Exploring Iowa With Zebulon Pike

Zebulon Pike

August 9, 1805. St. Louis, barely more than a muddy river town, fades behind a keelboat pushing into the current. Twenty men, a seventy-ton barge, and one twenty-six-year-old lieutenant—Zebulon Montgomery Pike—head north into land no one in Washington has seen.

His orders are to explore the Mississippi to its source, meet with Native leaders, pick spots for forts, and make sure everyone from the Sauk to the French traders knows who owns Louisiana now. Pike jots the moment in his journal like a telegram: “Left the post with twenty men and a barge of seventy tons, provisions for four months.” No flair, no reflection, just record.

The river doesn’t care about plans or flags. The current is heavy, the heat thick. The men fight mosquitoes, mud, and fatigue, pushing poles into the bottom to move a few yards at a time. Nights mean sleeping in wet clothes, drying powder near the fire, and keeping guard against thieves or curious strangers. Pike drills them anyway—inspection, orders, inventory. He’s a soldier first, explorer second.

By the end of August, they reach the Des Moines Rapids—eleven miles of limestone ridges beneath the surface, snagging the keelboat like claws. The men curse, haul, and pole their way through, half-dragging the craft upriver. Pike writes: “The longest and most difficult passage on the river.” To him, the rapids aren’t just an obstacle—they’re a choke point. Control this, and you control everything that moves north.

Zebulon Pike guiding his men through the
rapids of the Des Moines River

He notes that “the mouth of the Des Moines would be a proper place for a fort.” Three years later, Fort Madison rises from that same riverbank, the first permanent U.S. post in what will become Iowa.

A few days later, Pike stops at the high bluffs he calls the Yellow Banks—today’s Burlington. The river bends below like a drawn bow. “A handsome situation for a fort,” he writes. It’s the same sentence he uses again and again, part field report, part prophecy. He’s cataloging the future—spot by spot, bend by bend.

Northward, the river widens and deepens near Saukenuk, the Sauk capital. “Visited the village of the Sauk,” he writes. “Met several chiefs; exchanged flags.” The village stretches along the bank—fields of corn, longhouses of bark and wood, horses grazing on the flats. He notes the order, and the richness of the soil. The Sauk are prosperous and confident, tied to British traders who still rule the fur trade.

Across from the village, Pike studies a wooded island—a slab of timber and limestone sitting midstream, with deep water on both sides. “Would answer every purpose of defense and trade,” he writes. It’s an afterthought in the journal but a revelation in hindsight. Eleven years later, the Army builds Fort Armstrong there.

The meeting with the Sauk is civil but taut. Pike brings medals, handshakes, talk of peace and friendship. The Sauk chiefs listen, polite but unmoved. They already have trading partners. Later accounts say a young Black Hawk watched the exchange, studying this small, clean-cut officer who spoke in careful promises.

On September 1, the expedition reaches Julien Dubuque’s lead mines, better known as the Mines of Spain. The place smells of smoke and metal. Dubuque—French-Canadian, shrewd, and unbothered—has carved out a small empire on the west bank with the blessing of the Meskwaki.

Zebulon Pike meeting with the Sauk & Fox Natives
at Saukenuk (present day Rock Island, Illinois)

Pike fires a cannon salute as he arrives, a bit of military theater for a man who doesn’t need impressing. “Was received by Mr. Dubuque with great politeness,” he writes. The two men dine together and talk trade. Dubuque’s furnaces roar through the night, workers shoveling ore into the fire. Pike watches, noting the wealth pouring from the ground, and quietly adds a warning line to his log: “A subject worthy of government notice.” Translation—foreign hands are still profiting on American soil.

As the weeks wear on, the river grinds him down. Rain floods the camps, pork barrels split, tempers fray. “Rained hard all day. Men fatigued. Lost a keg of pork,” the journal reads. The words are dry, but the misery seeps through. Pike holds his men steady with sheer will. The mission comes first.

By the spring of 1806, Pike turns south again. He’s thin, worn, and running low on supplies, but his notebook is full. Two key sites marked for forts—Prairie du Chien and the mouth of the Des Moines. Everything else can wait. On April 30, he’s back in St. Louis, turning in the maps and measurements that will redraw the upper Mississippi.

His time in Iowa lasts barely a month, but it plants flags that will shape the next fifty years. Fort Madison goes up in 1808, Fort Armstrong in 1816. Both rise from the riverbanks he scouted, both built to watch the same nations who once hosted him.

When his report reaches Washington, the press calls him “an officer of much intrepidity and zeal.” They praise his precision, his obedience, his courage. Nobody mentions the exhaustion, the mud, the thousand small failures that make up an expedition. To the people who met him along the river—the Sauk, the Meskwaki, Dubuque—he’s remembered differently: polite, methodical, carrying a flag that means the world is about to change.

Ten years later, those forts stand where he said they should, guns pointed across the water. Traders come. Settlers follow. Pike’s short notes—“handsome situation for a fort,” “rained hard all day”—become the blueprint for an American frontier. He’s gone by then, off on another mission out west, but the current he set in motion still moves, slow and unstoppable, through the heart of Iowa.