Francis J. Herron Iowa's Hardest Charging General You've Never Heard Of

General Francis J. Herron

Francis J. Herron looked like he should’ve been selling dry goods instead of commanding men into artillery fire. One soldier remembered him as “slight of build, quick in motion, with eyes that never seemed to stop measuring distance.”

He was young. Thin. Sharp-eyed. The man people underestimated fast and then regretted it later.

He wasn’t born in Iowa, but Iowa made him. By the time the war arrived, he was living in Dubuque, working as a banker. When the first guns fired in 1861, Iowa answered with farms, factories, and young men who barely knew how to hold a rifle. Herron joined the fight. A Dubuque paper said he left “without hesitation, with the confidence of one who had already chosen his duty.”

He helped raise the 1st Iowa Infantry and marched off with them like someone who’d been waiting for the war to start. At Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, his regiment was thrown straight into one of the war’s early disasters. The Union lost the field. Men scattered. Smoke swallowed the hills. A private later wrote, “The air was thick with lead and fear. The trees were cut as with knives.”

Samuel Ryan Curtis and the Fight For the Frontier

General Samuel Ryan Curtis

Samuel Ryan Curtis didn’t look like a war hero. He looked more like a county surveyor who wandered onto the battlefield by mistake and never quite left. Thick sideburns. Heavy jacket. A man built for long walks and paperwork, not cannon smoke and screaming horses.

But the war didn’t care what men looked like. Curtis had been a West Point engineer, a congressman from Iowa, and a man who believed in the Union the way farmers believe in fences. When the shooting started in 1861, he quit politics and picked up a sword at age fifty-six. Most men that age were done charging at anything. Curtis was just getting started.

Missouri was the problem. Torn in half. Bushwhackers in the trees. Guerrillas in the shadows. Everybody armed. Everybody angry. Confederate armies wanted it back. Union generals wanted to hold it. Civilians just wanted to survive. One Missouri paper called it “a land where every fence rail hides a rifle and every road leads to ambush.”

Curtis was sent in to clean it up.

In early 1862, the Confederates made their big gamble. General Earl Van Dorn gathered an army and marched north into Arkansas, aiming straight at Curtis. Win the fight. Take Missouri. Threaten the Mississippi. Shake the whole Western war loose. Southern papers bragged that Van Dorn intended “to march through Curtis as through dry leaves.”

Curtis saw it coming and didn’t blink. He planted his army along Little Sugar Creek near a place called Pea Ridge and waited. Ten thousand men. Cold ground. Wet boots. No retreat planned. If the Confederate army came, they would come straight into his teeth.

The Joye Sisters Betty Ballard and Bobby Jean Lewis

Betty Ballard and Bobby Jean Lewis, better known as the Joye Sisters, were a Des Moines singing duo in the 1920s and 1930s. They headed to Mexico in May 1928, but were forced to turn back after a series of unfortunate events.

While in El Paso, they saw two Negroes lynched for attacking two white girls. That “horrible sight,” said Miss Ballard, “seemed to forecast the nightmare” of events.

They were detained in Juarez, then sent home because of the Revolution. They told reporters, “The queer taste of the Mexican food and a rumor that the revolutionists were poisoning all the food made them refrain from eating anything.”

No matter, the girls didn’t intend to let a bit of bad luck discourage them. They planned to return to Mexico in a few months after things cooled down.

Blood on the Beat: Remembering Des Moines Policeman Ollie Thomas

Policeman Ollie Thomas

Nobody agrees on the number, but the official count says seven. Seven shots cracked through the humid August night like the city itself had snapped.

August 21, 1925, near Fourth and Grand.

Some poor bastard heard the first few go off and thought it was just a car backfiring. Then two shots boomed louder than the rest, the kind that don’t lie about what they are. Gunfire always has a signature. Anyone who’s heard it knows when the lie ends.

Moments later, a bareheaded man came flying out of an alley and tore east down Grand Avenue like hell had suddenly remembered his address. The witness said the build looked right. The speed looked right. The panic looked right. Bootlegger energy, all of it.

By the time the echoes finished bouncing off brick and glass, Patrolman Ollie Thomas lay dead.

They found him crumpled at the bottom of a stairway landing, soaked in his own blood. Two bullets did the job. One through the abdomen. One through the head. Both traveling downward. That detail stuck with the detectives like a splinter in the brain.

Will Higgie Dances the Charleston Atop the Des Moines Register & Tribune Building

(from the Des Moines Register.
 August 26, 1925)

In August 1925, Des Moines got a rooftop performance no one forgot. Will Higgie—one of the original creators of the Charleston—strutted onto the roof of the Des Moines Register and Tribune building alongside his partner, Dorothy Ryan, and turned the city skyline into a dance floor. Below them, crowds looked up as the pair showed off the fast-kicking, rule-breaking dance that was sweeping the nation.

Later, Higgie let everyone in on a little secret. That famous “naughty wiggle” everyone loved? It wasn’t part of the original dance at all. It didn’t show up until after the Charleston was already loose in the world—proving that even America’s wildest dance craze was still evolving, one rooftop at a time.

That Charleston Band Davenport Iowa 1925

That Charleston Band were the featured entertainers at the Coliseum in Davenport on December 19, 1925.

(from The Daily Times. December 27, 1925)

Drake Bulldogs vs Iowa State Cyclones 1927

A scene showing the Drake Bulldogs and Iowa State Cyclones football game held at Drake's Stadium in 1927. Captain Bill Cook from Drake is running with the ball.

New Heating Plant at University of Iowa

(From the Des Moines Register. November 6, 1927)

The Des Moines Register published a photograph of the new heating plant under construction at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. The project was expected to be completed by the spring of 1928.

The plant was designed by Proudfoot, Rawson & Souers, with Professor B. P. Fleming serving as consulting engineer. The total projected cost was $500,000.

Charles Grilk The Iowa Attorney General Who Pushed Too Far

Charles Grilk (from The Daily Times. 
April 4, 1924)

When Charles Grilk ran for Congress in 1906 as a young Republican lawyer out of Davenport, the party brought in its heaviest weapon to carry him across the line: Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt arrived like the weather. Loud. Electric. Unavoidable.

That morning, he took breakfast at the Davenport home of novelist Alice French—known to readers as Octave Thanet—one of the most powerful literary and political voices in the state. The table was crowded with influence. Words were chosen carefully. Futures were weighed between coffee cups.

Then, Roosevelt and Grilk went to Central Park.

Thousands packed into Central Park in Davenport. Roosevelt spoke. The crowd surged. Grilk stood beside him, absorbing the force of borrowed gravity. It was a public anointing. A signal that this young Davenport lawyer had entered the bloodstream of national power.

He lost that race, but the door never closed again.

An Iowa Senator Who Refused to Behave: The Guy Gillette Story

Guy Gillette (The Courier. May 29, 1924)

Guy Gillette came to Washington in 1936 while the country was still bleeding from the Depression. Iowa farms were drowning in debt. Banks were collapsing. The New Deal promised rescue. Gillette arrived as a Democrat, but he never arrived as a loyalist.

He didn’t trust party machines. He didn’t trust Wall Street. He especially didn’t trust men who spoke softly while reaching for control.

Washington wanted obedience. Gillette offered scrutiny.

He backed farm relief because Iowa was starving. He backed soil conservation because the land was breaking. He backed rural electrification because darkness still ruled whole counties. Those votes earned him enemies in corporate boardrooms and quiet allies in farm kitchens.

The real fight came during World War II.

The Senate was flooded with emergency bills. Weapons contracts. War industries. Spending without ceilings. Gillette voted for the war, but he fought the money behind it. He questioned contractors, challenged cost overruns, and warned that corporations were growing fat while soldiers bled. As he told the Senate not long after America entered the conflict, “We said that they went over there … not to prove the prowess of America … but to see to it that there never was such a war again.”

Basements Barns and Bad Amplifiers: Iowa's Garage Rock Years

Des Moines in the mid-60s was supposed to be quiet. Flat. Corn-fed. God-fearing. That illusion died the first time a kid turned a cheap Silvertone amp all the way up in a basement and realized the walls could shake like a riot. The Midwest learned how to sweat that night. The garage bands came crawling out of rec rooms, Legion halls, gymnasiums, and half-finished basements all across Iowa like insects drawn to voltage.

The air smelled like beer, Brylcreem, overheated transformers, and teenage panic. Nobody knew they were building a scene. Scenes were for cities with music writers and better lies. These kids just knew the songs had to be fast, loud, and lethal. The parents were upstairs. The cops were somewhere else. The floor shook anyway.

Iowa didn’t have Sunset Strip clubs or Detroit ballrooms. It had VFW halls with bad carpet. Catholic school gyms with folding chairs. Roller rinks that smelled like rubber, popcorn, and spilled Coca-Cola. Stages made from plywood and rusty nails. The sound systems were a crime. The volume was the point.

YWCA Doll Farewell Party 1927

In January 1927, the Y.W.CA. hosted a farewell party for a group of dolls they were sending to Japan for the National Doll Festival there. The Des Moines Register explained the dolls were being sent to promote friendship with Japan.

Picture: (front row) Patricia Merrill, Naoma James, Mildred Williams, Ruth Partch, Ann Merrill, and Keith Merrill, Jr. (Standing) Bo Mahler, Babe Bartolomei, Mary Alice Mallum, Doris Stewart, Margaret Findley, Pauline Kauffman, Louis Orf, Myrtle Thompson, and Nicolina Bartholomer.

(from the Des Moines Register. January 9, 1927)

Chancy J. Stevens Montour, Iowa Mayor

In 1927, the Des Moines Register profiled Chancy J. Stevens of Montour, Iowa, believed to be the oldest mayor in America at age 94. Stevens had served as mayor for 18 years.

He came to Iowa from New York as a young man and first settled in Indiantown, two miles north of Montour. He supported prohibition, equal rights for women, and the woodshed as a corrective measure for wayward youths.

(picture from the Des Moines Register. December 25, 1927)

Salvation Army Food Distribution Des Moines 1921

The Salvation Army fed several hundred Des Moines families on Christmas Day, 1921. Brigadier William Andrews, his wife, and staff distributed dinner baskets, containing a chicken, potatoes, coffee, sugar, corn, and various fruits.

The picture shows Brigadier William Andrews and his wife, giving a dinner basket to an elderly couple.

(from The Des Moines Register. December 25, 1921)

Santa Claus Delivering Toys

This image of Santa Claus and his sleigh appeared on the front page of the Des Moines Tribune, Christmas Day, 1925. (I colored and touched up the black and white artwork)