Silent Nights, Gunshots, and Midnight Beliefs: Iowa’s Real Christmas History

Iowa didn’t invent a cute Christmas. It inherited a serious one.

 Before blinking lights and inflatable Santas, Christmas here was shaped by immigrants who brought their old customs intact, farmers who lived by weather and daylight, and towns that treated winter as something to endure rather than decorate. The result was something quiet, loud, watchful, and sometimes unsettling.

 

This isn’t folklore stitched together after the fact. These were actual practices Iowans followed, genuine beliefs they held, and real things newspapers felt compelled to comment on — sometimes approvingly, sometimes with irritation.

 

If you want to understand Christmas in Iowa, drop the soundtrack and listen harder.

James Tuttle: The Iowa General Who Held The Line

General James Madison Tuttle

James Madison Tuttle didn’t look like a soldier. He had the look of someone used to counting ledgers and weighing grain, not ordering men forward into rifle fire.

Before the war, he was a businessman in Keokuk, Iowa. Steamboats, trade, the river. A life built on schedules and contracts. When the war broke out in 1861, Tuttle was forty-one years old. Older than most volunteers. Too old, some thought, to start a war career from scratch.

 

The Keokuk Gate City said he was “not a man of noise or flourish, but one whose habits of order and decision commend him to command.” It was meant as reassurance. Iowa was sending fathers, clerks, and farm boys to war. They wanted officers who looked like men who’d bring them home.

 

Tuttle helped raise the 2nd Iowa Infantry and was elected its colonel. In 1861, officers weren’t handed down from Washington. Men chose whom they trusted. The 2nd Iowa chose Tuttle. The Gate City noted the regiment had selected “a commander of cool judgment, whose influence over the men is quiet but complete.”

 

They learned what that meant at Fort Donelson in February 1862.

 

The Union army pushed into Tennessee under Ulysses S. Grant, crashing into Confederate forts that guarded the rivers. Donelson was cold, muddy, and confused. Attacks stalled. Lines bent. Confederate generals tried to break out and escape.

Iowa Troops at Shiloh, April 1862

Steamboats at Pittsburg Landing

Iowa regiments were camped near Pittsburg Landing when the Confederate army came out of the woods at dawn and slammed into the Union camps with a violence few soldiers had ever imagined.

One Iowa correspondent said the attack came “like a thunderclap out of a clear sky,” adding that men were driven from their tents “before they had time to seize their arms.” A reporter for the Chicago Tribune was blunter: “The enemy fell upon us with a fury that astonished even seasoned troops.”

 

Shiloh wasn’t supposed to happen like that.

 

Union commander Ulysses S. Grant believed his army was secure while it gathered for an advance deeper into Tennessee. The camps were spread out. Men cooked breakfast. Some were still half asleep when musket fire cracked through the trees.

 

Grant would later admit, “I did not expect an attack so soon,” a statement repeated widely in Iowa papers in the weeks that followed.

Iowa's Ninety Day Men At Wilson's Creek: The First Iowa Infantry

The First Iowa Infantry fought alongside General
Nathaniel Lyon at Wilson's Creek

Wilson’s Creek was chaos from the start. No clean fields. No neat battle lines. Just rolling ridges, brush, tall grass, and narrow ravines that hid entire units. Smoke settled low and stuck there. Men fired at sound and movement. Nobody could see the whole fight. A correspondent said the field was “wrapped in a fog of powder smoke through which figures loomed and vanished like shadows.”

Union commander Nathaniel Lyon knew he was outnumbered. Confederate forces under Sterling Price and Ben McCulloch were camped south of Springfield with nearly twice as many men. Lyon didn’t have supplies, reinforcements, or time. In his official report, he said that he acted because “delay would have given the enemy great advantages.”

 

So he attacked anyway.

 

A correspondent traveling with the Iowa regiment wrote for the Dubuque Herald that Lyon moved “with the desperate determination of a man who knew delay was ruin.” Another Iowa paper said the army marched out “to fight or be destroyed,” with no illusions left about the danger ahead.

Iowa At Pea Ridge: The Day The Line Didn't Break

Defeat of the Rebel forces at Pea Ridge
(colorized image from Harper's Weekly)

When the Battle of Pea Ridge blew open in northwestern Arkansas in March 1862, Iowa troops were all over it—jammed into the worst ground, holding the ugliest stretches of line, trying to keep Missouri from sliding back into Confederate hands.

Pea Ridge wasn’t dramatic terrain. No wide fields. No pretty hills. Just woods, ridges, bad roads, and ravines that swallowed units whole.

Armies didn’t move cleanly there. They got lost.

Union commander Samuel Ryan Curtis knew that if he lost here, Missouri was gone. Win, and the Confederacy’s push north was finished.

Curtis said the enemy came in “with the confident expectation of cutting off and destroying our army.” That confidence didn’t survive the Iowa infantry.

Davenport Police Officer Henry Janssen: A Shot In The Dark

Police Officer Henry Janssen

Police work doesn’t come with warnings.

A patrolman steps into the dark never knowing if the next call will be nothing more than rattling doors—or the last thing he does. Most nights blur together. Fights broken up. Drunks sent home. Lives nudged back from the edge.

 

Then there are nights that change everything.

 

At 4:10 a.m. on May 1, 1911, Davenport police officer Henry Janssen answered what sounded like another routine call. A burglary at 330 West Fifth Street. Night Desk Sergeant Henry Nagel dispatched Janssen and Detective Sidney La Grange to investigate. The city was quiet, the kind of quiet that makes footsteps sound louder than they should.

 

As the two officers rounded the corner of Sixth Street, they nearly collided with a man moving fast in the opposite direction.

 

He was in a hurry. Too much of one.

 

The officers stopped him.

Margaret Hassock: She Got Away With Murder

Margaret Hossack
(Des Moines Register. February 17, 1903)

It always starts with a thought you’re not supposed to say out loud. Something primitive. Something sharp and heavy. Something with a handle.

What woman hasn’t pictured it? The ax. The swing. The sudden silence. Society pretends this thought doesn’t exist, but it does. It lives in kitchens and bedrooms and long marriages that curdle into private wars. Margaret Hossack didn’t invent the thought. She just refused to pretend it wasn’t there.

She talked about killing her husband the way other people talked about the weather.

John Hossack had been married to Margaret for thirty-one years. He’d become a domestic dictator—an aging tyrant stomping around a farmhouse in Iowa, barking orders, threatening his children, ruling through fear. Neighbors said he was one man in public and another in private, which is a polite Midwestern way of saying he was a bastard behind closed doors.

Margaret told anyone who would listen that she hated him. Wanted him dead. Wanted God to take him away if no one else would step up.

An Unlikely Suspect in the Villisca Axe Murders

Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly

Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly was an unlikely suspect in the Villisca Axe Murders. He was often described as a queer, strange, little man—standing only five foot two and weighing 120 pounds. An article in Smithsonian Magazine said he was well known as a sexual pervert. Just days before the murders, he was observed peeping into windows in Villisca.

Detectives arrested Kelly in 1917 and charged him with the killings, and for a while, it seemed they had the case wrapped up.

Kelly made a written confession. He said he saw a shadow by the Moore house while he was out walking. “Something prompted him to follow it. He saw an ax. He picked it up. Then came a voice saying: ‘Go in. Slay utterly.’”

He crept up the stairs and into the children’s bedroom. The voice came back. “Slay utterly. Suffer little children to come unto me.” He replied, “Yes, Lord, they’re coming quick.” Chop—went the ax.

Krampus: The Christmas Monster Iowa Didn't Want

Krampus approaching a small Mississippi River town

Krampus had a very clear role in the old world, and it wasn’t subtle.

In the Alpine parts of Europe—Austria, Bavaria, and a few neighboring regions—Christmas came with rules. Saint Nicholas rewarded good kids. Krampus handled the rest. He was hairy, horned, loud, and carried chains and sticks because apparently subtle parenting hadn’t been invented yet. If children behaved, great. If not, there was a half-goat demon lurking nearby to remind them consequences were real.

Krampusnacht wasn’t a cozy night with cocoa. It was grown men in terrifying masks running through the streets, clanging chains, and scaring everyone within range. Kids were meant to be afraid. Adults were meant to remember that winter was dangerous, life was fragile, and order mattered. It made sense in mountain villages, where darkness came early and folklore was taken seriously.

Then Christmas crossed the ocean.

James Wilson: The Iowan Who Made Farming Make Sense

James Wilson

James Wilson didn’t stumble into power. He plowed his way there, boots dirty, hands calloused, brain always chewing on the next problem. Born in Scotland and dragged to America as a boy, he grew up learning that the land didn’t care about your intentions. Crops failed. Weather lied. Hard work sometimes wasn’t enough. That lesson stayed with him longer than any sermon.

He became the longest-serving Secretary of Agriculture in American history—sixteen years, three presidents, no theatrics. McKinley picked him. Roosevelt kept him. Taft trusted him. While others came to Washington to make noise, Wilson came to fix systems. He turned farming into science, dragged food safety into the daylight, and built the Department of Agriculture into something that actually mattered.

Wilson believed farmers deserved facts, not fairy tales, and that belief reshaped American agriculture whether anyone noticed.

The story starts before Washington ever smelled him coming.

A Speaker Without Swagger: The Iowa Politician Who Didn't Need It

David Bremmer Henderson

David Bremner Henderson was born in Scotland in 1840, brought to America as a boy, and raised in the Midwest, where reliability mattered more than ambition. That background stayed with him, even after he reached the highest levels of power.

When the Civil War broke out, Henderson joined the Union Army. He expected the war to be short. Most people did. It wasn’t. He was shot in the neck. Later he was shot again, this time in the leg. Part of that leg was taken off, and he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Years later, he summed up the experience with characteristic restraint. “War is not a parade.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.

After the war, he went back to Iowa. He became a lawyer, married, and stayed involved in his community. He didn’t trade on his injuries or his service. He believed that surviving carried responsibilities, not privileges.

Politics eventually found him anyway.

Henderson entered Congress in the early 1880s and stayed there for twenty years, representing Iowa’s 3rd District. Washington was loud and combative in those days, but Henderson wasn’t interested in volume. He listened more than he talked. A colleague said he had  “the manner of a man who had already seen the worst that could happen.”

Book Review: Whatever It Took by Henry Langrehr

Henry Langrehr came from Clinton, Iowa. A river town. Factories, cold winters, work that didn’t ask how you felt. That kind of place teaches you to endure before it teaches you to dream. 

On June 6, 1944, he jumped into France with the 82nd Airborne. The sky over Normandy was shredded with anti-aircraft fire. Men were hit in the air. Some never reached the ground. Langrehr crashed through the glass roof of a greenhouse in Sainte-Mère-Église and kept moving because stopping meant dying.

 

The drop was chaos. Units were scattered. Orders didn’t exist. The survivors fought German tanks with rifles and nerve. Most of the men he trained with were gone within days. On June 29, he was captured.

 

From there, the war showed its real face.

 

Langrehr was held near a death camp and saw what the Nazis called efficiency. People marched to their deaths. Bodies stacked like lumber. It wasn’t rumor or ideology. It was machinery. He watched because he had no choice.

Bringing Christmas Home: How Evergreen Trees Came to Iowa

Christmas trees weren’t a big deal on the Iowa frontier. Not at first, anyway.

For many early settlers, Christmas was quiet. Sometimes it meant church. Sometimes, nothing at all. Winter was hard. Money was tight. There was wood to cut, animals to feed, and snow to shovel. Decorating a tree wasn’t high on the list.

 

The truth was, a lot of early Iowans didn’t know what a Christmas tree was. One widely reprinted explanation in American newspapers during the 1850s tried to spell it out plainly, calling it “a German custom, recently introduced into this country, and designed chiefly for the delight of children.”

 

The idea came west with German immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s, in places like Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington. Back home, they’d grown up with evergreen trees brought indoors and lit with candles. When they did the same thing in Iowa, their neighbors didn’t know what to think.

Henry Cantwell Wallace The Farmer Who Wouldn't Shut Up

Henry Cantwell Wallace was born in 1866, just after the Civil War finished. Rock Island, Illinois, on paper. Iowa in practice. Adair County dirt under his boots. Weather in his bones. A place where optimism depended on rainfall and a man learned early that effort didn’t guarantee reward.

His father preached the gospel and edited farm papers with the same intensity. Faith, soil, and justice were all part of the same equation in the Wallace household. Dinner wasn’t quiet. It was arguments about land, debt, and whether America would eventually remember who kept the lights on. Young Henry absorbed it all and went off to Iowa State believing, dangerously, that facts might matter.

He studied agriculture when it was still half science and half superstition. Graduated in 1892, convinced that farmers weren’t failing because they were lazy or dumb, but because the system was rigged to chew them up and move on. He would later write that the farmer’s greatest need was not harder work, but better knowledge. This wasn’t a popular opinion among men who profited from confusion.

Radio Station WOC Davenport Iowa

Dr. Frank W. Elliott, vice president and business manager of Palmer School of Chiropractic (left), was in charge of the WOC radio station at Davenport. Peter McArthur (right), worked as an announcer on the station.

An accompanying article said the station’s slogan was: “Where the west begins and in the state where the tall corn grows.”

At the time the article was written in 1925, the station was “selling good will.” Its advertising was “wholly indirect.” It discouraged “any direct selling methods.”

How times have changed.

Picture: Des Moines Register. December 6, 1925.