James D. Bourne First Settler in Clinton County

No one’s sure who got there first. Maybe it was Elijah Buell, who built a cabin on the Mississippi and drifted south before the ink on his claim dried. Maybe it was James D. Bourne, who came up the Wapsipinicon River in 1836 and never left.

The land didn’t look like a place where anyone could stay. The river bent and twisted through low timber, its banks soft with mud and cattails. Bourne stepped onto the shore and decided it would do. He built his cabin where the bend caught the morning sun.

It was a trading post for the American Fur Company at first. Coffee and powder for pelts, tobacco for tallow. A dozen faces came and went each week—trappers with frost in their beards, Native families with venison to trade, river men drifting between towns that didn’t yet exist. Bourne kept a notebook of what each man owed, though sometimes the ledger wasn’t worth the paper. He stayed anyway.

The next year he started carrying the mail. The “post office” was a shelf nailed to the cabin wall, a few letters folded tight against the damp. He ferried people across the Wapsi when the water ran high, and pulled them through when it froze.

When the county finally organized in 1840, Bourne became sheriff. He moved to DeWitt when the county seat did, and built one of the first frame houses there. His daughter was one of the first children born in that town.

Bourne was elected to the Iowa House of Representatives in 1848, representing Clinton County as a Whig in the state’s Second General Assembly. Iowa had just become a state in 1846 and was still working out its borders and laws. The issues were simple—roads, taxes, land, and counties.

No record links him to major bills. That wasn’t unusual for frontier lawmakers. He served one term and went home.