Morrill Marston Commandant of Fort Armstrong 1819-1821

Fort Armstrong at Rock Island

Morrill Marston served as commandant at Fort Armstrong from August 1819 to June 1821. After leaving Fort Armstrong, Marston became the commandant of Fort Edwards. His primary duty was to stop boats going up the river and search them for whiskey to ensure it did not get to the Indians.

After leaving the army when Fort Edwards was abandoned in 1824, he began farming near the fort. Unfortunately, Marston drowned in a drunken fit in 1831.

Fortunately for us, he penned a series of letters on the Sac and Fox customs to Reverend Jedidiah Morse in 1820. In addition, Marston said he talked with four of the principal chiefs of the two nations.

They called the land around Fort Armstrong Sen-i-se-po Ke-be-sau-lee or Rock River Peninsula. Government agents had been trying to get the tribes to relocate for some time but had no luck. A Fox chief told him they would not leave because their chiefs and friends were buried there.

Fort Madison in the Iowa Country

Fort Madison

They came up the river in the summer of 1808, sixty men, led by Lieutenant Alpha Kingsley, a thin, sunburned man with orders that looked clean on paper and smelled like death in the field. The Mississippi rolled brown and heavy beside them. Every splash of an oar felt like a signal. Every treeline whispered, don't stay.

 They built the fort anyway.

 

Logs hacked from the bluffs. Mud and sweat sealing the seams. The air thick with mosquitoes and dread. They called it Fort Madison, named for a president who’d never seen the place. The Sauk and Fox watched from the timberline. Quiet. Patient. 

 

Kingsley said the view was “commanding.” What he meant was exposed. There was a ridge behind the walls, a perfect perch for anyone wanting to shoot down at them. The men knew it. They built anyway, because that’s what soldiers do.

Establishment of Fort Des Moines 2

A typical frontier fort from the 1840s. No actual drawings of
Fort Des Moines are available.

In the spring of 1843, the U.S. Army sent a detachment of soldiers into the Iowa wilderness to build Fort Des Moines No. 2. The first fort, built near Montrose Hill in 1837, had failed after a few years.

Captain James Allen, a West Point–trained topographical engineer, led the mission. His men from the 1st U.S. Dragoons left Fort Sanford and Fort Dodge, followed the Des Moines River, and stopped at a muddy fork where two brown rivers met. Allen later wrote, “The junction of the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers presents high and dry ground, and is well suited for a post commanding the valley.”

The soldiers built a stockade of cottonwood logs enclosing about four acres. Inside stood two blockhouses, a storehouse, stables, and several cabins. In the center lay a parade ground where the men drilled, repaired equipment, and waited for mail that rarely came.

The fort’s purpose was to oversee the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes. A few years earlier, the United States had compelled them to cede their eastern Iowa lands under the Treaty of 1842. Allen’s official orders stated his duty was “to prevent the intrusion of whites upon Indian lands, and to keep the Indians from crossing eastward.”