend into three states of the Southwest -- Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- as well into three states of the Mountain West: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. So the Great Plains stretch across three somewhat artificially designated regions. Depending on the place, one can feel the tug of the Midwest, West, and Southwest in the grasslands.

From the perspective of elementary geography textbooks, the Great Plains spread across three major geographic provinces. The Great Plains include the westernmost states of the Midwest (in red) -- North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. This western sea of grass also stretches into parts of the Southwest and Mountain West.

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SOURCES

For the Internet source of each photograph, map, and illustration used in this essay, click on the image.

Additional sources that I consulted are available through the hyperlinks in the text, or below.

For a bibliography of Great Plains geography, consult http://libguides.emporia.edu/content.php?pid=60124

Oklahoma is discussed at http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/G/GR015.html

Theodore Roosevelt, cowboy
"I never would have been president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota."

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This photo-essay is part of a series on Great Plains geography.