If you were to stand right in the middle of Iowa
about 16 ,000 years ago, you definitely would
not be looking at perfectly straight green rows
of corn stretching to the horizon. No, not even
close. Right. You wouldn't see a farm at all.
You'd actually be standing on top of a massive
glacier just staring out at this frozen Arctic
wasteland. Ice as far as the eye could see. Exactly.
Welcome to this deep dive. Today, our mission
is to basically give you a shortcut to being
genuinely well -informed about a place that is
so often stereotyped as just endless, quiet agriculture.
Yeah, the endless cornfield stereotype. We are
diving into a really comprehensive historical
text on the history of Iowa, and the landscape
we are uncovering is, well, it's chaotic, dramatic,
and anything but settled. It's an incredible
starting point honestly because the physical
thawing of that glacial ice perfectly mirrors
the transformation of the human beings who live
there. Oh that makes total sense. Yeah. So around
12 ,000 years ago, as the Pleistocene Epoch ended
and temperatures finally rose, those massive
ice sheets retreated. And the earliest Native
Americans in this region had to figure out how
to survive a world that was literally melting
beneath their feet. OK, let's unpack this for
a second, because going from surviving on a frozen
tundra to the complex agricultural society we
eventually see, that is a massive leap. How exactly
did they adapt? Well, I mean, it didn't happen
overnight, obviously. But the warming climate
allowed for what archaeologists call the Woodland
Period. Over thousands of years, these nomadic
hunter -gatherers figured out that if they domesticated
certain plants, most importantly maize or corn,
they didn't have to endlessly chase migrating
herds. Because agriculture is basically a technology.
Exactly. Once you have a reliable, storable food
source, you can stop moving. And when you start
moving, you can build. Wow. They started constructing
these massive earth They developed really intricate
ceramics because, you know, they no longer had
to carry all their possessions on their backs.
They didn't have to pack up every week. Right.
They fundamentally terraformed their entire way
of life to match the thawing earth. which brings
up the specific nations cultivating this land
just before European arrival. I mean, the state
itself gets its name from the Aiwei tribe. Yeah,
the Aiwei. According to our sources, by the 1700s,
this was a highly organized group of about 1
,000 to 1 ,500 people. They were building villages
in the wooded areas near rivers. And they weren't
just hunting, right? No, they were actively managing
the landscape, farming corn, squash, beans. And
this is wild engineering. deep underground pits
to store their harvests. The material culture
was just quite sophisticated. I mean, families
were eating from bowls carved out of bison horns
and women were cooking in these specialized clay
pots. It's a whole thriving society. It really
was. And it's in this era that we see the first
recorded contact with Europeans. In 1673, two
French explorers, Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette,
arrived on the eastern edge of what is now Iowa.
I was really struck by the historical accounts
of that meeting in the text. It notes they were
met by the Illinois tribe who showed the Frenchmen
every possible manifestation of joy. Yeah, it
wasn't hostile at all. Not at all. The indigenous
people offered them peace and hospitality. But,
you know, looking at the timeline, that initial
joy evaporates completely as European expansion
accelerates. It really does. I want to jump to
the Blackhawk War of 1832. Blackhawk. who is
a respected Sauk leader, tries to return to his
people's ancestral village of Saukanoak after
they were forced out. Right. And the notes say
he sent men under a white flag of truce to parlay
with the Illinois militia. But the militia just
opened fire on the truce flag. They did, yeah.
You have to understand that this militia... It
wasn't some disciplined regular army. Oh, they
were volunteers. Mostly, yeah. It was comprised
largely of frontier volunteers who were panicked,
inexperienced, and deeply hostile. Firing on
a flag of truth threw the whole situation into
absolute chaos. Just a total breakdown of the
rules of engagement. Exactly. It sparked a war
that ended in a horrific massacre of the remaining
Sauk people on the Bad Axe River. The historical
record even indicates they fired on Blackhawk
after he personally raised a white flag. And
the federal government follows that up with the
Blackhawk purchase, which officially forces the
Native Americans out of Eastern Iowa. But wait,
I was looking at the modern map in our source
materials, and it clearly states that the Meskwaki
people currently own about 8 ,600 acres of land
in Tomah County, Iowa. They do, yes. How is that
possible if they were legally and violently exiled
by the Black Hawk Purchase? That is one of the
most remarkable acts of resilience in this entire
text, honestly. Decades after being violently
removed, a group of Meskwaki people simply refused
to accept the exile. They just came back. They
quietly returned to Iowa, pooled together exactly
$735 of their own money and went straight to
the state's governor, James Grimes. Wait, they
went directly to the governor? Yeah. Yeah. They
asked for the legal right to purchase their own
ancestral land back on the open market. OK, let's
unpack this. That is exactly like a tenant being
wrongfully, violently evicted from their own
family home only to save up their pennies, walk
back to the landlord and buy the property out
from under them. It completely subverts the standard
narrative of absolute defeat, doesn't it? Totally.
What's fascinating here is the geopolitical shift
happening just beneath the surface of these events.
If we zoom out... The Native Americans in Iowa
weren't just fighting local European settlers.
Right, they were bigger forces. Yeah, they were
caught in a massive, continent -wide domino effect.
Decades earlier, the French pushed into the Great
Lakes region demanding furs. Which armed the
Eastern tribes with guns. Right, exactly. And
that pushed the Sauk and Musquaki westward into
Iowa. Then, when the Sauk and Musquaki arrived,
they clashed with the Iowa, pushing the Iowa
even further west. So you're looking at a chain
reaction of displacement driven entirely by global
colonial markets. And the final domino in that
sequence officially opened Iowa to Euro -American
settlement in 1833. But the settlers rushing
across the Mississippi River faced an environment
they were totally unprepared for. Completely
unprepared. Our sources highlight that settlers
coming from the East Coast expected the lush,
heavy forests of Pennsylvania or Ohio. Instead,
they walked into the tall grass prairie. There
was almost no timber. Just grass. Yeah. How do
you build a house or a fence or heat your home
through an Arctic Midwestern winter without wood?
Well, you improvise. And this is where we see
the invention of the soddy. The sod house. Right.
Settlers literally cut bricks out of the dense
prairie sod and dirt and just stack them up to
build homes. The text mentions some people praise
them for being well insulated against the cold,
but it also describes them as dark. damp and
constantly raining dirt and bugs down on the
family sleeping inside. Yeah, it wasn't exactly
glamorous. Then the fuel situation is even wilder
because there was no wood to chop. They burned
dried prairie hay, corn cobs, and I had to read
this twice dried animal droppings. Buffalo chips
and dried cow manure. Wow. I mean, when you are
surviving in a freezing, wind -swept environment
with zero timber, you utilize whatever combustible
carbon you can find. Makes sense. It was a harsh,
unforgiving landscape. And that lack of physical
boundaries bred a very specific kind of frontier
chaos. They were trying to build the rule of
law from scratch. Which totally frames the Honey
War of 1839. Oh, the Honey War. I love this part.
careless surveyor messes up the border between
the Iowa territory and Missouri. Missouri decides
the border is actually further north and tries
to send tax collectors into the disputed zone.
Naturally. And Iowans refuse to pay. So impatient
Missourians cross the invisible border and start
chopping down bee trees to steal the honey as
a form of tax collection. And the escalation
from there is just a perfect snapshot of frontier
society. Right. I mean, in retaliation for the
stolen honey, Iowans march south armed with pitchforks
and bats. Imagine a modern neighborhood property
line dispute escalating into a literal militia
standoff over a beehive. It's absurd. It is.
They end up freezing in the cold and deserting
the next night. And the United States Supreme
Court eventually has to step in and legally define
the border. It sounds crazy to us now, but these
moments, relying on animal droppings for heat,
militias mobilizing over honey, they show a deeply
improvised society desperate to establish boundaries
before they even achieve statehood in 1846. Yeah.
But you also see this improvised frontier justice
operating in much darker, higher -stays contexts.
Look at the story of Ralph. This is a really
profound moment in the text. So in 1834, an enslaved
man named Ralph makes a contract with his enslaver
in Missouri. He's allowed to travel north to
work in the Dubuque, Iowa lead mines to buy his
freedom for $100. Right. He works for five years,
but just can't accumulate the money. So bounty
hunters grab him to drag him back south. But
a local merchant named Alexander Butterworth
sees the kidnapping happening. And he steps in.
Yeah, he immediately runs to a local judge and
gets a writ of habeas corpus. Let's clarify that
term for the listener. That essentially means
the judge issued a legal order forcing the bounty
hunters to physically produce Ralph. in court
before they could flee the territory, right?
Exactly. It prevents illegal detention. Butterworth
uses this writ to literally rescue Ralph off
a riverboat just before it departs down the Mississippi.
Just in the nick of time. Yeah. And in 1839,
the Iowa Supreme Court hears the case. This is
their very first decided case as a judicial body.
Their first case ever. Their first ever. They
examine the law and rule that because Ralph was
permitted to travel to a free territory, he could
not be treated as property or a fugitive. They
ruled him a free man. It's incredible. Even in
this messy dirt floor frontier territory, individuals
were actively utilizing the courts to draw a
hard legal boundary around human rights while
the rest of the nation was hurtling toward the
Civil War. But to survive that looming war and
to integrate into the national economy, Iowa
had to solve its geographical isolation. I mean,
they were entirely landlocked. Right. Enter the
railroad. The shift here is staggering. Track
laid in Iowa explodes from just 68 miles in 1855
to 655 miles by 1860. A massive jump. Huge. And
the very first bridge across the Mississippi
River is built in 1856, though in classic chaotic
frontier fashion, a steamboat immediately crashes
into it and catches fire. Of course it does.
The Supreme Court actually had to step in again
and legally rule that building bridges over navigable
rivers was allowed. Well the railroad didn't
just solve their transportation problem it fundamentally
altered space and time for the Midwestern farmer.
How so? Previously if you grew excess corn it
might just rot because you couldn't move it over
muddy rutted trails. Trains provided year -round
high -speed transport for corn beef and pork
directly to the massive markets in Chicago and
from there to the rest of the world. It sparked
massive industrialization. Exactly. John and
Robert Stewart start an oats processing plant
in Cedar Rapids that eventually becomes the global
giant Quaker Oats. Oh wow. Yeah and because trains
need fuel a massive coal mining industry detonates
across the state. You know I was looking at the
enlistment numbers for the Civil War in our notes.
Iowa heavily supported the Union sending over
75 ,000 soldiers but I scanned the historical
maps and I couldn't find a single major Civil
War battlefield inside Iowa's borders. Right
there weren't any. So what exactly was their
strategic role? If we connect this to the bigger
picture, wars are won on logistics. Armies run
on calories. Because of the railroad boom, Iowa
became the Union's breadbasket. The wartime economy
caused grain prices to absolutely spike, and
the rail network allowed Iowa to pump massive
amounts of food eastward to sustain the troops
and the industrial cities. Those they fed the
war effort. Precisely. They transitioned from
isolated subsistence farming into an industrialized
global food supplier at the exact moment the
nation's survival depended on it. And the demographics
of the troops they sent are fascinating, too.
The text details a unit called the Greybeards,
the 37th Iowa Infantry. Yes, the Greybeards.
These were specifically recruited men over the
age of 45. Their average age was 57, and some
were in their 60s. Why recruit men that age?
Because the state was draining its young labor
pool to fight on the front lines, they needed
older men to take over guard duty, protecting
the vital supply trains and cities back home.
The text also highlights the 60th Colored Infantry,
formed by African American men from Iowa. Despite
enduring terrible conditions and systemic disease,
they successfully repelled an ambush by 1 ,500
southern troops in Arkansas. Which is incredible.
Yeah, they were fighting for a nation that was
still heavily segregated. And when those troops
came home, the industrial and agricultural boom
didn't stop. It actually accelerated. But the
railroads and the new coal mines required massive
amounts of manual labor. They needed more people.
Right. The young state simply did not have the
population to sustain its own growth. Here's
where it gets really interesting. Facing a massive
labor shortage, 19th century Iowa essentially
launches an aggressive international corporate
marketing campaign. They really did. In 1870,
they create a board of immigration that prints
promotional booklets in five different languages,
English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish.
Yeah, they are actively competing with other
states to pull people from across the globe onto
the prairie. It completely shatters the modern
assumption we have of a historically homogenous,
native -born Midwest. The resulting diversity
was staggering, honestly, and it was driven by
complex push and pull factors. You have economic
desperation in Europe pushing people out and
targeted corporate recruitment in Iowa pulling
them in. Take the Dutch, for example. The text
notes they were fleeing a potato crop failure
in Europe, combined with a search for religious
freedom, and they end up founding the town of
Pella, Iowa. Or the Utopians. Oh yeah. You have
French socialists founding a colony called Acaria,
and then you have the Amana colonies. The Amana
colonies are a fascinating case study. The notes
say these were German pietists who practiced
strict communal living, essentially communism,
all the way until 1932. But then they suddenly
pivoted to manufacturing household appliances.
How does a religious agrarian commune become
a commercial appliance brand? It comes down to
survival. By 1932, the Great Depression had absolutely
bankrupted their communal agricultural model.
They were starving. So what did they do? The
community held a vote and enacted what they called
the Great Change. They abandoned the communal
economy. formed a joint stock corporation and
utilized their existing highly skilled metalworking
and craft shops to begin manufacturing commercial
refrigeration. That is such a pivot. Isn't it?
Yeah. They adapted their community to survive
a global economic collapse. We also see targeted
corporate recruitment completely shifting demographics.
In the early 1900s, national restrictions were
choking off. European immigration. Right. So
the American beet sugar company, desperate for
labor in north central Iowa, begins actively
recruiting Latinos, specifically from Mexico,
to perform backbreaking manual labor in the fields
and on the rail lines. And African Americans
were similarly recruited. In the 1880s, southern
Iowa coal companies brought black workers up
from the American south, initially as strikebreakers.
Yeah. And this migration led to the creation
of unique, predominantly black, thriving coal
towns. in Iowa, like Buxton. Later, during World
Wars I and II, federal military training camps
located in Des Moines introduced thousands more
black families to the state. But building your
entire state economy on global exports and international
labor comes with a massive vulnerability. I mean,
when the globe hiccups... Iowa feels it in its
bones. The 20th and 21st centuries look like
an absolute economic roller coaster. Because
they are deeply integrated into the world market.
During World War I, the federal government urges
farmers to patriotically increase food production
for the allies. So they expand. Exactly. Farmers
take on heavy debt to buy more land and tractors.
But when the war ends, European agriculture recovers,
global demand plummets, and the 1920s bring a
devastating crash. The numbers in the text are
brutal. At one point, the price of corn hits
10 cents a bushel. It was literally cheaper for
farmers to burn their own corn to heat their
homes than to sell it and buy coal. It's hard
to even imagine. Farmers were so desperate that
a group called the Farmers' Holiday Association
started setting up blockades on the highways,
forcefully withholding food from the market just
to artificially choke the supply and raise prices.
Which shows how dire things were. Yeah. Real
relief only materializes when the New Deal introduces
the Agricultural Adjustment Act. which the text
notes was architected by an Iowan, Henry A. Wallace.
And that whiplash just continues. During World
War II, Iowa farmers are suddenly deemed so essential
to the global war effort that the government
issues them draft exemptions while women step
into the factories and run the farms. And then
the demographic shifts again later on. Right.
Decades later, the geopolitical fallout of the
Vietnam War reaches the prairie as Iowa actively
welcomes over 10 ,000 refugees, including a large
population of Khai Dam who permanently resettle
in Des Moines. Even their local political systems
become a national focal point. The Iowa caucuses
begin in 1972. I always assumed this was some
ancient tradition, but the text says it was actually
born out of local Democrats' frustration with
party bosses controlling the nominee selection.
Yeah, it was a totally new approach. They designed
a grassroots system and it blew up into a national
spectacle when Jimmy Carter utilized it to capture
the presidency in 1976. But the economic data
we see in the 1980s and 90s shows how macroeconomic
policy continued to violently reshape the state.
And just to clarify for you listening, we aren't
taking partisan sides on the politics here at
all, just looking at the source data. Right,
just observing the impacts. Exactly. During the
1980s farm crisis, under the agricultural policies
of the Reagan administration, the text shows
the price of Midwestern farmland plummeting by
more than half. It wiped out independent implement
dealers and destroyed tens of thousands of middle
class rural jobs. And then in the 1990s, the
passage of NAFTA under the Clinton administration
shifted the economic landscape yet again. How
so? Well, the economic data correlates the free
trade agreement with heavily subsidized American
corn flooding the Mexican market. This undercut
and displaced local Mexican farmers who then
migrated north to places like Iowa to find work
in the massive meatpacking plants. Processing
the very animals fed by that Iowa corn. Precisely.
Which completely transformed the demographics
and the social fabric of rural towns. like Storm
Lake, where meatpacking companies were literally
posting recruitment billboards south of the border.
It's a huge structural change. Concurrently,
the text correlates the lingering rural economic
oppression and the social hollowing out of these
towns with the rise of Midwestern meth superlabs.
Yeah, that's a dark chapter. The text specifically
highlights the massive illicit operation run
by an Iowan named Lori Arnold. during this period
is just relentless change. This raises an important
question for anyone looking at this history.
How does a community absorb such racket structural
volatility? Right. From agricultural crashes
to the complex impacts of global free trade agreements
to enduring billions of dollars in sudden damages
from natural disasters. I mean, the text outlines
the great flood of 1993, the catastrophic 2008
Parkersburg tornado, the devastating 2020 direct
go, which is essentially an inland hurricanes.
Just massive destruction. All the way up to the
supply chain collapses of the COVID -19 pandemic.
Iowa's history is ultimately a master class in
adaptation. They are in a perpetual state of
reshaping themselves in response to forces much
larger than their own state borders. We've covered
an incredible timeline today. We started with
melting glaciers and the terraforming brilliance
of Native American societies. We saw early pioneers
building houses out of dirt, burning dried animal
waste, and forming militias over honey. It's
been quite a journey. We watched the railroad
transform a landlocked prairie into a global
breadbasket that fueled the Union Army, followed
by a multilingual marketing campaign that pulled
immigrants from around the world. And finally,
we rode the whiplash of the modern era. from
the desperation of the Great Depression to the
complex demographic ripple effects of NAFTA.
It is a history that completely shatters that
peaceful, static painting we imagined at the
very beginning of our conversation. Exactly.
And that is the final thought I want to leave
you with today. We so often think of the American
Midwest as a quiet, isolated place, safely insulated
from the chaos of the rest of the world. But
looking at the deep history of Iowa, It is abundantly
clear that the heartland is not a shelter from
global forces. Not at all. It is the very place
where those global forces collide first and often
hit the hardest. So the next time you see a quiet
green cornfield stretching to the horizon, don't
just see a farm. Ask yourself, what invisible
global economies are currently shaping the dirt
beneath it? Thank you for joining us on this
deep dive.