A City on the Plains -- Small Wonders

When the first three white men to come to Lyon County, Iowa, showed up, the plot of land as far north and west as you can put your finger on in the state, they were looking for beaver and deer and whatever else they could find to trap and shoot and eat. We’d call them “mountain men,” I don’t remember seeing any mountains in far northwest Iowa—gorgeous hills run up by the Big Sioux River, beautiful land as far as you can see, but no mountains.

For the record, Mssrs. McGregor, Lockhart, and Clark were their names, although Mister George Clark was no shirttail relative of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. George Clark was among the first white men to set foot on the far corner of our fair state, but he didn’t fare well here—he was drowned in March of 1863, when the Big Sioux had one of its frequent flooding fits.

Mr. Clark was, however, preceded in death by Mr. Lockhart, who took an arrow from a band of Dakota who were 80 miles away from the Minnesota River valley where their kinsmen determined not to take the abuse they were suffering and rose up to begin the 1862 war. The arrow that Mr. Clark took was a glowing ember from a far bigger fire.

That left McGregor, who found himself quite alone in a desolate prairie, where he didn’t trust bands of Injuns (his word) coming by. McGregor picked up his arms and trotted back east with enough tales to enchant any barroom gang.

Those three men might well have found as many as 76 stone circles and dozens of mounds along the Big Sioux, odd protrusions of the earth, different sizes and shapes, a whole acre of honor they could have guessed had to be left behind by some long gone marauding savages—"one huge Injun’ cemetery maybe,” they might have surmised. Their surmising would have been right.

In, say, 1725, a century before those mountain men were here, they would have had to go 1500 miles east to Boston, to find as big a city as the one that once existed right there where these three tough guys stood, just south and east of Sioux Falls, SD, which was back then an interminable sea of tall grass. As many as 5000 people (researchers call them Oneida people) lived on the dusty pathways of the city. Five thousand residents doesn’t seem like overpopulation, but New York was New Amsterdam back then; Chicago wasn’t even there when this city of indigenous people was thriving.

It seems impossible that about the time when wave after wave of immigrant Englishmen and women were stepping down on Plymouth Rock, this city, people have taken to call Blood Run, was pulsating with

life and trade. 

South Dakota has done a wonderful job of celebrating the once-here thriving city of Blood Run. Just follow the signs to The Good Earth State Park, where pleasant and informative Visitor’s Center tells what can be told, what can be explained about the Onieda people—some Sac and Fox, some Sioux and Omaha, some Ojibwe. And take the kids—there’s all kinds of interactive things that’ll catch their attention.

The city of Blood Run was down the steep hill and across the river from the park, in a place we call today, Iowa. If you’re from Dakota, you have every reason to be proud of the way the state has honored what once stood just across the Big Sioux.

But if, like me, you’re an Iowan, you’ll be disappointed, even embarrassed to discover that across the river, where once so very long ago a city of 5000, give or take a couple hundred, stood a city bigger than almost city in North America.

And there’s nothing there because decades of King Corn has flattened the mounds and filled the empty spaces. And there’s nothing there because Iowa, dragging its harrowing feet, really needs to do more than McGreegor, Lockhart, and Clark.

Blood Run is a gorgeous, haunted place, unlike any anywhere near