James W. Grimes: An Iowa Politician Who Refused to Play It Safe

James W. Grimes landed in Burlington when it was still half frontier, half fever dream—muddy streets, cheap whiskey, and men who argued politics like they were swinging shovels. Grimes fit right in. “This is a place where a man can make something of himself,” he supposedly said. “Preferably noise.”

Everyone who met him remembered his voice. Not loud, but cutting. It could slice through a crowded saloon and make the piano player lose his place. One editor said, “Grimes didn’t speak; he struck.” Another said, “He had the manner of a man who expected you to be wrong.”

In 1854, Iowa made him governor—a bad idea for anyone who preferred peace. Grimes was built for conflict. Slavery’s supporters tried to push their influence west, and he met them like a brick wall. “If slavery enters Iowa, it will come over my dead body,” he said, and people believed him. He didn’t smile when he said it. He didn’t smile much at all. A Davenport paper described him as “a man who looks permanently disappointed in human nature.”

He became one of the early architects of the Republican Party, back when it was more movement than machine. He didn’t care if he made enemies. “Let them shout,” he said. “I’ll shout louder.” When a rival called him radical, Grimes shrugged it off. “If freedom is radical, the Founders were radicals,” he said, and the line stuck because it sounded like something hammered into metal.

Laughed Off Stage, Written Into History: The Cherry Sisters

A colorized image of The Cherry Sisters

The Cherry Sisters didn’t arrive on the American stage—so much as detonate on it, like some godforsaken cyclone stuffed with tin pans, bad hymns, and the righteous confidence you normally only see in evangelists or heavily medicated congressmen. Five of them—Effie, Addie, Ella, Lizzie, Jessie—marching into the 1890s like a militia of homemade virtue, certain the world was ready for their greatness.

The world, of course, had other ideas.

 

Their traveling revue, a fever dream called “Something Good, Something Sad,” wasn’t a show so much as a moral crusade welded to accidental slapstick. They sang with the reckless abandon of people who did not know what singing required. They recited poetry like hostile witnesses in their own trial. They dispensed moral lectures with the zeal of frontier prosecutors. And they performed dramatic sketches stitched together like ransom notes.

 

The Clown Who Outsold Charlie Chaplin: Iowa's Harry Langdon

Harry Langdon was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1884—small, pale, blinking like the sun was too bright and the world too loud. He wasn’t built for noise, so he made his own. Soft noise. Strange noise. The kind that made people lean in.

 He grew up watching more than talking, a quiet kid who turned confusion into comedy. Vaudeville grabbed him early. He drifted into tent shows that smelled like dust and popcorn, where comics fought for dimes and dignity. His act was a man-child stumbling through life like someone had swapped the instruction manual for a blank sheet of paper. “I never knew much,” he said. “That seemed to help.”

 

Crowds loved him. They felt protective, then foolish for feeling protective, then they laughed harder. One reviewer said he looked “one sneeze from disaster.” Another said, “Langdon makes you hold your breath, then giggle at yourself for it.”

 

Mack Sennett signed him in 1924. Hollywood figured he’d break instantly. He didn’t break. He shuffled his feet, and underplayed everything until audiences lost their minds. Moving Picture World said, “Langdon doesn’t hit gags. He drifts into them like fog into a valley.”

The Iowa Woman Who Changed the Republican Party From the Inside: Mary Louise Smith

Mary Louise Smith

Mary Louise Smith grew up in Eddyville, Iowa, in a house where the radio never shut up and the news barged in like a half-drunk uncle with opinions about everything. She was born in 1907—late to the suffrage fight, but early enough to feel the leftover electricity crackling through the country.

She wasn’t loud. Not the type who storms rooms or slams fists. She watched and saw the tiny things—how a chair scraped just before someone disagreed, how an entire meeting could tilt off its axis because one person liked the sound of their own voice. She could sort the talkers from the doers in under a minute.

Politics in the 1920s and ’30s wasn’t made for women. It wasn’t made for most men either. It was a noisy, overheated kitchen where everyone was burning something and nobody wanted to clean the pan. Most women stayed out of it. Mary Louise stepped in like she’d been sent to organize the pantry before the entire place exploded.

She started in the church-basement world of Republican women’s clubs. She taught people how to vote, how to read a ballot that looked like it had been typeset in a coal mine, how to stand up without shaking like a loose fencepost. She said politics was something anyone could learn “one stitch at a time,” and she meant it.

The Iowa Woman Who Broke the Bar: Belle Babb Mansfield

Belle Babb Mansfield grew up in a house where books were treated like they mattered. Her parents believed girls should learn the same things boys did. Her mother said she had “a mind that runs ahead of her years.” Belle spent her childhood catching up to it.

When the family moved to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Belle found herself living two blocks from Iowa Wesleyan University. The campus buzzed with students arguing about politics and the future of the country. Belle slid into that world like she belonged there. She read constantly, took every challenge seriously, and graduated as valedictorian. One professor said she had “a steadiness rare in the young.”

After college, Belle taught school. She liked her students, but the work didn’t use her whole mind. Whenever she visited her older brother Washington’s law office, she’d sit near the window with a law book open on her lap while the office cat slept on her feet.

Her brother remembered, “She read the law as if she had known it all her life.” She read case after case until the pages smudged under her fingers. The work made sense to her—the structure, the logic, the arguments. It lit something in her that teaching couldn’t.

Before The FED, There Was Leslie Mortimer Shaw: Iowa's Man At The Treasury

Leslie Mortimer Shaw

Leslie Mortimer Shaw came into the world in 1848 in Morristown, Vermont, a place that taught thrift, discipline, and that comfort was something other people had. He grew up believing you survived by grinding harder than the next man. That philosophy followed him west to Iowa, where ambition grew faster than corn.

Shaw arrived in Denison in 1874, opened a law practice, and married the schoolteacher. He served on boards, ran civic committees, and quickly built a reputation as someone who didn’t waste time or patience. People noticed. One Denison editor wrote, “Mr. Shaw has no talent for idleness; he is a steam engine disguised as a lawyer.”

 

By the 1880s, Shaw had taken over Denison’s banks and insurance companies. He studied financial systems with an intensity usually reserved for religious conversions. Currency debates, farm credit, banking power—these were the storms he wanted to steer. The local newspaper called him “a gentleman of firm will and iron reason,” a man who refused to back down once he decided he was right. Another paper noted, “He speaks of money the way a surgeon speaks of pulse—one wrong beat can kill the patient.”

 

In 1898, the Iowa Republican Party nominated him for governor. His speeches hammered stability, sound money, and predictable government. “Shaw speaks as if lecturing Congress from the steps of a barn,” the Des Moines Register wrote, half amused and half impressed. Voters responded. He won the election and walked into the governor’s office with the air of a man who already knew what needed fixing. One supporter said, “We did not elect a showman. We elected a mechanic with a toolbox.”

When The Fighting Stopped & The Land Changed Hands: Winfield Scott & The Black Hawk Purchase

Winfield Scott in 1812

When General Winfield Scott reached Fort Armstrong, the Black Hawk War was over. The shooting had stopped. The militia had gone home. What remained was the uneasy quiet that settles in after a storm. Scott hadn’t come to win a battle. He had come to draw the new lines that followed one.

He was supposed to arrive at the height of the campaign with a fresh army behind him. Instead, cholera ripped his force apart as it moved along the Great Lakes. Soldiers died fast—sometimes within hours. One volunteer wrote, “Death travels faster than the soldier.” Scott burned contaminated gear, quarantined entire units, and marched on through the sickness anyway.

 

By late July, he reached Illinois with what one newspaper called “a column of survivors rather than an army.” And by then, Black Hawk had been defeated at the Bad Axe River. The war had closed its own curtain.

 

But Washington wanted more than peace. Officials wanted land—security for settlers, control of the Mississippi, and a treaty that would keep Native nations from returning to Illinois. If the war had been fought with bullets, the settlement would be finished with signatures.

A Drunk, A Reformer, A Governor: Harold E. Hughes of Iowa

Harold E. Hughes didn’t look like a governor—he looked like the truck driver he used to be. Big shoulders. Thick hands. A face carved by cold highways and too many nights sleeping three states from home. He talked straight, prayed hard, and carried the ghosts of alcoholism like extra luggage.

He wasn’t a polished politician. He was something rarer. He was real. And from 1963 to 1969, Iowa found out what it meant to put a real man in the governor’s chair.

 

Hughes came into office when Iowa government still smelled faintly of the 19th century—old boys, old systems, and old fears. The state needed oxygen, and Hughes brought a tank.

 

His inaugural address made the establishment nervous. “We are not here to preserve the past. We are here to build the future.” That sounded harmless…but Hughes meant every word like a fist hitting a desk.

 

He started with mental health—an issue most politicians tiptoed around. In 1963, he pushed through a sweeping reorganization of Iowa’s mental health system, shifting treatment to community centers instead of massive state institutions. The Des Moines Register wrote, “Governor Hughes speaks of mental health not as a program, but as a moral duty.”

UFOs over Iowa

In 1967, two state troopers near Norwalk chased a red-orange
spacecraft down a rural highway at 2 am

Something was loose in the Iowa sky during the 1960s and 70s—something bright, silent, and definitely not from any Air Guard training schedule. Iowa papers were printing UFO stories with the same straight face they used for county board meetings. It wasn’t fringe. It was news. And to read those old clippings today is to feel the weird throb of a state trying to keep its sanity while the heavens misbehaved.

 Take 1964, for example—Lisbon and Mount Vernon. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported locals watching an oval-shaped light that shot across the sky, stopped cold, and hovered like a nervous housefly with a PhD. One man told the paper it “hung there like it was thinking.” Thinking! This was Iowa, where nothing thinks in the sky except clouds and maybe the occasional bird with ambition.

Death After the Applause: Cary Grant's Final Night in Iowa

Cary Grant didn’t plan on dying in Iowa. Nobody does. Iowa isn’t a death state, not like Arizona with its heat or New York with its taxis. Iowa is a place for corn, river towns, and people who will tell you directions by pointing with two fingers and a soft “you bet.” Still, that’s where Cary Grant’s story stopped—Davenport, of all places—on a chilly Saturday night in 1986.

He’d come for a show at the Adler Theatre. Not a movie—but a conversation. Just Cary Grant on a stage, answering questions, smiling, telling stories about being Cary Grant. People in Davenport bought tickets faster than you’d expect for a Hollywood relic. The Quad-City Times noted, “The Adler has never hosted a presence quite like this one.”

 

He checked into the President Riverboat Hotel, and walked through the lobby greeting people with that soft British-American hybrid voice of his. A desk clerk later told a reporter, “He was polite. Quiet. The sort of man you hope you’ll meet again when you look better.”

The McGreggor Murders--Andrew Thompson

Andrew Thompson dragged Marie Haggerty and her
children across eastern Iowa and Wisconsi for over a week

The river keeps secrets until it’s ready to spit them back.

 For almost six months, the Mississippi held its tongue about what Andrew Thompson did on a frozen December night in 1868. It kept quiet while the ice tightened, the slush thickened, and the current dragged four bodies along its dark ribs. No one in Iowa or Wisconsin knew a thing. Thompson went home, fed his livestock, slept beside his wife, and pretended his hands weren’t stained.

 

Love—or whatever twisted thing he felt—had pushed him there.

 

Maria Haggerty. Thirty-six. Pretty, dark-haired, sharp-eyed. She ran the Bull’s Head Saloon after her husband left for the Union Army. Thompson was a regular. A big, soft-bellied farmer from Monona Township with money in his pockets and hunger under his skin. When Maria poured the whiskey, he fell hard and stupid.

 

People whispered. John Haggerty came home from the war and didn’t even try to fight it. He divorced her, turned the saloon over to her, and headed west.

Abraham Lincoln, Grenville M. Dodge & the Transpacific Railroad

Abraham Lincoln arrived in Council Bluffs on August 13, 1859, looking less like a future president and more like what he was — a traveling lawyer with a worn suit, a dusty hat, and long legs that seemed to fold awkwardly off the steamboat. He came west partly to see the Missouri River country for himself, and partly to learn more about the growing railroad interests pushing toward the Pacific.

On this visit, he met Grenville M. Dodge, a young civil engineer whose surveys of the region were already respected. Dodge later recalled that Lincoln approached him with a direct question that bypassed all small talk:

“I am informed you are a railroad engineer, and that you have made surveys.”

Lincoln wanted just one thing: an honest engineering assessment of where a transcontinental line ought to begin. Dodge told him that the most practical starting point on the Missouri River was Council Bluffs, citing the favorable grades leading west through the Platte Valley. Dodge recalled Lincoln listened with intense focus, asking what he later described as “a series of minute questions” about routes, elevations, and obstacles.

A Ghost Tale of Clinton Iowa

This one is just for fun. There’s not a hint of truth in it, is there?

 

Folks in Clinton don’t talk much about Silas Burdett. Not when the sun’s up, anyway. In daylight he’s a joke you toss around over burgers at Hook’s or while waiting on a latte at 392. A story. A shrug.

 

But when the Mississippi fog slides in after dark, people stop joking. Conversations dry up. Eyes slide toward the windows. And if you listen, if you really listen, you’d swear you hear crackling wood. Burning. Smoldering. Old smoke that isn’t there.

 

Silas Burdett. Yeah. Him.

 

The lumber baron who ran Clinton back when sawdust blew through town like blizzards and the mills never slept. He had a voice like grinding timber and a jaw cut from white oak. Folks say he didn’t walk so much as shove the ground out of his way. His mill squatted on the riverfront where the LumberKings ballpark stands now—back before baseball, before bleachers, before anything except heat, noise, and fear.

What Happened to Mrytle Cook: A Vinton Iowa Mystery

Myrtle Cook

Myrtle Cook’s murder had everything police hate—politics, booze, the Klan, and an estranged husband whose alibi kept springing leaks. On September 7, 1925, someone walked up to the living-room window of her Vinton, Iowa home at 703 Third Avenue, confirmed she was sitting at her desk writing a speech for the next day’s W.C.T.U. meeting, and put a bullet straight through her heart.

She stayed alive long enough to whisper a name to her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Cook—a name the town didn’t expect. A man the local police practically trusted with the keys to the city. Detectives didn’t buy it. They chalked it up to shock, pain, and wishful thinking.

Her husband, Clifford B. Cook, wasn’t so dismissive. He said the family reenacted the shooting angle. If Myrtle saw the shooter, she could have identified him. That made everything messier.

Investigators first chased the obvious suspects: rumrunners. Myrtle was one of the loudest prohibition activists in Iowa. She harassed mayors, sheriffs, and state officials. She wrote down license plates and took notes on her neighbors. She treated Prohibition like a personal crusade and made enemies the way some people collect stamps.

Boxcar Murder in West Davenport, 1922

Harry Carey (aka Walter Baum)

Manuel Rodriguez didn’t expect anything unusual when he walked into his friend’s boxcar shack on May 4, 1922. He just pushed open the door—and froze. Manuel Rocha was on the floor, head in a pool of dried blood. Three ax blows to the skull. Then the killer flipped the ax and smashed his face in. Rocha hadn’t even gotten off the soapbox he used as a chair.

Police barely had time to process the scene before the rumors started: Rocha had been sleeping with his friend Harry Carey’s wife, Margaret. In that part of Davenport, an affair was a fast way to end up dead.

 

Margaret wasn’t hard to track down. Detectives found her half out of her mind at Evelyn Locke’s brothel on Warren Street—drugged up, covered in blood, and rambling. Locke said she’d shown up around ten the night before, screaming, “The Mexican has killed Harry. My poor Harry. He will never have to go to jail no more.”