Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/245



This place was situated about ten miles up the river from Muscatine, at the mouth of Pine Creek. In 1834 Benjamin Nye and a Mr. Farnam had established a trading post at that point, on “Grindstone Bluff,” where for several years a large trade was carried on with the Indians. But the prospective Capital of Iowa is now a farm.

The first record to be found in which the name IOWA is applied to the section of country which became the State of Iowa, is Lieutenant Albert M. Lea’s report and book of 1835-6 descriptive of the “Black Hawk Purchase,” as he saw it while accompanying the exploring expedition. He writes of it as the “Iowa District,” as the Iowa River was the principal water course running through it. The name seemed at once to meet with favor among its inhabitants, for we find, soon after, that a writer in the Dubuque Visitor, alludes to that part of Wisconsin Territory as the future State of Iowa. In the following year when a convention assembled at Burlington to memorialize Congress on the subject of preemptions, the disputed boundary, and for a division of the territory, that portion of Wisconsin lying west of the Mississippi was called the “Iowa District.”

The name of the Dubuque Visitor was soon after changed to the Iowa News. In the summer of 1837 James Clark, of Burlington, gave his paper the name of the Iowa Territorial Gazette. William L. Toole, who was a delegate to the Burlington Convention in 1837, says that it was there decided to give the new Territory the name Iowa, after other names had been proposed and discussed. The name, however, was not used in the memorial asking for the organization of the new Territory, but was applied to it in the one on the subject of preemptions. But by common consent before the act passed organizing the new Territory, the name Iowa given by Lieutenant Lea was accepted and to him must be accorded the honor of giving our State its beautiful name.

So far as can be ascertained the first time the name Iowa