THE DREAM OF A TOWN

“There were three ox-drawn wagons. One was that of my grandfather, the last John Coleman, with his wife, born Krum, and named Catherine, and his two grown-up daughters. The second belonged to my Uncle Matthew Coleman, with his wife and their little girl. At the beginning of the voyage of the prairie schooners, as they were called, my mother rode with her parents, accompanied by her young daughter. My father’s wagon carried his three boys, the eldest some thirteen or fourteen years old. While in mid-voyage my father and mother were married. Our family consisted therefore of what we used to call three sets of children, at least after my three full sisters and myself had put in our appearances.”

“Each of the previous marriages had been dissolved by divorce. And it is significant of the character of my parents that never the whole history of the family did I become aware of any slightest feeling on the part of my brothers and sisters that any partiality was shown by father or mother as between these offspring of former marriages or in favor of the later one.

“It was a train of three ox teams which kissed the forest good-by just west of Dubuque in July or late June of that rainy season of 1858. Each wagon represented one of thousands of home then in process of transplantation. Besides the oxen, each had the foundation of its breeding herds and flocks. They started with the germs of the future Iowa agriculture, cattle, hogs and poultry. Imagine It! The fowls were in crates tied to the back of the wagon. The cows were driven in a small herd. Each wagon had its little flock of sheep, too.

“Our people stated with hogs, too, meaning to drive them with the other live stock; but these useful beasts could not keep up even with ox teams; and streams swollen by rains, and which had to be forded, were too deep and swift for swine, so they were soon sold.

“It was a season remembered for decades as the wet year. The women and children often had to clamber out in the mud and water and rain while the goods were unloaded and carried to firmer ground to lighten the wagons so that doubled teams could drag them on west of the swales. The skies were gloomy. The summer air was often chill, or heated to sultriness as the thunderheads rolled up out of that luring west and broke in thunder and lightning and downpour. Cooking had to be done under these conditions over fires by the roadside. Yet still they pressed on, toward the hope which had preceded their fathers for two hundred years like a pillar of fire by night and of cloud by day.

“I have heard my father say that in that summer the earth was so wet that springs of living water broke out on the very hillsides and the wagons mired down on the steep ground.”

“You may imagine how these weary, wet and delayed pilgrims felt when they reached the Iowa River at Steamboat Rock, and seeking to cross it, so as to go on to what they called with cheerful generality, “the Fort Dodge country,” found that the river was far out of its banks and too deep and swift to ford or swim; and that the primitive ferryboat had been cast away somewhere, down by the rocks which gave the town its name. They camped on or near the ground where Root’s Hotel was afterward built and, for all I know, still stands. Near it was a stone house (in 2005) the Neilson house).”

“You think these miserable, wet–and, I have no doubt, dirty–people were avoided and looked upon askance by the community? You do not know the Midwest of those days. Instead of being avoided, they were welcomed. There lived in the village one S.B. Cunningham, a man long locally celebrated and known by no other name than Squire. He and others came to our people and urged them to stay at Steamboat Rock. Here, if they only knew it , was the place for which they had started. Any one could see that these people were poor; but that made no difference. Steamboat Rock wanted them to stay. Squire Cunningham owned or controlled the stone house close at hand . He would give them the right to occupy this dwelling for a month, rent free, if they would only stay and give the locality a chance.

“Everything in their wagons was wet and moldy. They wanted to dry out. They had long arrears of laundry work to take up. They were weary of the everlasting splash, splash of the wheels and of the oxen’s feet in the mud. ‘Weariness’ is not a strong enough word to apply to the condition of these women; and they all yearned to see how it would seem to sleep with a roof over their heads. They all wanted to get out of the wet. So they yielded to the hospitable arguments of the people and stayed in the locality permanently.”

“If the Iowa River had not been so high, I should have been born somewhere in western Iowa. Perhaps I should have been scalped in the Indian troubles of a few years later.