History of Iowa

Until the early 19th century Iowa was occupied exclusively by Native Americans and a few European traders, with loose political control by France and Spain.

When the American Indians first arrived (in what is now Iowa) thousands of years ago they would hunt and gather living in a Pleistocene glacial landscape.

By the time European explorers visited Iowa, American Indians were largely settled farmers with complex economic, social, and political systems.

During the Archaic period (more than 2,800 years ago), American Indians adapted to local environments and ecosystems, slowly becoming more sedentary as populations increased.

At other times, they traveled throughout western Illinois and eastern Iowa hunting, fishing, and gathering food and materials with which to make domestic articles.

For the next three months, the Illinois militia pursued Black Hawk and his band of approximately four hundred Indians northward along the eastern side of the Mississippi River.

[17] This land, known as the Black Hawk Purchase, constituted a strip fifty miles wide lying along the Mississippi River, stretching from the Missouri border to approximately Fayette and Clayton Counties in Northeastern Iowa.

After purchasing some of their land back, the Iowa Legislature fought for the Meskwaki tribe to receive an annual payment from the Federal Government.

[27][page needed] The Black Hawk Purchase opened up the lands of Iowa to settlers for the first time, and "official" settlement began pursuant to this on June 1, 1833.

Most of the immigrants who came shortly after this time were from other states, especially Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and to a lesser extent New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas.

Once past the extreme eastern portion of Iowa, settlers quickly discovered that the state was primarily a prairie or tall grass region.

In most portions of eastern and central Iowa, settlers could find sufficient timber for construction of log cabins, but substitute materials had to be found for fuel and fencing.

Some of the early sod house residents wrote in glowing terms about their new quarters, insisting that "soddies" were not only cheap to build but were warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

In the early 1850s, city officials in the river communities of Dubuque, Clinton, Davenport, and Burlington began to organize local railroad companies.

With the 1850s, railroad planning took place which eventually resulted in the development of the Illinois Central, the Chicago and North Western Railway, reaching Council Bluffs in 1867.

Iowa supported the Union during the American Civil War, voting heavily for Lincoln and the Republicans, though there was a strong antiwar "Copperhead" movement among settlers of Southerner origins and among Catholics.

[43] Several Republicans took leadership positions in Washington, particularly Senators William Boyd Allison, Jonathan P. Dolliver, and Albert Baird Cummins, as well as Speaker of the House David B. Henderson.

[44] Under the guidance of Governor (1902–1908) and Senator (1908–1926) Albert Baird Cummins the "Iowa Idea" played a major role in state and national progressivism.

Southern and Eastern European immigration, especially from Italy and Croatia, began in not insignificant amounts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they came to work in Iowan coal mines.

[95] Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and others from Central and South America followed, though a significant majority of Iowa's Latino population was and remains Mexican.

[98] Sugar beet growing requires a significant amount of difficult manual labor, and immigration restrictions on Europeans during the time limited their availability to work in the United States.

[100] Many of the Mexicans recruited to work on the railroads established communities at Fort Madison, Council Bluffs, Des Moines, and Davenport.

[65][102] The late 1980s and subsequent periods have brought a resurgence of Mexican immigration as the demand for labor in the food processing industry has increased.

An 1838 Act[106] prevented African-American settlement in Iowa unless he or she could present a "fair certificate" of "actual freedom" under the seal of a judge and give a $500 bond.

[110] Initial African-American settlement in Iowa after the Civil War was in agricultural communities near the southern border, as well as along river towns on the Mississippi and to a lesser extent the Missouri.

[112] Over time, African Americans migrated from agricultural communities to urban areas, and from the river towns to the coal mines of southern Iowa.

During the farm crisis catalyzed by policies introduced by President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s,[123] the price of farmland plummeted by more than half and the rest of the local economy was proportionally effected.

[128][page needed] Social impacts resulting from NAFTA (such as job loss and depressed wages) are correlated with accelerated diffusion and prevalence of the drug before during the period of the first meth epidemic.

[129] [130] Displaced Mexican farmers flooded the state's remaining industry--meatpacking--when companies like Cargill and Swift solicited workers from cities such a Juarez and Villacueto Mexico to come to Iowa for work by posting billboards south of the border at a moment when Mexican farmers were being wiped out by the sudden drop in staple prices that came in the wake of NAFTA's passage.

[131][127] Real average earnings per job relative to the rest of the United States fell in Iowa, for most of the period between 1969 and 2022--reaching their lowest point in the 1990s and 2000s.