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.