R. Sieler's Saxaphone Orchestra Sioux City

R. Sieler’s Saxophone Orchestra played dance tunes for Sioux City listeners on KSCJ radio.

Members (left to right): Marvin Johnson (trombone); L. Fredericks (banjo); L. Gunderson (cornet); R. Sielers (saxaphone); T. De Mare (percussionist); N. Connovar (saxaphone); and A. Flurie (piano).

Photo from the Sioux City Journal. July 24, 1927.

Fox War Chief Sogonapothanji

Sogonapothanji was a Meskwaki (Fox) war chief in what is now eastern Iowa. His name meant “He Slew Three Sioux,” and it wasn’t a metaphor. It was a record.

Among the Meskwaki, names like this marked what a man had done, not what he hoped to be remembered for. Sogonapothanji’s reputation came from direct conflict with the Dakota (Sioux), longtime enemies in a region where raids and counter-raids were part of daily reality. Survival depended on speed, strength, and nerve. Leaders proved themselves in action.

He was not a council chief. His authority came from warfare—planning attacks, leading fighters, and defending Meskwaki territory when violence broke out. Killing enemy warriors was dangerous, personal work. Doing it more than once mattered. Doing it three times gave him a name people remembered.

By the time Americans began building forts and pressing westward, men like Sogonapothanji were already veterans of another kind of struggle. Intertribal warfare didn’t pause for treaties or survey lines. It continued even as a new and far larger threat crept into the region.

Meskwaki Chief Taimah

Chief Taimah was a Meskwaki (Fox) leader in the early nineteenth century, known less for fighting than for dealing with Americans face to face. That alone made his job dangerous.

He was a civil chief. A negotiator, expected to sit through long councils, listen to translators stumble through his words, and answer to officials who already believed the outcome was decided. Taimah understood that once something was said, it lived on paper. And paper lasted longer than promises.

He spent years moving through that system. Treaty talks. Delegations. Repeated demands that the Meskwaki give up land and move west. Saying no often brought soldiers. Saying yes brought regret. Taimah chose his words carefully because there were no good options left—only less immediate disasters.

He wasn’t naïve. When he signed treaties, it wasn’t trust. It was calculation. Delay could mean another season on familiar ground. Another year to plant corn. Another chance to keep families together before removal became unavoidable.

George Catlin said he was calm, dignified, and deliberate. He noticed how carefully Taimah dressed and carried himself. That wasn’t vanity. It was strategy. Appearance spoke before words did.

Pashepaho, The Little Stabbing Chief

Pashepaho, sometimes written as Pah-e-pa-ho,  was a civil chief of the Sauk Nation in the early 1800s.

In Letters and Notes, George Catlin described Pashepaho as "grave and deliberate." He was one of five Sauk delegates who signed the 1804 treaty at St. Louis, which gave away most of the tribal lands, including Saukenuk.

He showed up to speak for his people while land disappeared and choices narrowed, knowing restraint was the only tool he had left—and using it, anyway.

He sided with Black Hawk’s British Band during the War of 1812, then sided with Keokuk’s peace faction during the Black Hawk War in 1832.

Photograph Of Downtown Eldridge In 1929

The Davenport Democrat and Leader. December 1, 1929.

The Davenport Democrat and Leader printed this photograph of Main Street in Eldridge, Iowa, as part of a photo spread on progress in the city. 

Bill Glasgow University of Iowa Hawkeye Half Back

Des Moines Register. January 19, 1930.

University of Iowa All-American half back Bill Glasgow received the Chicago Tribune Big Ten Trophy of 1930 as a star of the Western Conference.

Book Review: The Lincoln Highway in Iowa: A History

The Lincoln Highway sounds innocent enough. A nice old road. Something you learn about from a brochure while standing next to a bronze plaque. Darcy Dougherty Maulsby’s The Lincoln Highway in Iowa: A History takes that tidy idea, shakes it hard, and shows you the mess underneath.

The Lincoln Highway wasn’t some graceful ribbon of progress floating across Iowa. It was a fight. Towns clawed at each other to get on the route, knowing that a line on a map could mean survival—or a long slide into irrelevance. Meetings were held. Deals were cut. Routes shifted. Winners celebrated. Losers stewed.

 

Maulsby is especially good at showing how rough the early days really were. Before smooth concrete and reliable maps, Iowa roads were muddy traps waiting to swallow cars whole. Early motorists were gamblers. You might make it to the next town. You might not. That sense of risk hums quietly beneath the book.

 

The book really comes alive along the roadside. Gas stations, cafes, tourist cabins, motor courts—each one a small act of faith. People built their livelihoods on the hope that cars would keep coming. Some struck gold. Others watched traffic dry up when the route shifted a few miles south or a bypass cut them out entirely. Maulsby has a sharp eye for these human stories, and lets them unfold without sentimentality.

Davenport Locomotive Company Engine Used In China

Des Moines Register. September 14, 1930.

The Des Moines Register printed this picture of the Number One locomotive on China's K. P. Railroad. It was made by the Davenport Locomotive Company and has been in service for years. 

Booze, Bad Decisions, And Robbery In Long Grove

Stockmen's Savings Bank in Long Grove Iowa

The automobile had changed everything. In the past, men robbed banks on foot or horseback. Now they could now roll into a town, strike, and disappear down country roads before a sheriff could arrive. Small towns with one bank and a handful of streets suddenly looked vulnerable. A quiet place could be cleaned out in minutes. Newspapers across Iowa and the Midwest called them auto bandits.

Long Grove sat ten miles north of Davenport and had a population of about 150. Strangers stood out like a sore thumb. That’s why the Hudson touring car drew attention as it rolled into town on December 15, 1921.

William Clausen, a truck driver for Tri-City Bottling Works, saw it pull up and felt something was off. Then, just as quickly, he watched it move on and let the moment go. He didn’t connect it to anything until the shooting started and the whole town seemed to crack open at once.

Lucielle And Erma Iversen Clinton Iowa Performers

Lucille and Erma Iversen, better known as "The Iversen Dolls," performed for large audiences in Clinton, Iowa, in the early 1920s. The children could sing and dance like real actors.

Lucielle, age 3, usually performs as a man, and Erma, age 4, as a woman. They have performed at Red Cross benefits, automobile shows, and numerous conventions.

Ruby Hall, Queen of the Clear Lake Winter Carnival (1929)

Ruby Hall, 18, winner of the bathing beauty contest at Clear Lake, Iowa. The contest was part of the city's Water Carnival and she was named "Queen of the Carnival." As winner, she got to ride in the Queen's Float in the Venetian parade.

Lewis Worthington Smith Drake University Poet

Lewis Worthington Smith was an English professor at Drake University from 1906 to 1940. He believed writing mattered. Style wasn’t decoration. Ideas should stand up to pressure.

He belonged to the Poetry Society of America and the Authors’ Club of London, alongside writers who shaped modern literature. Locally, he was active in Des Moines intellectual circles like the University Club and the Prairie Club. That mix—Midwest roots with international reach—defined him. He was proof that you didn’t have to live on the coasts to think seriously about culture.

 

Smith wrote eighteen books, ranging from criticism to broader reflections on language and civilization. Ships in the Port used metaphor and reflection to explore stillness, waiting, and transition. The Mechanism of English Style broke writing to its moving parts, treating prose like a machine that had to work cleanly and efficiently. The Skyline in English Literature examined how writers used cities, horizons, and modern landscapes to express ambition, anxiety, and change.

 

He didn’t chase trends. He asked how English actually worked—and what it revealed about the people using it.

No Justice For Evelyn Lee

Evelyn Lee

Nine-year-old Evelyn Lee was playing near her Des Moines home on Saturday afternoon, May 10, 1930, when she disappeared in the woods along Four Mile Creek. 

Two days later, E.M. Wessels stumbled upon Evelyn’s battered body while digging up shrubs in the same woods, just south of the Youngstown Bridge on Scott Street. Investigators quickly determined she had been choked to death by a left-handed attacker. Footprints found at the scene matched Evelyn’s shoes, and showed her attacker might have been a man with a crippled right foot. 

Detectives wasted no time in narrowing their search to two suspects—Carl McCune, 34, and Elmer Gibson, 35—scrappers who had been spotted driving a beat-up 1926 Ford roadster loaded with barrels and scavenged items. Witnesses recalled seeing the pair in South Des Moines that Saturday, drinking heavily and behaving erratically. 

The manhunt ended on May 15 when police apprehended McCune and Gibson at McCune’s mother’s house in Des Moines.

Evelyn’s parents were devastated. Her stepmother learned of Evelyn’s death when Agnes Arney, a reporter for the Des Moines Register, showed up at her door.

Carlisle Straw Stack Murder

Man running from straw stack
murder scene

The straw stack murder mystery broke in Des Moines in early August 1925. A red-haired woman was clubbed her to death and then burned in a straw stack on the George Patterson farm near Carlisle.

Investigators had little evidence to go on—a pile of bones, an expensive brooch, a string of pearls, and a tuft of red hair.

Earl Leverich and Harlan Cain found the charred skeleton at the top of Watts Hill. Leverich was driving home when he saw a skull in a pile of ashes in the field.

“Harlan thought I was seeing things,” said Leverich. He stopped the truck a couple of hundred feet down the road and walked back to investigate. “As we got closer to the skull, we could make out the rest of the body, which was badly burned.

“It looked to me as if someone was having a party that ended in murder.” He saw a partial bottle of ginger ale, alcohol, and some sandwiches nearby.

He said He Was Going To Kill me And My Baby

Katherine and Paul Eberle

Paul Eberle was crazy. No one questioned that.

His chauffeur, Harry Schultz, heard Eberle tell his wife, “I don’t see why I don’t kill you, Katherine.”

Schultz watched Paul Eberle threaten the lives of his wife and child again and again. Once, he saw Eberle on the edge of killing himself. Another time, he said, “I’m going down in the basement to cut my arteries.”

Schultz and Katherine followed Eberle downstairs and watched him sit in a chair next to the furnace with a razor blade pressed to his wrist.

Eberle had many strange obsessions and addictions. He was a cigarette fiend, buying them in boxes by the tens of thousands. He drank coffee constantly and used drugs. His moods swung so fast, you never knew how he’d act.

Others noticed it too. John McDonnell said Eberle acted like a man with a permanent chip on his shoulder, ready to do battle at any time.