Moses Keokuk Son of Chief Keokuk

In 1852, Wunagisa went to Washington to meet the people who decided who would be considered chiefs and such things. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs told him his father had been made a chief because he was “a good man and a true friend to the whites.” He said General Winfield Scott had approved it, and that if Wunagisa was as good as his father, he could remain chief.

That was the rule. Keep the peace. Be the kind of man who didn’t cause trouble.

Years later, Wunagisa became a Baptist. He took the name Moses Keokuk and began trying to live in a way the white men would approve. He gave up one of his wives, stopped drinking, stopped gambling. He moved out of his wigwam, stopped painting his face, and gave up the ceremonies his father had led.

Many in his tribe couldn’t understand it. The old Moses had been a man of color and noise—his hair shaved in bright stripes, his clothes loud, his laugh louder. He raced horses, made bets, and stood at the center of things. “He wore the most gaudy apparel he could find,” said Jacob Carter, the government agent.

Artist George Catlin on the Iowa Frontier

George Catlin

George Catlin moved upriver in the summer of 1832, chasing something he couldn’t name. The steamboat thumped against the current, smoke rolling over the deck, the air thick with mosquitoes and gunpowder residue. The Black Hawk War was over. The army said peace had returned to the frontier. Catlin didn’t see peace. He saw silence—the kind that comes after something irreversible.

He was heading for Fort Armstrong, a log-and-stone post on Rock Island, Illinois. Across the river lay the territory that would become Iowa. The Army held it now, but the land still belonged to the people who had lived and died there.

 

Catlin was an unlikely witness. He was a painter—a thin, restless man who believed he could record an entire world before it disappeared. “I have flown to the rescue of their looks, manners, and customs,” he wrote, “from the grasp of civilization, which will destroy them.”

Hanging of Bennett Warren Scott County

Bennett Warren had a small farm in Liberty Township in Scott County, Iowa. Not much farming got done there. Instead, his house served as a meeting place for the more unsavory element—horse thieves, counterfeiters, occasional burglars, and other frontier badasses. 

Warren never stole horses or counterfeited money, but he helped the banditti by letting them keep the stolen horses on his property. In return, he took and passed counterfeit currency. Each time the authorities arrested Warren, no one would testify against him, so he got off with little more than a slap on the wrist.

On June 24, 1857, two hundred vigilantes crossed into Clinton County from their rendezvous spot at Big Rock. They marched to Warren’s house and took him to a nearby grove.   

Abraham Lincoln Frontier Ranger Black Hawk War

Abraham  Lincoln. Lincoln laughed it off when he described his experiences during the Black Hawk War and compared it to  swatting flies. 

"Did you know I am a war hero?” asked Lincoln. “Yes,  sir. In the days of the Black Hawk War, I fought, bled, and  came away... I had a good many bloody struggles with  mosquitos, and although I never fainted from loss of blood,  I can truly I say was often very hungry.”

Even though he never fought a battle in his short stint  as a warrior, Lincoln saw the aftermath. He helped bury five  men killed and scalped in the battle of Kellogg’s Grove.

Black Hawk Sauk War Chief

Born in 1767, Black Hawk was older than the United States. His father was a war  chief, and though it was never certain, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-Kia-kiak, or Black  Sparrow Hawk, became the best-known chief of the Sacs. After the Black Hawk  War, he met President Andrew Jackson in Washington and told him, “I am one  man. You are another.”

Johnny Lujack Notre Dame & Chicago Bears Football Star

Johnny Lujack

Notre Dame, 1943. The war’s taken half the roster, and the star quarterback’s off in uniform. The Irish need someone who won’t flinch. Johnny Lujack is nineteen, straight out of a Pennsylvania coal town, quiet, steady, built from hard work and wintry mornings.

 They hand him the ball. He doesn’t say much—just looks downfield and gets to work. He runs like he means it and throws like he’s trying to prove something, every play tight and clean, no wasted motion, no fear.

 

That fall, he rips through Army like a hot knife through arrogance, and the Irish take the national title. The papers call him “the most complete player ever to wear a Notre Dame uniform.” One writer says, “Lujack doesn’t play the game so much as control it — like he’s got the whistle in his own mouth.”

 

The word Heisman floats around, but before anyone can engrave a trophy, the Navy snaps him up. He swaps the gridiron for a steel deck and spends two years hunting German submarines in the Atlantic. One of his crewmates said, “He never blinked. We could’ve been staring into hell, and he’d just adjust the periscope.”

Riverview Stadium Clinton Iowa

The baseball stadium on Clinton’s riverfront from a 1940s postcard. The WPA finished building it in 1937. The Clinton Owls were the first team to play there.

Clyde Sukeforth, the man who would later scout Jackie Robinson, managed the team. His star player was Sam Nahem—an Arab-Jewish boy from Brooklyn. The reporters couldn’t figure him out. One of them said, “Nahem wears spectacles and talks less like a ballplayer than any diamond star this reporter knows.”

The Owls tore through the Three-I League that summer. Clinton beat Peoria, Springfield, and Davenport. Seventy-five wins. Thirty-six losses. It was a record that made old men start believing in luck again.

Clinton baseball fans wouldn’t soon forget that magic season in 1937.

Colonel Henry Dodge Frontier Ranger Black Hawk War

Henry Dodge

Henry Dodge stood on a ridge overlooking the Wisconsin River, coat streaked with mud and gunpowder, watching his men reload. The air smelled like wet leaves and blood. Below them, the Sauk lay scattered through the brush. It was July 21, 1832. Nobody said the words, but everyone knew it—the war was dying.

 Two months earlier, everything had gone to hell. Black Hawk had crossed the Mississippi with his people—warriors, mothers, old men, kids—all of them walking straight back into the land they used to call home. The settlers panicked like prairie chickens in a thunderstorm. Militias sprang up overnight. Dodge didn’t wait for anyone to tell him what to do. He just saddled his horse and rode toward the smoke.

 

His men came from the lead mines—farmers, drifters, gamblers, men who smelled like sweat and whiskey and knew how to shoot by instinct. They didn’t have uniforms. Some didn’t even have boots. They slept in the mud and ate whatever didn’t crawl away first. Orders came slowly; rumors came fast. Every campfire burned with the same stories—raids, burned cabins, families gone missing. Dodge rode into it like a man chasing lightning.

Davenport Writers Group

 

Members of the Davenport Writers Group engaged in a heated literary discussion. left to right: Arthur Davison Ficke, Floyd Dell, Suasan Glaspell, and George Cram Cook.

Des Moines Baseball Team 1906

Des Moines baseball team, 1906..

Top row, left to right: Ben Caffyn, M. E. Cantillion, Louis Mauske.

Second row: Babe Towne, Andreas, George Hogreiver, Mike Welday, Roscoe Miller.

Lower Row: Charles Dexter, George Magoon, Frank O’Leary, Bill Shipke, Eddie Cicotte, Grover Gillen.

Upper right corner.: John J. Doyle, captain and manager.

(From the Des Moines Register. September 2, 1906)

Lillian Russell The Iowa Girl Who Took the World By Storm

Lillian Russell was born Helen Louise Leonard in Clinton, Iowa, in the early 1860s . Her father ran a newspaper, her mother scared the local men by speaking her mind, and the baby came out howling like she already had headlines to make.

 She grew up in Chicago, where sin had a better rhythm. Helen sang too loudly, laughed too big, and drove her mother half mad. She got kicked out of a church choir for “indecorous behavior,” which is Victorian code for being interesting. Someone told her nice girls didn’t go onstage. Helen said, “Then I guess I’m not nice.”

 

She was eighteen when she ran away to New York — the filthy, electric carnival of the Gilded Age. Tony Pastor looked her over, saw the cheekbones, the mouth, the trouble. He said, “Helen Leonard sounds like someone who does laundry. You’ll be Lillian Russell.” It was a name made for scandal and silk sheets.

 

By 1881 she was onstage in The Pirates of Penzance, and America lost its collective mind. The New York World called her “the prettiest girl in America.” Another paper called her “a soprano who makes an entrance like a cavalry charge.” A Boston critic said she was “more bosom than brilliance.” She framed that one, saying, “At least he noticed.”

Murder in Davenport's Fairmount Cemetery

Kate Ryan

They found her at dawn in Fairmount Cemetery. A workman on his way to the gate saw a horse first—head down, reins slack. Then a buggy smashed against a tree. Then, farther down a ravine, a woman in black.

She was face-down, her hat in the grass. A hatpin was still in her hand. When the police rolled her over, they found a bullet hole between her eyes.

Her name was Kate Ryan, though in Bucktown she went by Rose Earl. She worked at Babe Foreman’s house, one of the licensed brothels in Davenport’s red-light district.

Since 1893, the city had made vice official business. The police collected monthly fines from the madams, and the girls worked without fear of raids. It was cleaner that way, they said. Predictable. Kate’s boss paid twenty-five dollars for the house license and ten more for each girl. Kate Ryan was legal. Until she wasn’t.

The man everyone blamed was Peter Shardis, known to the streets as Pete Sardine. He was thirty-five, short, with a limp and a bottle habit. He’d come from Greece eight years earlier, drifted between Moline and Davenport, working in foundries until he drank his way out of them.

Grace McDaniels The Mule Faced Lady

Grace McDaniels and her son, Elmer

They say every carnival needs a monster. Iowa built one on a farm.

Grace McDaniels was born near Villisca in 1888— a cold little dot of America where even the cows look bored. She came into the world with a red mark running down her face, the kind of thing that makes old women cross themselves and whisper about God’s unfinished business. The doctors didn’t have a clue. They called it a “port-wine stain” because it sounded classier than “weird, red mistake.”

 

Grace grew up hiding behind scarves and hand-me-down shame. She tried powder, veils, anything short of duct tape. Iowa is an awful place to look different — too flat, nowhere to hide. She probably spent half her childhood dreaming about disappearing into the corn.

 

At some point, she stopped fighting it. That’s the thing about humiliation — it either kills you or makes you bulletproof. Grace figured if the entire world was going to gawk, she might as well sell tickets.

 

So she packed up her pain and took it to Chicago in 1933. The World’s Fair — a temple of progress powered by electricity, gasoline, and cruelty. For a dime, you could see the future, or a human being in a cage. Grace joined the sideshow under a hand-painted banner: THE MULE-FACED WOMAN.

Edward Bonney Frontier Thief Turned Detective

Edward Bonney at Mother Long's (unfortunately Bonney
never posed for a portrait. This image is from his book.)

Edward Bonney came to Nauvoo in the spring of 1844 with a half-smile and a forged past. He’d been a miller, a hotel keeper, and a counterfeiter. Now he was playing saint among saints. The city was busy building heaven on earth, but under the hymns and handshakes was a different congregation—men who printed money at night and buried bodies by day. Bonney recognized the smell. He’d once reeked of it himself.

 The Hodges were the first cracks in the holy façade. William and Stephen—farm-boy faces, dead eyes. They’d killed a man during a robbery gone wrong, then tried to hide behind the good name of the Saints. Iowa wanted blood. Burlington got it. 

 

The gallows went up behind the courthouse. The crowd pressed close, hungry for justice or entertainment—it was hard to tell. One brother prayed aloud; the other cursed the sheriff. When the trap fell, the sound was short and heavy, like a door slamming on the frontier’s soul. 

She Killed Her Baby And Got Away With It

Nellie Taylor

Des Moines, 1909. Everyone was dying dramatically. Fifteen murders. Twenty-five suicides. Five people flattened by streetcars. Ten by trains. It was like the Grim Reaper had a summer home there.

 And then,  Nellie Taylor came into the mix.

 

She was twenty-three, pretty, well-dressed, and apparently powered by poor decisions and unresolved trauma. Her husband, Glen, got himself killed while working on the railroad. Then she fell for one of his friends, Everett Humble—which is a terrible name for a man who absolutely wasn’t. They planned to get married until she got pregnant and he did what men named Everett Humble apparently do and ghosted her like a coward with a mustache.

 

So, Nellie had a baby. Then she panicked. The children’s homes wouldn’t take it, her parents didn’t know about it, and her mental health was circling the drain. So she decided that murder was her “only course.”

 

She told the police that calmly, like she was reading a weather report. “I undressed it, took the string from its shirt, and tied it tight around its neck.” That’s what she said. Straight face. No tears. No tremble. Just… logistics.