History of Cherokee County |
History of Cherokee County |
| PREFACE - 1878 History of Cherokee County The two great internal industries of the United States are farming and mining. Upon these two the greatness of this country almost wholly depends, as all other pursuits are merely supplemental to them. Agriculture is the primary occupation of civilized man, and so long as the world lasts, every other occupation must be subsidiary to it. Every great nation, whether ancient or modern, has drawn its resources principally from the soil and its rise can be traced in its development and protection of its farming interests; its fall in its neglect or oppression of them. The mining interests of the United States are chiefly confined to its mountain ranges, while its area of arable and pasture lands exceed those of any one nation on the face of the globe. The valleys of the Mississippi and Missouri are the most extensive in the world while, in regard to fertility and general adaptability to agriculture they surpass all others in any quarter of the globe. Two leading physical causes contribute to their superiority, viz: their southern incline and unequaled hydro graphic systems. These, coupled to their extent, fertility and salubrity of climate, make them the most wonderful fields ever opened to the settlement of man. In this valley, as the two large rivers converge to form one stream, lies the State of IOWA - the greatest of all the agricultural states, the immense capabilities of which are as surprising for their annual production as for their exhaustlessness. In the entire state there is not a township that forbids settlement, or from its soil or physical condition precludes the highest attainments of the agriculturist. Along some of the streams are bold embankments, with naked knobs or escaped peaks, but in general language the state is one broad Savannah, fertile beyond exhaustion and beautified by almost every conceivable variation of landscape found in a prairie land. On competent authority it is stated that ninety-five percent of the entire state is tillable, being the largest percentage of any similar body of land known in either hemisphere. In Kansas and Nebraska less than thirty per cent of the land is arable, while in Dakota the portion adapted to agriculture does not equal ten percent of its surface. Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan have each vast area of land that bid defiance to the agriculturist; at least they will not be reclaimed for centuries yet to come. The surface of Iowa dips southward. The Mississippi shows a fall of six inches to the mile, the Missouri of one foot to the mile; but the central part of the state is so elevated, streams flowing down to the great rivers named, show a fall of from eight feet, as in the case of the Upper Iowa River, to two feet per mile. This central ridge, passing through the state, makes what is called its water shed, as it sheds the water courses tributary to the great rivers. This ridge of high land is unmarked by any bold physical features, hence the traveler may pass from one valley to the other without being conscious of having done so; yet it forms a range which, on the eastern border of Cherokee County, is 1,100 feet above the level of the Mississippi and 400 feet higher than the Missouri River at Sioux City. About two-thirds of the state is drained by the Mississippi and about one third by the Missouri. The soil of these valleys is wholly unlike, with the exception of four counties in the northwestern corner of the state, which have a soil identical with those east of the water shed. The soil of the Mississippi valley may be briefly stated to belong to what is called the Drift deposit, a debris of rocks supposed to have been ground up by the glacial period. The soil of the Missouri valley is what is termed the Bluff deposit, supposed to be formed by the sediment of the Missouri River, which at a time after the glacial period covered what is now its valley in the form of an immense lake, but having eroded itself a deep channel, the bottom of this ancient lake was drained, and is now as inviting a field for human habitation as the world affords. Such in brief, is a general outline of the state, typographically; a state that has one million and a quarter of a population, an assessed valuation of $398,983,231, has four thousand miles of railway, and hundreds of miles of navigable rivers; has the most extensive coal fields in the world and other resources that lift it into the proud position of the foremost state of the Union. When the older states were first people, settlers naturally followed along the course of the streams, as these afforded the best means of transportation. The pioneer settlers of Iowa adopted a like course. Immigration has ever come from the East, and the eastern part of the state naturally intercepted the home seeker, who, satisfied with the appearances that met him, settled along its wooded streams, and slowly but surely made that portion of the state a veritable garden. From 1854 to 1867 capitalists were seized with a desire to invest in Western lands, not for settlement, but for speculation; railroads were projected across the state, and each alternate section within certain limits, was granted to railroad companies to construct certain lines across the state. Eager to anticipate these lines of travel, speculators posted westward and located township after township, until tens of thousands of acres of land in the northwest portion of the state were entered, leaving only a small portion of the whole for actual settlers. Then came the financial panic of 1857, the railroads were not built for twelve years afterwards; but they held their grants,and the speculators held their lands, so that the northwestern portion of Iowa was virtually locked up from settlement. But the great tide of emigration could not be stayed, for, although Northwestern Iowa, with its hundreds of thousands of acres of land, unequaled for beauty and fertility, had locked the door against the home seeker, there were other fields that welcomed him, so the car of progress rolled on, and Kansas, Nebraska and Dakota "took on" the sturdy pioneers who would have rejoiced to have had an abiding place in the nearer and finer lands of Iowa. Finally the roads were built, but in the mean time a great civilization had sprung up beyond them, and the fact that immense unsettled fields were still in Iowa, seemed to be forgotten, or if thought of were looked upon suspiciously as being some way unfitted for habitation, because they had been passed over for lands more remote and less accessible. But the true reason was: one-half of the lands were held for the railways, and probably two-thirds of the other half by speculators so that only about one-sixth was open to actual settlement. The Hon. C. C. Nourse, in his Centennial address in Philadelphia said: "One of the most injurious results of the state, arising from the spirit of speculation prevalent in 1856, was the purchase and entry of great bodies of government land within the state by non-residents. This land was held for speculation and placed beyond the reach of actual settlers for many years. From no other one cause has Iowa suffered so much." Of the 35,000,600 acres of land within the state, only 13,000,000 have yet been put under cultivation, little more than one acre in three, and yet the products of this one-third reach the enormous sum of $200,000,000 annually; a sum perfectly bewildering to contemplate, and this, be it remembered, in a state that has only seen forty years since "Gen. Scott stood on the western banks of the Mississippi, treating with the savages for the first strip of this country which the white settler was permitted to occupy." |
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