Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/405

 selected the site where Lewis stands. This town was laid out on the east side of the Nishnabotna River the next year and became the county-seat. The first house was built by S. M. Tucker and the first newspaper was established by J. C. Brown in 1861, named the Cass County Gazette. In 1868 the town of Atlantic was located on the line of the Rock Island Railroad which was built through the northern part of the county in that year. After a bitter contest the county-seat was removed from Lewis to Atlantic in November, 1869. Anita and Wiota were located on the line of the Rock Island Railroad. CEDAR COUNTY was established from territory embraced in the original county of Dubuque and lies in the second tier west of the Mississippi River and in the fifth north of the Missouri boundary line. It contains sixteen townships, making an area of five hundred and seventy-six square miles, and was named for the Cedar River which flows through the county in a southeasterly direction.

The first white man known to have traveled through this county was Colonel George Davenport who, in 1831, established a trading post on the west side of the Cedar River just above the mouth of Rock Creek. Poweshiek, a chief of the Fox Indians, had a village in that vicinity where he made his headquarters and here Colonel Davenport, through his agents, carried on a profitable trade with the Fox Indians. The first claims made in the county were taken by Colonel Davenport, Antoine Le Claire, Major William Gordon and Alexander McGregor. These men went about twenty-five miles west of Davenport to a fine body of timber which was afterward named “Posten’s Grove” and staked out claims embracing all of the timber land. From there they passed on to Onion Grove and took possession of that timber land by the same process, all for purposes of speculation. Neglecting to comply with the claim laws, however, by making actual