Part 3 (2/2)
”Civil government in Iowa proceeded with its rapid settlement. The pioneer became a model citizen. He knew the necessity for the laws that were enacted. He did not feel oppressed by government. He had experienced the losses of robbery and larceny and knew something of the embarra.s.sment and inconvenience of being scalped. There was no hysteria about trusts and combines because they had practiced combinations themselves for mutual protection. If any one would learn the true genius and exemplification and philosophy of self-government, government of and for and by the people, let him study the records of pioneer life, the inst.i.tutional beginnings, and the evolution of their laws.
It would be worth our while on some suitable occasion when time permitted to talk over the interesting incidents attending the administration of justice in the early days of Iowa, the incidents of its territorial legislatures, the birth and growth of its statehood and the character of its officials. But the greatness of our state is not contained in any name. Its official history is the exponent of its industrial life and character. Its greatness is the sum total of its citizens.h.i.+p. In order to be just, John Jones, the average citizen, must be mentioned along with our most ill.u.s.trious officials. Somebody said that the history of a nation is the history of its great men, but there is an unwritten history which that averment overlooks. The growth of a state is the progress of its average citizen. The credit of a commonwealth is the thrift of its John Jones and its William Smith, and the character, prosperity and patriotism of the individual citizen is the history of Iowa.
”The population of 97,000 which she had when admitted into the union had increased to 754,699 at the close of the Civil war. Of these about 70,000, almost one-tenth of the population, were in the war--a number equal to nearly one-half of the voters of the state. Who made the history of Iowa during that great struggle of our nation's life? John Jones, the average citizen, whether he carried a musket helping to put the scattered stars of state back into the constellation of the Union, or whether he toiled from early dawn to lingering twilight in the fields or in the shop. The best civilization is that which maintains the highest standard of life for its average citizen.
”Since the Civil war the state of Iowa has increased in population to almost 2,225,000 of people, and most of the time has had the least illiteracy of any state in the Union.
Doubtless for that we are indebted to many of the older states, whose enterprising and courageous citizens const.i.tute so large a portion of our population. With but a century of statehood and with an area of but 55,475 square miles, the state of Iowa produces the greatest quant.i.ty of cereals of any state in the Union. As long ago as the last federal census, taken in 1890, it produced more corn, more oats, more beef, more pork than any state in the Union. Not long since I was introduced to a gentleman from New York city. He said, 'Oh, from Iowa--ah--let me see, that's out--ah--you see, I'm not very well posted on the geography of the west.' 'Yes,' I said, 'it's out there just across the Mississippi river. You can leave New York about noon and get your supper in Iowa the next evening. It might be worth your while to look it up. It's the state which produces more of the things which people eat than any other state in the Union. It has more miles of railroads than your state of New York, more than Mexico, more than Brazil and more than all the New England states combined.'
”The value of Iowa's agricultural products and live stock in round numbers for the year 1892 was $407,000,000, to say nothing of her other great and various industries and enterprises. She produced that year 160,000,000 pounds of the best b.u.t.ter on earth of the value of $32,000,000. The Hawkeye b.u.t.ter ladle has achieved a cunning that challenges all Columbia. The Iowa cow has slowly and painfully yet gradually and grandly worked her way upward to a s.h.i.+ning eminence in the eyes of the world. The state of Iowa has on her soil today, if nothing ill befalls it, ninety million dollars' worth of corn. The permanent value of land is estimated by its corn-producing qualities. Of all the products of the earth, corn is king and it reigns in Iowa.
”Industry and nature have made the state of Iowa a creditor.
Her soil has always been solvent and her system of farming does not tend to pauperize. She is a constant seller and therefore wants the evidence of the transaction to be unimpeachable. She has more school teachers than any other state except the Empire state and only three and six-tenths per cent of her population are illiterates. The state of Iowa has yielded the greatest dividends on her educational investments. She has become ill.u.s.trious on account of her enlightenment. She has progressed further from 'primitive indifferent tissue' than the land even of Darwin himself, and in her escape from protoplasm and prejudice she is practically out of danger. Marked out in the beginning by the hand of G.o.d, bounded on the east and west by the two great rivers of the continent, purified and stimulated by the snows of winter, blessed with copious rainfall in the growing season, with generous soil and stately forests interspersed, no wonder that the dusky aborigines exclaimed when they crossed the Father of Waters, 'Iowa, this is the place!' Not only did the red men give our state its beautiful and poetic name, but Indian nomenclature runs like a romance throughout the counties and communities. What infinite meaning, what tokens of joy and sadness, of triumph and of tears, of valor and of vanquishment, of life and love and song there may be in these weird, strange words that name to-day so many of our towns and streams and counties: Allamakee, Chickasaw, Dakota City, Sioux, Pocahontas, Winnes.h.i.+ek, Keosauqua, Sac, Winnebago, Tama, Nodawa, Competine, Chariton, Comanche, Cherokee, Waukon, Muchakinock, Washta, Monona, Waupeton, Onawa, Keota, Waudina, Ioka, Ottumwa, Oneska, Waukee, Waucoma, Nishnabotna, Keokuk, Decorah, Wapello, Muscatine, Maquoketa, Mahaska, Ocheyedan, Mississippi, Appanoose, Missouri, Quasqueton, Anamosa, Powes.h.i.+ek, Pottawattamie, Osceola, Oskaloosa, Wapsipinicon.
”Ere long some westland genius, moved by the mystic inspiration of the rich and wondrous heritage of Iowa nativity, may sing the song of our legends and traditions, may voice in verse the wondrous story of his ill.u.s.trious state. Maybe somewhere among the humble homes where blood and bone and brain grow pure and strong, where simple food with frugal ways feeds wondering minds and drives them craving into nature's secrets and her songs--somewhere along the settler's pathway or by the Indian trail where now the country churchyards grown with uncut gra.s.ses hide the forms of st.u.r.dy ancestors sleeping all in peaceful ignorance of wayward sons or wondrous progeny--somewhere where rising sun beholds the peasantry at early toil and leaves them in the mystic twilight ere their tasks are done, where odors of the corn and new-mown hay and vine-clad hedges by the shadowy roadside linger long into the night-time, as a sweet and sacred balm for tired hearts--somewhere, sometime the song of Iowa shall rise and live, and it will not omit the thought of that gifted son who said: 'Iowa, the affections of her people, like the rivers of her borders, flow to an inseparable union.'”
CHAPTER V
_The Geology of Linn County_
BY WILLIAM HARMON NORTON, PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY IN CORNELL COLLEGE
It is said that a certain county in Kentucky, underlain by limestone, always goes democratic; while a county adjacent, underlain by sandstone, is as invariably republican. Certain it is that a deal of politics, economics, and history depends at last a.n.a.lysis more or less upon the processes past and present which belong to geology and physiography. The rocks, the minerals they contain, and the water they store, the hills and valleys into which they have been carved, and the soils to which they weather, largely control the industries, locate the cities, and outcrop even in the social, intellectual, and moral life of the people. The metropolis of Linn county, for example, owes its name and place to the rapids of the Cedar, and the rapids find ultimate cause in the fact that some millions of years ago nature stopped laying a softer rock upon the ocean bed and deposited upon it one of more resistant texture. In the eastern part of the county the Chicago & Northwestern Railway runs for very good and sufficient reasons where once rested the edge of a long tongue of glacial ice, and west of Cedar Rapids its route is determined by the course taken by the turbid floods issuing from the melting glaciers. The streets of Mount Vernon and several of the main highways of the county do not lie with the points of the compa.s.s but follow the direction of flow of ancient ice-streams.
The distribution of forest and prairie is due to geologic causes. The values of farm lands are markedly affected by the same influences, and we can even point out a little area which differs from its surroundings in its inhabitants and in their literacy, language, architecture, manners, and morals, primarily because it belongs to what geologists cla.s.sify as the deeply dissected loess-covered Kansan drift sheet.
The inductive history of Linn county, reasoned out from what we have learned of the lie of the land, the shapes of hills and valleys, the soils and subsoils, and the underlying rocks, is a wonderfully long one. The first chapter that has been opened to inspection in the geologic record of our area is that of the deepest rocks probed by the first deep well drilled at Cedar Rapids. At a depth of 2,150 feet from the surface--1,417 feet below the level of the sea--the drill encountered a hard red siliceous rock which may be taken as the equivalent of the _Sioux Quartzite_, which comes to the surface at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and at Baraboo, Wisconsin. This well known building stone is used in a number of the business blocks and private residences of Cedar Rapids, as for example in the old office building of the _Republican_. Belonging to the Algonkian, an era so remote that its age must be reckoned in scores if not in hundreds of millions of years, the quartzite at the bottom of the deep well tells of time inconceivably remote when Linn county was part of a wide sea floor on which red sands were washed to and fro and finally laid to rest in thick deposits of sandstone. Tilted and folded and hardened by pressure, the Algonkian rocks were uplifted from the sea to form dry land of mountainous heights. After the lapse of ages the old land sunk beneath the sea, and again and again with intervals of uplift and subaerial erosion there were laid upon it sea muds, impure limestones, and thick sandstones during a long succession of geologic aeons.
Samples of these deposits can be seen in the well drillings preserved in the Y. M. C. A. at Cedar Rapids and in the collections of Cornell College. For many millions of years Linn county was thus sometimes land and sometimes sea, but neither land nor sea was tenanted by aught but the humblest of living creatures. These ancient deposits concern us because they are the aqueducts by which artesian waters of purest quality are brought to our doors from their sources far to the northward in other states.
[Ill.u.s.tration: INDEPENDENCE SHALES on C., R. I. & P. Ry. below Cedar Rapids]
[Ill.u.s.tration: BLUFF AT KENWOOD PARK]
[Ill.u.s.tration: EXPOSURE OF BRECCIATED LIMESTONE IN MILWAUKEE CUT AT LINN JUNCTION]
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE BLOW OUT,” PALISADES]
[Ill.u.s.tration: A FIRST SETTLER, NEAR MT. VERNON]
[Ill.u.s.tration: PALISADES]
The most recent of the formations which are pierced by the drill, but which do not come to the surface within the limits of the county, is the _Maquoketa shale_, reached in the eastern towns.h.i.+ps at a depth of somewhat more than 300 feet. This impervious bed of altered clay stops the descent of ground water, which thus is stored in large quant.i.ties in the overlying limestones and supplies some of the important wells of the county such as that of the town of Mount Vernon. At the time when these sea clays were laid, eastern Iowa was under sea, but so near was the low lying land to the north and east that vast quant.i.ties of mud were brought in by its rivers forming deposits nearly 300 feet in thickness.
THE SILURIAN
With the lapse of ages physical conditions changed and Linn County was covered with a warm shallow coral sea in which were laid the ma.s.sive limestones which now form the country rock in the eastern tier of towns.h.i.+ps. In some of the quarries one may see the ripple marks into which these coral sands were heaped by the pulse of the waves, and one may pick out of the rocks casts and moulds of ancient sea sh.e.l.ls, corals, and trilobites, which formed the highest forms of life then tenanting the Iowa seas.
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