The histories of the worlds and the worlds they made

One of the reasons we Midwesterners do not like to think of ourselves as being in the world is that the world was already here long before we deigned to show up. Long before the French Creole trader and financier Auguste Chouteau ran aground near the site of what would become the city of St. Louis, the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers was the site of the ancient city of Cahokia, built and inhabited by Indigenous peoples known to historians only as the Mound Builders. At the height of its power, Cahokia commanded an immediate hinterland that extended fifty miles in all directions, and a population of some 40,000, but its trade networks penetrated far deeper into the continent. The mounds built at Cahokia were, well into the nineteenth century, some of the largest constructions in North America; the Mound Builders fashioned them in a ceremonial relationship with the skies, to celestial events, most conspicuously, to the movement of the sun. The people who once inhabited Cahokia had largely abandoned the city itself by the time Christopher Columbus stumbled onto the beaches of the island known to its Native inhabitants as Guanahani but that Europeans would later call the Bahamas–a word that might by derived from the Lucayan Taino language, but might also be a corruption of the Spanish word “bajamar,” meaning “shallow waters.” It is not entirely clear what drove the depopulation of Cahokia in the period before colonization–political conflicts, internal wars, over hunting and over farming are all possible explanations, as is the possibility of a mass death precipitated by viruses introduced by earlier waves of European explorers that had been less disposed to settlement–but it is generally believed that the people of Cahokia would go on to join older Indigenous nations both east and west of the city, or to form new communities from the remains of their old polity. These would be the nations that, from the early seventeenth century, Europeans would meet and come to rely upon as trading partners, confidents, and informants. If it is not already a truism that European settlers could not have survived in their New World without Native help, as well as the gift–and, later, outright theft–of Indigenous know-how, it should be. Native peoples sustained Europeans throughout the Americas–not because they were particularly altruistic, but because Europeans seemed to be interesting trading partners, people who dealt in unfamiliar goods that, if not immediately useful, were beautifully seductive. They also looked upon these raggedy newcomers with a certain degree of pity. For most reasonable people, it is hard to watch somebody starve; it is easier if you do not have to see them waste away. So, Native peoples helped to keep Europeans alive. Their generosity would not go unpunished. The worldliness of this encounter–the world-making violence of the encounter–would be quite deliberately dis-remembered. By the time my family showed up in Iowa, the ethnic cleansing of Native peoples was largely complete across the Midwest, while the regulation of Black people and Black mobility, the ability of freedpeople to move within and between states, was just getting underway. Many radical Abolitionists had hailed from Iowa–in 1859, Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, US Congressman from Iowa’s fourth district, had sheltered John Brown after Brown’s attacks on pro-slavery forces in Kansas; after Brown’s raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1860, the village of Winfield, Iowa changed its name to Harper’s Ferry, something that later generations would claim had nothing to do with Brown–but in the years following the Civil War the state legislature passed new law barring Black settlement within its borders, and attempted to limit the movement of freedpeople in the state. Both of these processes would prove to be to the advantage of later generations of European immigrants, particularly among the Irish immigrants who found a welcoming home among an earlier generation of French-American Catholics. A certain strand of my family history is woven through this larger tapestry, dependent upon, and contributing to, the reproduction of state counter-sovereignty and the jealously acquisitive logic of capital accumulation. The farm on which my mother grew up, on which her father had grown up, the farm his father had carved into forty acres of wooded land just a few miles west of the Mississippi in Monona Township, was once part of what was called “the Black Hawk Purchase.” Ceded to the US government under the terms of the treaty that ended the so-called Black Hawk War of 1832, the Black Hawk Purchase involved the sale of a strip of land on the western banks of the Mississippi, exacted as an indemnity for Sauk and Fox involvement in the conflict. Fifty miles at both ends, and forty at the middle, the strip extended from the northern border of Missouri–a border that remained in dispute until 1839, when the Supreme Court determined the border to be fixed at the site of Keokuk’s village on the Des Moines Rapids–to the mouth of the Upper Iowa River as it drains into the Mississippi. All told, the Black Hawk Purchase covered about six million acres of land, much of it in what geologists now call the Driftless Region, the topographical peculiarity that extends for maybe a hundred miles east and west of the Mississippi above the Missouri drainage, the only area in the Midwest that, because it was not leveled by glaciers during the last ice age, has hills, and forests, and is home to somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety percent of the region’s naturally occurring water features–streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, limestone aquifers and underground springs. This land, in 1832, was held, in large part, by Indian nations who were not themselves party to the Black Hawk War or to the treaty that ended the war. It was not land the Sauk and the Fox had any compellingly exclusive claim over, much less a right to sell. This, of course, did not much matter to the architects of American empire. For what they stole, the US paid the Sauk and Fox a little less than a quarter million dollars; many of the regular soldiers who were witnesses and signatories to the treaty would go on to settle on the southern shores of Lake Michigan near the scraggly little settlement that would very quickly rise to become St. Louis’s most direct competitor in the region and the nation, the old French trading post at Chicago. By the time my great-grandfather bought the land that he would make into his farm, in 1919, the memory of Black Hawk and the Black Hawk Purchase had mostly passed from the land, and the dominance of Chicago over agricultural markets in what had become the West was a foregone conclusion. The arcane witchery of what would evolve into the Chicago futures exchange, of course, bedevils Midwestern farmers to this day. My great-grandfather was part of this chicanery, his labor helping to ensure that his efforts to eke a living from the soil would be forever undermined by the unknown presences that haunted the trading pits of a far distant city. One of many workers who would, over decades, essay forth the spellcraft by which a quasi-national rail infrastructure would come to participate in the transformation of agricultural commodities into troublesome financial instruments, my great-grandfather was incidentally adjacent this history, having spent some portion of his later twenties working on the electrification of the stretch of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad that spanned Montana and Idaho. While the rail network linking Chicago to the Pacific had been completed decades earlier, the electric EF-1 and EF-2 locomotives pioneered by the American Locomotive Company and General Electric promised a reduction of costs through greater fuel efficiency and more consistency with respect to schedules, allowing for more efficient–or at least more convincing–means of assessing supply, demand, and value. The wages my great-grandfather drew from this employment were most likely the basis for the capital he used to purchase his land in Iowa; they were no doubt augmented by work on the Milwaukee Road ended in 1917, when he was drafted into the military and sent to France, where he was one of the 1.2 million American soldiers who fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Over a third of the soldiers who fought in the six week Meuse-Argonne campaign died on the battlefield. My great-grandfather did not. He survived the campaign and was mustered out of the service shortly after the Armistice. He came back to Iowa physically unharmed, but by most accounts, he came back from the war maybe just a little bit cracked. Seeing the world he was of may have broken him.