Pups in Siouxland

The very first ground my wife's Van Gelder immigrant ancestors worked out here in northwest Iowa sat twenty miles or so west of us down what became Highway 10, then south over the Plymouth County line in the neighborhood of McNally, a town whose remains today are skeletal at best. No more than a month ago we drove up close, and my father-in-law, who's 97 years old, mentioned something I didn't know. "Got the land from the railroad," he said. I hadn't heard that bit of his family story before.

The U.S. of A. was so anxious to strap together this sprawling, endless country with railroads that they gave away huge portions of it to John J. Hill, Jay and George Gould, a Dutchman named Cornelius Vanderbilt, and an assortment of other Trump-types, who figured out the financing, then sent thousands of grunts out to do the dirty work.

We're talking big, big chunks of land, millions of acres, sometimes swaths 20 miles wide on both sides of the track, land that ran all the way west. Other financiers got rich on the railway barons' good fortunes, real estate people who brought up big chunks of the railroad's big chunks and peddled them out in 160-acre plots to America's huddled masses yearning to be free.

That's where the Van Gelder family comes in, families most of us who still live on this good land come from. The Van Gelder family's first American ground came from the railroad, my father-in-law told me last week. Whether or not they paid the railroad for the place, I don't know. But that it was railroad land is almost certain.

Some 19th century immigrants weren't dirt poor. Hundreds of them, Brits--hard as this is to believe--came to America with huge, bulging wallets. A few of them bought all kinds of land in big chunks from those bigger chunks owned by the railroad, then sold them to people like the Van Gelders. The biggest of the Brits was the Close Brothers, Inc., one of the biggest land agents and financiers in all of North America, whose eccentric colony of landed gentry young Brits—“pups” they were called--had its heart just down the road in LeMars, Iowa. I'm not making this up. There was big money here long before Blue Bunny, and a passle of rich kids having afternoon tea.

That's the story--it's long and detailed and very European--that Curtis Harnack tells in Gentlemen on the Prairie (Iowa State University Press, 1985). Not new at all. Harnack is gone, as are the Close Brothers and almost everything they built, including polo grounds--seriously! --just down the road. Cricket anyone?

Curtis Harnack

Gentlemen on the Prairie sat fallow in my library for 30 years. The outline of the story I knew because Harnack, who was born just south of Remsen, came through northwest Iowa when his book was published and did a reading and presentation at Dordt College, then stopped off for tea and crumpets at the Schaap house afterward. My copy is signed with a nice little line of appreciation, by the by; but it took me all of those thirty years (and retirement) to open its cover.

What a story. One of the best books I've read all year. 

Is that a recommendation? Sure, if you make it such. 

Gentlemen on the Prairie is not for everyone. You probably have to be from here, and you probably have to care about the ground you walk on because it all happened right here. The Brits named Paullina, Larchwood, and Sutherland, as well as some towns that are no more. They built mansions and barns and raced horses born and bred in England. One of the Close Brothers famously went on a fox hunt that lasted sun up to sun down, so long they finally quit the chase, even though their blessed hounds didn't. Who knows where they ended up? 

All of that right here.

Fred Manfred once told me how, when he was a kid, he finished milking one night and sat out on the back step for a while, looking over the fields west. He told himself that there had to more to the ground his father was working than a seed bed for their corn and soybeans. "What happened here anyway?" he asked himself. "What did I miss?"

Those kinds of questions led to a whole shelf of his books. 

If you think there's more to the story, there probably is, and Curtis Harnack's Gentleman on the Prairie will tell you things about this ground you wouldn't believe if you didn't know it was true. Took me decades to read it, but it's a great book--if you really want to know. 

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If you'd like a much quicker intro to the era of the British invasion, you can get Jacob van der Zee's The British in Iowa, a University of Iowa publication in 1922, for a buck on a Kindle. Otherwise, you can pick up a pdf version free at a variety of sources on line. BTW, van der Zee was, I'm told, from Sioux County :).

Siouxland Yankees and Brits

A Yankee looks upon a horse or any animal simply as a machine out of which to get as much profit as possible at the smallest possible cost and trouble, and also as something which is meant to be ill-used. The way some of them treat their horses is simply atrocious and makes me so savage sometimes that I can hardly control myself. If we had a Yankee on the place here, I know I would kick him till he could not stand, within a week of his coming, for ill-using something. p, 167

Despite the fact that the man who wrote this note, James Cowan, was talking about people who lived right here, and despite the fact that my own great-grandparents may well have been among Cowan's neighbors, the truth is, I've got no dog in this fight.

Had he said "A Hollander" rather than "A Yankee," I might have. But the ingrate horse beaters are people he calls "Yankees." In all likelihood he didn't mean my great-grandparents. I've got no idea how my forbearers handled their horses--I know they had them because they appear on their standard homesteading portrait. What's more, I know my great-grandfather, a North Sea sailor, didn't make it as a North American farmer. The path he left all over the upper Midwest makes clear he didn't set down the roots immigration brochures promised. At best, he was a tenant farmer; at worst, something of a failure.

But Mr. Cowan's ire has been raised by other Americans, among whom Cowan doesn't count himself. James Cowan was landed British gentry, one of hundreds who live in northwest Iowa in the 1880s, upper-class Brits--"pups," they called themselves--who left England and Scotland to learn farming in an area only recently inhabited by white men and women. For the most part, they were here to waste time, to learn something before returning England. And, oh yes, to make money in real estate. For a time, they owned millions of acres and made millions of dollars. 

The James Cowan who spewed hate in that quote above was "upper-class" in an old-world fashion that kept him forever disdainful of the Yankee masses, the human beasts of burden he needed to turn his soil and harvest his grain, but not to drink his blessed tea. 

Before Cowan ever got here, he'd likely never put a horse to work breaking ground. The steeds leisurely housed in his country estate were for hunting fox or pulling a carriage. He hadn't worked. He never needed a horse to make a living.

But then maybe he was right. Maybe those grimy yankees he and the Brits needed to help with harvest all too regularly beat-up horses. Maybe the locals were the earthy turds, potato-eaters who didn't know their place. Northwest Iowa looked nothing like Downton Abbey in 1880.

The word "yankee" was, once upon a time, an ethnic slur against Hollanders, who some New Yorkers liked to call "John Cheese," the New Amsterdam Dutch being the very first American cheeseheads. Eventually, the word came to any hyphenated-American from the huddled masses. What James Cowan means here when he designates "Yankees," is 19th century white trash, and certainly not his high-and-mighty Brits.  

I may think my own ethnic heritage escaped his indictment, but James Cowan was without a doubt talking more about me and my people than he was himself and his. 

I suppose we all need someone to beat up. James Cowan needed Yankees and those untidy Yankees needed the beasts of the field. 

Seems to me, the truth of this and every Christmas season is there is a much better way.