Sioux County History--"An Outburst of Prayer"

An estimated 12.5 trillian Rocky Mountain locusts descended on the rural Midwest from July 20 to July 30, 1874. They virtually devoured everything in swath of land that encompassed almost 200,000 square miles.

Jelle Pelmulder, Sioux County’s first school master, wrote this poem mid-onslaught, in a fragile community only four years old.

Pelmulder wrote in Dutch, in rhyming couplets. The manuscript belongs to and is available at the Sioux County Museum, Orange City.

An outburst of prayer*

at the coming of the locusts

July 17, 1874

In the northern heavens something rises

from the horizon—clouds maybe,

or smoke billowing so far up into the sky

it takes my breath away, so high,

it seems the wind has wings.

Oh, my God,

they swarm as countless

as the sand on the shores of the sea.

The fields all around,

the hopes of every farmer here,

will go up like smoke and vapor,

consumed by locusts whose appetites

will not be filled ‘til everything is gone.

To forget the sheer delight we all just felt

from lovely grains in gardens and in fields? —

Must all the work we’ve done come to nothing?

Will they take every tree, every bush?

Can you see my tears, Lord? --

will you hear my voice?

I lift my soul to you on high:

Must all of what we have be lost?

Forgive my iniquitous complaints,

but when I see the poor among us,

whose very lives stand there

in perfect rows set for slaughter,

really, Lord, must all of it go? —

gardens and fields, bushes and trees? --

Must all of what we have be lost?

Merciful Father, I’m on my knees.

That host of locusts in the sky

live and breathe at your command.

That endless cloud, that legion,

now rising between sun and land,

that sky-born plague and scourge

 is it sent, in fact, by my Father’s hand?

Nothing we devise will stand between us

and your omnipotence.

Faint and powerless,

every bit of strength we have is gone.

If in our temerity

some errant curse escapes our lips,

if you wish it so and by your hand,

we fall into the dust beneath our feet.

O Lord God, bring your mercy

to task here and now so that our thanks

may once more soar unto your throne.

Deliver us so we can praise your name.

From our knees we come before you,

in the name of your Son, our Savior:

[Prayer: 

God, our Father, spare our land, our crops,

Lest those in poverty fall to despair

When, in cold, the north winds howl.

Have mercy, oh God! have mercy.

Look down upon us and refresh us

once again with the blessed hope

of a good and healthy crop.

Please make it happen, Lord,

Our very faith is in your hands.

Show us the love you promise--

Avert the swarms above

that threaten every living thing.

We live in your hands; you alone have power

to rid us of this contagion once again

—as you did long ago in Pharaoh’s land,

when Moses stood and prayed before the roaring sea.

Teach us the trust that never ends, Lord,

the hope that rests in you alone.]

July, 1874

Sioux County, Iowa

_____________________ 

*Ontboezeming bij jet aankomen der sprinkhanen op zondags den 19den Juli 1874.

Translated from the Dutch by Johan Hegeman. By way of this version, I've attempted to make Mr. Pelmulder's "outburst of prayer" accessible to many readers.

Sioux County History--our first county commissioners

It was a government in absentia, but not at all unusual. Several new Iowa counties were run from afar back then, if run has any meaning, if dropping a log or two over a creek is really building a bridge, or if a log cabin is a county courthouse. 

Sioux County's first government declared such things to be their work and paid themselves royally for the labor, even if and when there was no labor. Government was a hoax, a racket, a fraud, a scam--but if you were part of it, the works turned over some significant cash.

Four guys, if history tells the story straight, voted themselves in to become our first County Commissioners. What they knew was that, sooner rather than later, hoards of easterners would descend on ground they thought theirs for the taking. Crowds were coming all right, just as they were coming to every other corner of the region.

In 1859, four entrepreneurs around a card table in some Sioux City dive got together and called themselves Sioux County Commissioners. They may have tracked up here along the Big Sioux River once or twice to have a look around; but they didn't really live here. They didn't have to, not to make money. All they had to do was build a sod hut or a lean-to, then claim to live here. Who'd 'a checked? 

The key to the enterprise were "warrants." As long as couple of gamblers could smell out a willing a judge--money speaks a universal language--to authorize the graft, our four original commissioners could create some pretty significant income for doing next to nothing.

They'd issue "warrants" and put them up on the market for land speculators and others, monied interests who were out there buying what they could to get rich on the upcoming and ongoing transformation of the whole region--from buffalo to Monsanto. Banks were buying, as were fat cats from all over the east who'd pay good money to turn the wholesome profit speculating on Iowa land could bring.

It may be a little shameful to think of Sioux County government being run out of a Sioux City tavern, but that's what it was, basically: a table of card sharks, a friendly judge, and a printer to turn out some documents that looked official. 

Such warrants could be peddled until the population of the county was sufficient to create taxation and thereby finance what all governments needed to do in frontier times--clear roads and build a bridge or two. Those were the jobs those poker buddies amply compensated themselves for doing, whether or not they ever got done. Who'd check anyway? The only human beings anywhere close were trappers and injuns, and most of them were on the run, given the fact that they really didn't care because the neighborhood was going to pot anyway. 

One of the men kept a diary, which is somewhat helpful in determining what went on in the earliest days of white Sioux County, but what he wrote can't always be believed any more than phony census rolls filled with names of people who never did live here, relatives known to abide in, say, Connecticut.

What those Sioux City gamblers knew was that good money was going to be made for a year or two or three--but no more, enough anyway, to keep the game going. They knew the enterprise was fly-by-night, but they had wings.

Sioux County's very first chapter ended on a cold winter night when an armed militia in wooden shoes took sleighs over the snow to Calliope, on the county's western edge, and strong-armed a safe full of documents, wrested that beast out of the maw of the crooks to take it home to Jerusalem so that, I'll have you know, today the county courthouse--and it's beautiful--is right here in Orange City. You can read that story elsewhere, but listen to it here.

Why on earth am I retelling this old tale? Because one of the first Sioux County Commissioners took his share of the loot and hiked back east to Des Moines, where he'd been when he'd determined a man could turn over some considerable dough out there on the frontier. 

The guy was a shrewd investor, created a huge Des Moines business, Equitable Life Insurance, then got into real money in the biggest boom industry of the time, railroads. Eventually, our governmental ancestor and his family bought and lived in Iowa's only showplace mansion, Terrance Hill, home of the governors. That man's name was Frederick Marion Hubbell.

Mr. Hubbell, who started started gaining his fortune in a sod house just outside of Hawarden (well, from a poker table in Sioux City), came a one heckuva long way from here to become one of Iowa's wealthiest financiers.

And as we speak, another Fred Hubbell, Frederick M's great-great grandson, Fred Hubbell is running for governor of the state of Iowa. 

Up here in Sioux County, I don't know that anyone remembers his long-gone ancestor's checkered past. But I do know there's no county in the state more solidly Republican than the one his illustrious great-grandpa once ran. 

So I'm thinking that if this Fred loses his shirt in Sioux County, which is likely, no one will blame it on his grandpa.

Sioux County history--The Gentlemen on the Prairie

William Brooks Close

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Emma Lazarus's storied sentiment is etched on a plaque inside the pedestal of that grand lady who stands in the New York harbor and therefore clings to our perceptions of how this country was settled, a nation of homeless and tempest-tossed, Europe's wretched refuse yearning to be free.

It's not inaccurate. Only one of my Dutch immigrant ancestors, a pastor/professor, arrived as a man of means, and his means were not particularly abundant. My other forebearers can certainly be numbered among the huddled masses who'd come with great faith the new land offered vastly more opportunities than the land of their birth. 

Dutch-Americans of my tribe shouldn't forget that Dominie Scholte, the godfather of the huge Pella colony in Iowa, was hardly homeless, even if many of his 800 followers were from the Netherlands' huddled masses. 

A real anomaly were the English gentry, the Gentlemen of the Prairie (a book by Curtis Harnack), who were anything but homeless. The Close brothers, who'd come to America in 1876 for a centennial regatta in Philadelphia, were Oxford's most prestigious student athletes entered in a sport that clearly offered no home for the homeless. While their showing on the river in the City of Love was nothing to write home about--the whole team caught some kind of stomach ailment--one of the crew got a blister of sorts in a place that kept him out of training.

That brother, William B. Close, an English gentleman (think Downton Abbey) happened to meet a well-heeled American businessman named Daniel Paullin, from Quincy, Illinois, one Sunday afternoon while the rest of the Oxford crew was training. The two began to talk business, Paullin explaining to the young English gentleman that great fortunes could be made in real estate because valuable land out west was being bought and sold for peanuts (okay, he probably didn't say "peanuts"). Paullin, by all appearances, had done well, had become something of a gentleman himself.

Young Mr. Close decided on a road trip Paullin created for him, a sales trip to northwestern Iowa, to here, where I'm sitting, in fact, a place where Paullin claimed fertile land was both abundant and dirt cheap, ripe for harvest in every possible way. 

What resulted from that sales trip was a Siouxland English colony made up of country gentleman who only occasionally got their hands dirty. Close was among England's most storied athletes, so when he advertised possibilities for an English colony of gentlemen in the American frontier, his words got notice. Hundreds came.

"The achievement of these gentlemen during the past two years," the local press trumpeted, "in the way of improving and developing the country, stands without a parallel in the history western civilization." That's trumpeting. "The business of the two firms embraces the investment of English capital in lands, and the improvement of the same; that is transforming the broad prairies of the peerless northwest into improved farms."

The story of these gentlemen on the prairie--told first by Sioux County historian Jacob van der Zee (The British in Iowa, 1922) and later by Curtis Harnack (Gentlemen on the Prairie, 1985)--is not to be forgotten.

Years ago, Frederick Manfred told me he wanted to write a novel about the gentlemen, so he did a little looking around and turned up the last of the Close family, a fellow, he said, who probably spent too much time with his elbows up on a bar.  At least that's where Fred met him. He told me that he'd asked this last English gentleman on the prairie what he'd done, where he'd worked, what he'd done for a living.

"Oh, I wasn't born to work," the man told him, smiled, and returned happily to what was before him.

They're gone now, the English gentlemen. They were not homeless, not members of the huddled masses, but they are part of the story of the land beneath my feet. 

Sioux County History--"the first great tragedy"

When the men got to the banks of the Rock River, what they found rose before their eyes like a nightmare. The oxen Gerrit Keuvers and Dirk Jan Wesselink had driven down to the river stood there grazing in a kind of reverent silence, the two of them still yoked to the front wheels of the wagon. 

But there were no back wheels and no men. It was early in the 1870s, and a couple hundred Sioux County pioneers lived in sod huts or dugouts cut from and in an immense field of grass slowly being opened for business and settlement. No great love songs were ever written about dugouts, no memorable poetry honored the memory of a sod house. People got out of them as quickly as they could because all kinds of creepy, crawling things found them far more homey than the humans who tried to live there.

All that thick sod kept temperatures from extremes, but the dirt floor turned to mud with every rain.  Snakes turned moms and kids "zero at the bone," as Emily Dickinson wrote, with entirely too much frequency. 

What's more, a homesteader had to improve the land he claimed. There was every reason to build a house, every reason to traipse down to the Rock River for wood and, with it, put up some decent domicile. That's what Keuvers and Wesselink were doing. They'd left the neighborhood that would one day become Sioux Center to get wood from the Rock River, and then they'd not returned.

One can only imagine the concern. A search party was commissioned, the men who found the oxen still hitched to the front wheels. A man named Bellesfield ran a tavern, an inn, you might say, on the rutted path along rivers between Sioux City and Sioux Falls. Bellesfield had a row boat. With the boat, they found the bodies.

The Rock was a force to be reckoned with back then. The men speculated that Keuvers and Wesselink drove the wagon in and the oxen panicked in deep water. The rig somehow smashed and snapped in half and the two men were thrown in the deep water that claimed them.

A couple of days had passed. One can only imagine that those bodies weren't pretty. So the men took them to Bellesfield's tavern, cleaned them up well, then dressed them in new overalls and shirts before delivering them and the news to their families. Time, it seemed, was only a secondary concern. The brutality of death itself was lessened by that act of kindness. 

Charles Dyke tells that story in The History of Sioux County. Many of the stories he tells in that book are sagas he remembers, but not this one. He could only have heard this one, and how he tells it is both interesting and wonderfully human. The deaths of Keuvers and Wesselink, he says, in an opening line, was "the first great tragedy of the settlement," the first breath-stopping horror no one saw coming. Two men die unexpectedly, leaving their families in dugouts cut into and out of the dirt.

People must have been shocked, stunned. The funeral was in Orange City, hardly a town yet, but a church at least in and at the heart of the brand new Dutch settlement. Kleuvers left a wife and three daughters "almost grown." Wesselink and his wife had eight kids. "His widow bravely carried on and raised her brood in decency," Dyke says. 

But he doesn't know how to end the story really. Charles Dyke can be a little arrogant as a writer. He knew how to spin a story. My mother-in-law, who remembered him, claimed he shouldn't always be believed. But in the face of this first tragedy, a story he must have heard a dozen times, he has some trouble--as we all might--knowing what to say.

Mrs. Wesselink eventually married a second husband, a widower named Harmen Jan Wissink, who already had 12 children. You do the math.  Neither of their "shanties," Dyke says, was big enough for this wholesome brood, so they simply nailed them together. 

And then, as if he doesn't know exactly what to say, Dyke just goes on with images that never left his memory. Because eventually, he says, "all was well." 

"The ceiling in one shanty was so low that a man had to put his pants on sitting down," he writes. Then more random facts. "They baked every day and in the morning they had pancakes." That's not all. "The table and stove were partly supported by bricks, and they burned hay and corn stalks," which, of course, would not have been all that unusual. 

Still not over. Later, when the first Sioux Center church was built, Wissink stood up in assembly and moved they pay for it in cash, and the motion was carried," just in case you were wondering. 

And file this away too. "Wissink was a kind and genial man who always wore wooden shoes, even to church. For the latter purpose they were scrubbed and polished until they fairly shone."

And that, oddly enough, is where the story of "the first great tragedy" ends. All of which is to say, once more, I suppose, that "all was well."

All of that doesn't sound like Charley Dyke, but the stories each of us know, and maybe the ones we can't or won't forget, are simply not easy to tell. 

Sioux County History--the last Sioux in Sioux County

Charley Dyke, a wonderful story-teller and the county's first historian, locates this yarn just about right on the site where Orange City would eventually sprout and grow, on Holland and Nassau township lines, just a few miles west of the Floyd River. That's got to be pretty darn close to where Northwestern College stands today.

They were, he claims, dumbstruck at the beauty all around. "Would that  our friends were here to feast their eyes on this glorious land," they said to each other. "Where could we have found anything better?"

Charley Dyke knew the beauty of the uncut prairie. He himself saw Sioux County before it was sectioned off and forever outfitted corn and soybeans. Lakes and streams and sloughs abounded. A herd of elk ran off when those landseekers rolled up a hill not far south from here.

Something moving miles away grabbed their attention one afternoon as they were surveying the land, some interruption on the ocean of grassland, a human being, a man, an Indian flying along on a pony so fast he seemed oblivious to them. He had a rifle too, or so the story goes. When he got up close, he drew that pony up quickly. They were scared. Whatever weapons the Dutchmen had were back in the wagon at the Floyd River. Van Der Aa was a Civil War vet, but they went zero at the bone when they guy showed up. They hadn't expected "injuns."

But they tried friendliness, and it seemed to work. Slowly the man smiled, got off his horse, and looked around. Even though they couldn't communicate--they tried English, Dutch, and German--eventually they guessed he was just out hunting when he'd stumbled on the tall bearded men in strange wooden shoes.

He left, Dyke says, as quickly as he'd come. 

When they went back to their camp on the Floyd that night, they ate heartily, telling Injun stories; and when darkness arrived they noticed someplace close, just across the river, the eerie silhouettes of men against yet another roaring fire. Had to be the Indians.

They were terrified, he says, sure that those half-naked little men would try to make off with their mules. One of them, Van Den Bos, took the first watch that night and took his little dog with. The rest Dyke claims went to sleep with dreams of "scalping Indians in action." Old Charlie meant that as a joke. 

Soon enough, Van Den Bos came back to the camp wheezing and puffing. "They're comin', boys," he said. "Never was sleep sooner from their eyes," Dyke says.

They grabbed rifles, shotguns, and butcher knives, whatever they could to stave off the barbarians, waited patiently for the attack, but saw nothing but a team of gangly sunflowers dancing innocently in a slight evening wind. 

Nothing happened that night. Those Dutch pioneers from Pella ended up sleeping soundly, uninterrupted by screaming warriors singing death chants. And when, the next morning, they crossed the river to try to find the camp they'd spotted in the darkness, they discovered only the remains of a deer, supper the night before. Van Den Bos's lurid imagination had conjured an attack that never came because it never was.

One moment in the story Dyke tells reaches metaphor. It seems that in that brief time their surprising visitor was with them, he was greatly taken by the little machine the landseekers were using to set out the parameters of their claims to all this cheap land, land they simply assumed no one owned. What caught his eye was the surveying instrument, "with the needle always pointing north no matter how the compass turned." With that little gizmo, "he was very much interested."

As well he should have been. Still, they determined that he "seemed to feel that they meant well."

And they did mean well, I'm sure, even though what they were so enthusiastically plotting for a colony of Dutch folks didn't include him or his people.

That nameless man we might well think of as a Yankton, the very last Sioux from Sioux County. 

Yankton (Nakota) Sioux by Karl Bodmer, approximately 1833

Sioux County history--Lifelines

Right here where I'm sitting, Holland Township, Sioux County, Iowa, got sectioned into homesteads by a gang of Hollanders up from the Pella area, looking for cheap land and space enough for another colony of Dutch Calvinists, a new colony for tons of new wooden shoes just off the boat, ja. 

They'd set boundaries for what land they'd wanted for themselves and for a town, then they returned to Sioux City to fairly distribute that land among themselves. They did so, and left once more for Pella, having achieved exactly what they'd intended to do.

Then later, two wagon trains from Pella came up north and out west. It was October, 1868.

October may well be the most beautiful month to live in Siouxland. Summer's reach hasn't drawn back, fall colors are burnished and warm, hosts of prairie flowers are swaying in the warm sun and even winds. October must have made the place seems a paradise--birds, animals, streams full of game fish.

Here's how Charley Dyke describes it:

The prairie swarmed with old and young prairie chickens, quail, killdeer, larks, plovers, curlews, native sparrows, song sparrows, cranes and many other s and the trees along the river were musical with nesting song birds. The sloughs were alive with ducks of different kinds and jingled with the song of the bobolink. Yellow headed blackbirds hovered over the tall grass and red-wing blackbirds hovered over the tall grass and redwing blackbirds wung and ukelelied on the reeds. A brilliant sun made everything summer and glimmer and glisten.

This forever prairie, grass as far as you could see, had to be cut, opened up for habitation. Had to be. So these folks set the plow behind an ox or a horse and tried their best to outline a home, a place they'd somehow come to call their own. That was the very first step: outline our property. The Yankton must have considered them plain crazy, but most of these white folks had come from nothing or very little, so outlining what glory was theirs had to have been pure joy.

Imagine this. In October the tall-grass prairie was a forest of native glory, so high it could out-tall the horses. People literally got lost just taking a walk. For  years already, some had called the tall-grass prairie an ocean because when the constant winds blowing over the grasses made waves that turned the country as endless as the Atlantic.

So once those first white settlers outlined their homesteads and started to think about sod houses or where they'd get sufficient wood for proving up their claims, the second thing they did was turn those oxen west and north to the Floyd River and the West Branch, the only breaks, the only recognizable diversion from an endless grassland. 

Those furrows weren't highways really. Those first white settlers had far too much work to travel anywhere. Those furrows were lifelines to the safety zones because if you got to the river, at least you knew where you were. Those pioneers cut furrows into virgin ground just in case you or your spouse or your kids got head-over-heels in the lush prairie, so mixed up you lost your wits and way, nothing around but an ocean of grass. 

I'm sitting right here in the southeast corner of Holland Township, Sioux County, Iowa, 146 years later. In an awakening dawn just outside my window, the land slopes gently to the Floyd River maybe an eighth of a mile north. I could walk there in minutes. I'd like to imagine that once upon a time one of those lifelines ran right here through flowery prairie grass, a single line of unearthed dirt running to the bank of the river so we could know where we are.

We may well be the wealthiest rural county in all of Iowa's 99 these days. There are more confinements per square mile than anywhere else in the state, it seems. A friend of mine claims that the company he hauls cement for claims there's sixteen new ones going up in the neighborhood just this summer. Lots of work.

But with all that wealth, it's a crying shame we have nothing to remember how rich this world was when paleface Hollanders determined it would be their own new colony, when they put the plow to ground no one had ever farmed, drained the sloughs, and muddied the rivers. 

It'd be nice to be able to imagine more easily what this creation looked like back then, this ocean of grass with lifelines running right down the hill to the river, just in case we get lost. It'd be nice to have a section of nothing but tall-grass prairie.

It'd be nice. I don't know--I think it might also be right, a lifeline of its own.