Goodrich Hotel Council Bluffs Iowa

The Goodrich Hotel stood at 8th and Broadway in Council Bluffs, built by local businessman Walter S. Goodrich. For years, it was one of the city’s best places to stay—solid, respectable, and busy with travelers coming off the trains.

A fire in March 1922 lit up the downtown skyline. Firefighters saved the building, though the damage left scars that never fully healed. The hotel reopened but never quite regained its old polish.

By the 1970s, the Goodrich had shifted from hotel to low-rent apartments. The building was sold in the early 1980s, and talk of demolition followed, possibly to make way for a parking lot.

Hanging of William Barger Jackson County Iowa

William Barger was hung in June 1857 by a group known as the Iron Hill Vigilance Committee. Barger had killed his wife in 1854 at Bellevue in Jackson County, Iowa. He had accused her of infidelity. She sued for divorce. At the time of her murder, Mrs. Barger lived with a relative in Bellevue. Barger bored a hole in a fence near the house. Then he waited for her to open the door. When she did, he shot her dead.  

He pleaded insanity and was tried for murder twice. The first jury was hung, and the second found him guilty. After that, Barger’s lawyer didn’t think his client could get a fair trial in Bellevue, so he got a change of venue to De Witt in Clinton County for his third trial.  

The Tipton Advertiser justified the hanging, saying, “That the law was sluggish is evidenced in the time Barger has been suffered to lay in the jail at the expense of the county, even when it was judged and positively known that he was guilty.” In effect, they said, if the law doesn’t do it, the people will.

Wartburg College Clinton Iowa

Wartburg College (circa 1900)

Wartburg College was built by German immigrants who thought knowledge should serve both God and common sense. They weren’t wrong. In 1894 they planted their red-brick fortress on a hill in Clinton, Iowa — a solid slab of faith and discipline staring down the Mississippi like it owned the view.

It wasn’t fancy. It was tough. Classrooms, chapel, dorms, dining hall, library — all jammed into one building like the world’s most righteous machine. It smelled of chalk dust, coal smoke, and boiled potatoes. The professors ran a tight ship. Latin for the mind. Math for the soul. Theology to keep you honest. They preached that the world might hold together if everyone just studied a little harder.

The students learned, prayed, shoveled snow until their fingers cracked. They lived by the bell and the book. The streetcar clanged up from downtown, packed with frozen kids in heavy coats. They studied Scripture, philosophy, bookkeeping — whatever would keep them from going under.

Highland Park College Des Moines Iowa

Highland Park College (circa 1906)

Highland Park College in Des Moines was basically Hogwarts for sensible Midwesterners who didn’t have time for wizard nonsense.

Students rode the streetcar up from downtown. They studied — literature, science, bookkeeping — basically all the things your great-grandparents did before Wi-Fi and television. The professors were serious types who believed learning could save civilization, which seems unlikely in retrospect.

The college didn’t last. It got taken over by Des Moines University, and later Drake University. But for a few good years, Highland Park College was buzzing — full of earnest kids and big ideas and maybe a couple of disastrous romances that still haunt Des Moines.

Downtown Clinton Iowa (circa 1930)

 

Downtown Clinton, Iowa. (Circa 1930s, pencil drawing after a vintage postcard)

John Looney Rock Island Gangster

John Looney and Lawrence Pedigo
outside of his Rock Island home

Homegrown Rock Island gangster John Looney might have lived in Illinois, but his influence extended into the underworld in Western Illinois and Eastern Iowa. This is a drawing of Looney and Lawrence Pedigo outside the Looney Mansion at 1635 20th  Street in Rock Island, Illinois.

Moses Keokuk Son of Chief Keokuk

In 1852, Wunagisa went to Washington to meet the people who decided who would be considered chiefs and such things. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs told him his father had been made a chief because he was “a good man and a true friend to the whites.” He said General Winfield Scott had approved it, and that if Wunagisa was as good as his father, he could remain chief.

That was the rule. Keep the peace. Be the kind of man who didn’t cause trouble.

Years later, Wunagisa became a Baptist. He took the name Moses Keokuk and began trying to live in a way the white men would approve. He gave up one of his wives, stopped drinking, stopped gambling. He moved out of his wigwam, stopped painting his face, and gave up the ceremonies his father had led.

Many in his tribe couldn’t understand it. The old Moses had been a man of color and noise—his hair shaved in bright stripes, his clothes loud, his laugh louder. He raced horses, made bets, and stood at the center of things. “He wore the most gaudy apparel he could find,” said Jacob Carter, the government agent.