Russell Farnham Explorer Indian Trader

Russell Farnham

George Davenport partnered with Russell Farnham in 1824. He couldn’t have chosen a more qualified person for his growing enterprise. 

John Jacob Astor was the first to capitalize on the Lewis and Clark’s western explorations. He sent two expeditions to the Pacific coast in the summer of 1807. Captain Jonathan Thorn sailed around Cape Horn to the Pacific coast. Astor selected 23-year-old Russell Farnham to lead the cross-country expedition, following Lewis and Clark’s footsteps. Farnham handpicked a crew of seventy frontiersmen and started up the Missouri River to its headwaters. 

 

The expedition wintered at the mouth of the Milk River. When spring came, they pushed on to the Columbia River. By the time Farnham reached his objective in October 1808, just seven men remained of the seventy who started. 

 

Unfortunately, Farnham arrived at the designated meeting place just in time to see the ships sail away. He waited three weeks, hoping they would return for him, then set off on foot across the country to make the return journey. By the time he reached his previous wintering spot on the Milk River, Farnham was the only man left. 

Naming Davenport Iowa

George Davenport

After the Black Hawk War ended, George Davenport turned most of his attention to land speculation. Davenport was part of a party that laid out the town of Stephenson (formerly Farnhamsburg) in 1834.

The following year, nine men gathered around the fireplace of Colonel William Davenport to lie out a new city on the Iowa side of the river. They included Colonel William Davenport, Commander of Fort Armstrong; Major William Gordon, a United States surveyor; Antoine Le Claire, Indian interpreter; Colonel George Davenport, Major Thomas Smith, Alexander McGregor, Levi S. Colton, Philip Hambaugh, and Captain James May.

The men purchased a quarter section of land, comprising thirty-six blocks from Antoine Le Claire, for $2,000. Each man put up $250, except Colonel William Davenport.

Duke Slater Iowa Football Player

Duke Slater came out of Clinton, Iowa, like a walking thunderclap. Big shoulders, bigger presence, a man who made coaches straighten their backs when he walked past. Reporters called him “a human barricade.” Players called him worse. None of it slowed him down.

He grew up in a world that didn’t expect a Black kid to go anywhere. Slater ignored the script. He pushed through it the way he pushed through defensive lines—head down, legs driving, no apologies.

 

His high school couldn’t afford helmets. Most players hesitated. Slater didn’t. He played bare-headed and kept doing it for the rest of his life. A rival said, “Hitting him was like running into a stone wall.” Another said, “I hit him once. That was enough.”

 

When he got to the University of Iowa, everything changed. The Hawkeyes already had a team. Slater gave them a force of nature.

Great Burlington Ice Cream Heist of 1914

Boys stealing tastes of ice cream on the heat-soaked riverfront

The Great Ice Cream Heist of Burlington didn’t look like a crime wave at first. It slid in slow and sticky, the way trouble sneaks into river towns when the heat gets mean and people get stupid. By July 1914, Burlington was staggering through one of those summers when the Mississippi smelled like dead fish and everyone walked around half-dizzy. Tempers thinned. Judgment wilted. That’s when strange things start moving in the dark.

The Burlington Ice Cream Company started losing tubs off their wagons. Not a pint here or there—five-gallon buckets. At first, it looked like sloppy bookkeeping or a hungry stray. Then the numbers piled up. Fifteen gallons went on Tuesday. Thirty on Thursday. By August, someone had hauled off hundreds of gallons. The Burlington Hawk-Eye called the culprits “ice cream fiends,” adding that “whole tubs vanish nightly.” Another line warned that the city was “plagued by a youthful gang whose appetite exceeds their morals.”

Julebukking in Decorah

A knock at the door, and random masked strangers

Decorah always felt like it was built to survive winter, not enjoy it. The cold didn’t nibble at you—it crawled straight through your coat and took up residence in your bones. The Norwegians who settled there understood the cold. They’d lived with storms that could erase entire villages, so when they brought julebukking with them—this odd little winter ritual—it didn’t feel like an import. It felt like a warning that old traditions don’t die; they just change latitudes.

Julebukking was never a spectacle. No carolers in neat rows. No cheerful postcards. No marching band in red hats. It was smaller, stranger, and more intimate. It thing started with a knock after dark—the kind that froze a room mid-sentence. A knock with weight to it. A knock that carried old-country ghosts on its back.

The children always heard it first. They stiffened like animals catching a scent. Adults tried to look unconcerned, but the winter air came into the house in a new way when julebukk night rolled around. Everyone felt it.

Christkindl in Eastern Iowa

Children placing boots by the door on Christmas Eve

Christkindl came to eastern Iowa the way December storms did—quietly at first, then all at once. By the 1860s, the river towns of Davenport, Guttenberg, Elkader, and the communal streets of Amana carried the sound of German carols through the cold air, and it was hard to tell where old-world memory ended and new-world habit began.

The newspapers rarely explained the holiday. They assumed everyone already knew. When they mentioned it, they spoke in plain sentences. A Davenport editor said , “The German families prepare for Christkindl as their parents did before them.”

 

Children placed boots outside their doors on Christmas Eve. Big boots, if they had them. Little ones polished until they reflected lamplight. The Christkindl—not Santa, not St. Nicholas, but something more gentle—was said to slip inside the houses after the family had gone to bed. “The Christ-child brings the gifts,” the Iowa Reform explained, “and no child should seek to spy upon its coming.” Parents repeated the rule with the solemnity of a town ordinance.

 

Sinterklaas Comes to Pella

Sinterklaas came to Pella the way most things did in the 1800s—carried across an ocean, held together by memory, and kept alive because people needed something familiar in a place that was still trying to decide what it wanted to be.

Every December 5th, Dutch families lit their lamps a little earlier. Children took out their wooden shoes and lined them near the door, polished as best as small hands could manage. Nobody said it outright, but the shoes mattered. A good shine suggested good behavior. A scuffed heel hinted at mischief. Children hoped Sinterklaas wouldn’t notice.

 

The Pella Gazette said, “The little ones prepare their shoes with great care, and the streets ring with their anticipation.” That was about as emotional as the paper got, but you could tell the editor enjoyed the spectacle.

Dubuque Christmas Market

The Christmas market on Main Street always arrived early in Dubuque. It didn’t sneak in. It simply appeared one morning, as if dropped there by a tired hand. By the 1860s, everyone expected it. By the 1890s, nobody could imagine December without it.

The Dubuque Herald tried to explain the thing every year. It usually gave up by the second paragraph. Crowds were too big, smells too mixed, vendors too hopeful. “Main Street bustles with the commerce of the season,” the paper wrote in one of its calmer years, leaving the rest to the reader.

 

The smell was the first sign. Pine wreaths stacked in carts. Wet horses cooling in the snow. Oysters that had traveled too far, too fast, and looked a little startled by the journey. The Herald said, “A mild aroma accompanies the oyster barrels.” Mild was one word for it.

Samuel Freeman Miller Supreme Court Justice

Samuel Freeman Miller grew up in Kentucky, where slavery lay over everything like a shadow nobody wanted to talk about. He talked about it anyway. It made him feel like he was living inside a house with a rotten beam. You could pretend it wasn’t there, but the ceiling still sagged.

So he left.

He went to Iowa, where the towns were young and nothing was settled yet. Keokuk in 1850 wasn’t pretty. There was mud everywhere, steamboats coughed smoke into the sky, and strangers drifted in with the river current. Men trying to become something they weren’t yet. Miller stepped onto the landing with a medical degree in one hand and a law license in the other, not sure which one would carry him farther.

People trusted him sooner than he expected. He spoke plainly. He didn’t pretend to know more than he did. When he knew more, he didn’t make a show of it. One lawyer said Miller “could read an entire library before breakfast,” and maybe that was true. He read because he couldn’t help himself. Books steadied him. They made the world feel a little less chaotic.

Keokuk leaned Democratic, but Miller leaned toward anything that looked honest and open. Slavery had chased him out of Kentucky, and he didn’t plan on letting it creep into Iowa. “A nation cannot be half free and half pretending,” he said once. It wasn’t meant to be a famous line. It was just the truth as he saw it. He joined the Young Republican Party because it seemed to move toward that truth.

Word spread. By 1862, people in Washington were hearing about the sharp-minded lawyer from Iowa who worked like a man trying to outrun himself. Lincoln needed new Supreme Court justices—men who wouldn’t flinch when the war pushed the Constitution to its limits. Miller’s name came up. Lincoln looked at his record, at his steadiness, and said yes.

William Boyd Allison Iowa Politician

 

William Boyd Allison walked into the state like a mild-mannered undertaker with a pocket full of dynamite and a handshake that meant you were already halfway buried.

Born in Ohio, he wandered west, and landed in Dubuque — a city that in those days smelled like wet sawdust and pig fat. Allison set up a law office, wore tidy clothes, spoke softly, and terrified everyone. “You never knew what he was thinking,” one rival said. “Mostly because by the time you figured it out, he’d already outmaneuvered you and sent you a polite note about it.”

 

The Civil War blew half the country sky-high, but Allison didn’t rattle. He slid into Congress like a man taking the wheel of a slow, ugly machine. Lincoln loved him — “steady as a church bell,” he said — which from Lincoln was basically anointing someone with holy oil. Allison wasn’t a firebrand. He was a locksmith. He understood the gears, the tumblers, the secret hinges that kept the Union from falling apart.

 

Washington reporters noticed early. “Allison is the only man in the chamber who reads the entire bill,” one wrote. “Which makes him the most dangerous.”