Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/199



Previous to the explorations made by Lewis, Clark and Pike very little was known of the regions of the central west, drained by the two greatest rivers of North America. The reports of these explorers, who had only examined the country along the great water courses, awakened a deep interest among thoughtful Americans in the country recently acquired by Jefferson, known as Louisiana. The only people who had penetrated this unknown wilderness of woods and prairie were French missionaries who sought to convert the savages to Christianity; and the hunters and trappers who cultivated the friendship of the Indians in the interest of their traffic. Neither of these classes made homes, cultivated the soil, or left marks of civilizations in their track. Hardly a trace of their wanderings for more than a hundred years within the limits of Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska were found by the first actual settlers who came to the country to make permanent homes. No record even of the discoveries of the missionaries, hunters and trappers survived.

Thus a hundred and fifteen years passed from the time Marquette and Joliet discovered Iowa, before Julien Dubuque and his companions made the first white settlement within its limits. It was forty-four years later that the Indian title to any portion of its soil was relinquished. For the first half century after the new American Republic was established, it was the prevailing opinion that there was little country west of the Mississippi River valuable for agricultural purposes, and that portion of our possessions could be best utilized as permanent homes for the various Indian tribes which were being dispossessed of their lands east of the Mississippi. It was believed that having there an almost unlimited range, they could subsist largely upon game and fish, in the regions bordering upon an unexplored country marked upon the maps as the “Great American Desert.”

As late as 1819, the St. Louis Enquirer, Thomas H. Benton, editor, said: