HistoricalTownMaps Blog

My son Tommy and I recently made a surprise visit to see my friend Tim Waggoner and his wife Tami in Fort Madison Iowa.  Tim and Tami recently purchased the Kingsley Inn and Alpha’s restaurant in Fort Madison.  The Waggoners were fabulous hosts, the Inn was immaculate, and the food and service was outstanding.  Moreover, the Kingsley Inn is in an ideal location right on the Mississippi River.  It is also located near a major east-west crossing point over the Mississippi for the railroads.  My son the train nut was in heaven watching the trains go by all day and night.

Moreover we were really taken by the graciousness, unpretentiousness, and “down-homeness” of the people in Fort Madison and Lee County.  I looked at my son and told him “Welcome to America.”   He could inately sense the lask of ostentation so endemic with life on the coasts.  Ironically, he told me this as he was wearing the uniform of East Coast ostentation - Abercrombie and Fitch!  He told me he wanted to move to Iowa and live at the Kinsgley Inn - sort of a mid-western version of Disney’s Suite Life with Zach and Cody.  In this 21st century clash of cultures - the midwestern ethos clearly won out.

However, as Tommy and I travelled throughout the area -we became aware of numerous other clashes of culture - even clashes of civilization that led to murder, mayhem, and people scattering.   I have often blogged about location based echoes - those echoes from the past of traumatic events in a location that drove people to leave one place and others to arrive.   We came upon two of those echoes on this trip.

The first was in Fort Madison itself.  As excerpted from the History of Old Fort Madison:

“In 1808, Fort Madison, the first United States military post on the upper Mississippi River was established. In part, the fort served to protect a trading post where native tribes could exchange furs and lead for hunting knives, animal traps, blankets, iron tools, fishhooks and other manufactured goods. The post was also intended to secure the American frontier in that region. The fort was under the command of Lt. Alpha Kingsley (sound familiar?).

The majority of area Indians were friendly toward the fort and traded peacefully at the post. However, bands of unfriendly Sauk, Meskwaki, and Winnebago menaced Fort Madison under the partial leadership of the noted Sauk warrior Black Hawk. In September 1812, hostile bands of Sauk andMeskwaki besieged Fort Madison, killed one soldier,  slaughtered the garrison cattle, and burned several nearby cabins.  In July 1813, a party of Winnebago and Sauk killed two soldiers. A week later, four soldiers were set upon and killed by hostile Indians. During the following weeks, Indians frequently attacked the fort with burning arrows.

Faced with constant harassment,  the post commander ordered the fort abandoned in September 1813. Under cover of darkness, the men of the garrison set fire to the fort and slipped away downriver in boats”

Clearly the soldiers of Fort Madison had a very different experience than Tommy and I did in this clash of cultures.  But this conflict and the soldiers resultant departure was really an echo of the beginning of the end of native control of the territory.  Twenty years later  under the terms of the Black Hawk Purchase, legal non-Indian settlement in the Iowa Territory began in earnest. A land rushed followed and a series of treaties pushed Indians westward beyond the Missouri River. By 1851 all Indian lands in Iowa had been ceded to the U.S. government.

When Tommy and I crossed the Mississippi into Nauvoo IL and took a tour of the Joseph Smith historic sites - we learned of another violent culture clash in the midwest.  As described by Michael K. Young:

As we all know, on June 27, 1844, in the hardscrabble town of Carthage, Illinois, Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and his brother, Hyrum, were brutally murdered by a mob that desired nothing more than to be rid of the “hated” Mormons.

The Mormons had recently settled in large numbers on nearby farms and had even built a city, Nauvoo, in the forlorn hope that they might finally find refuge from persecution somewhere in this land supposedly founded on the principal of religious freedom. But the mob had other ideas. Kill the shepherd and the sheep will scatter, they reasoned in the twisted logic that has motivated religious bigots for millennia.

But even assassinations were not enough, the mob soon discovered. So, over the next two years, they drove outlying Mormon settlers off their farms and into the town where an estimated 17,000 people were soon suffering for want of food and supplies. Finally, in the hopes of finding the peace they thought was their birthright, in February 1846, in the bitter cold of an Illinois winter, Brigham Young began directing the mass exodus across the frozen Mississippi and toward the west, where those who survived the 1300-mile journey would establish Salt Lake City a year and a half later.

Illinois was at least the third state they had been forced to abandon”

As we learned of what happened in Nauvoo - Tommy looked at me incredulously and asked - “this happened in the United States???”  “Doesn’t the Constitution guarantee freedom of religion?”  While he had learned in school of the conflict between native Americans and European immigrants, and that people came to these shores in search of religious liberty, he had not heard until that day that people had to flee in America for their lives and the right to exercise that religious liberty in peace.  It was an important life lesson for the both of us.

Every location has a story, and the echoes of those stories reverberate in historical maps, vital records, family histories and lore, and for many people around the world, reverberate in their daily lives.  Listen for those echoes.  When these  echoes can be “heard”- they can provide  moments of such profound clarity they will literally take your breath away.  Random sets of recorded multi-generational events all of a sudden have structure.  Patterns emerge.  And most importantly - deep insight is achieved.

Tommy and I went to go see some friends in Iowa for a fun weekend.  But we also left with a deeper understanding of the American experience in both the 19th and 21st centuries.

Good hunting,

Bernie

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 8:20 am and is filed under Location Based Genealogy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.