The Annals of Iowa

Review of: Iowa Historic Schools Highlighting Victorian Influence: Photo Study of Architecture, by Sandra Kessler Host

Townsend, Lucy

Book Reviews and Notices      333 
Iowa Historic Schools Highlighting Victorian Influence: Photo Study of Ar-
chitecture, by Sandra Kessler Host. Council Bluffs: Sandra Kessler Host, 
2014. 126 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, bibliography. $27.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Lucy Townsend is professor emerita at Northern Illinois University, 
past president of the Country School Association of America, and editor of the 
Country School Journal.  
The seeds of Sandra Kessler Host’s historical study were sown while 
she was participating in a community project to restore Willow Tree/ 
Richland #1 School, built in 1883 near Odebolt, Iowa. To ensure the au-
thenticity of the restored rural school, the group consulted a restoration 
architect who identified Victorian features in the school’s original struc-
ture. That revelation led Host—curator for the Iowa Rural Schools Mu-
seum of Odebolt, descendant of a pioneer family, and an alumna of the 
school—to embark on a three-year study to uncover an answer to this 
question: How common were Victorian features in Iowa rural schools 
built in the Victorian era (1860–1900)? Host set out to find, examine, and 
photograph all standing historic country schools in Iowa’s 99 counties. 
She photographed ornate features considered to be Victorian and ex-
plained why later generations ignored or effaced them. She assigned 
photos to categories to illustrate different architectural features as the 
schools evolved. She also included other matter, such as photos of Vic-
torian clothing styles, the Willow Tree restoration process, and maps. 
In addition, she explored Iowa’s history during the late 1800s to place 
the schools in a broader context.  
 The result is a coffee-table book divided into an introduction and 
preface, three chapters, a conclusion, and four appendixes. The first 
chapter explores Victorian influences on Iowa rural schools built 
between 1860 and 1900. The second includes current photos of rural 
schools that have remnants of Victorian features. The third contains cur-
rent photos of 220 Iowa historic schools placed in six categories: schools 
built during the settlement years (before 1870); town schools; historic 
religious/private schools; maintained first-generation rural schools 
(built before 1910); second-generation rural schools (built after 1910); 
and consolidated rural township schools built in the early 1900s. 
 In the conclusion, Host answers her initial research question by as-
serting that about 3,787 (30 percent) of rural schools built in Iowa during 
the nineteenth century had Victorian features. She also concludes that 
the restored Willow Tree/Richland #1 School is an excellent example of 
country schools having Victorian features. She explains farmers’ ability 
to adorn these schools by asserting that more than a million farm set-
tlers had the skills and financial resources to build schools with Victo-
rian influences.  
334      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
 Over 25 percent of the book is devoted to appendixes. Appendix A 
identifies Iowa’s standing historic schools by county. Appendix B lists 
Iowa’s historic schools on the National Register of Historic Places. 
Appendix C contains a narrative of Iowa’s rural settlement and the role 
of rural schools in that story. Appendix D includes a bibliography and 
suggested readings.  
 Host’s book is a treasure trove of more than 400 beautiful photo-
graphs and accompanying text. Like most coffee-table books, it is over-
sized, hard covered, and ideal for display on a table. Unlike most coffee-
table books, it includes long prose passages, definitions of terms, and 
historical analysis based on original research. Thus, it would be a valu-
able resource for anyone studying or restoring country schools. 
 The book has two weaknesses, however. First, its organization is 
sometimes confusing. For example, the research question (repeated of-
ten) concerns schools built between 1860 and 1900. Yet later the dates 
are 1860 to 1910. Host does not clearly explain that difference. A second 
weakness is the book’s sprawling organization. For example, the table 
of contents lists six categories of current photos of Iowa historic schools, 
but Host later tacks on two more: unmaintained one-room rural schools 
and rural schools repurposed for other uses. Despite such weaknesses, 
Host’s book would be a valuable resource for those who attended one-
room schools, state and local historical societies, and libraries in Iowa’s 
towns, cities, and universities. Teachers, researchers, students of country  
County Capitols: The Courthouses of South Dakota, by Arthur L. Rusch, 
with an introductory essay by Jason Haug. Historical Preservation Se-
ries 5. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2014. vi, 170 
pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paperback.  
Reviewer Wesley I. Shank is professor emeritus of architecture at Iowa State 
University. He is the author of “The Demise of the County Courthouse Tower 
in Iowa: A Study of Early 20th-Century Cultural and Architectural Change” 
(Annals of Iowa, 1992). 
County Capitols is a historical encyclopedia of South Dakota county 
courthouses. For the building now serving each county, Arthur Rusch 
provides a concise entry with a photograph and caption listing address, 
construction dates, architect, contractor, and cost. He includes a histor-
ical sketch of the county and of the construction of its previous and pres-
ent courthouses, a detailed architectural description of the present court-
house, and occasionally photographs of earlier ones. Notes identify 
sources.  


English

Iowa Historic Schools Highlighting Victorian Influence: Photo Study of Architecture

Swenson Arnold, Brie

An Opportunity to Challenge the "Color Line": Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Women's Labor Activism in Late Nineteenth-Century Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Review of: "Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival," by Laurence Gonzales

Durham, Frank

Book Reviews and Notices      213 
the Oneida, like many other Native peoples, have shown the ability to 
thrive in new environments, and they will carry that resourcefulness 
into the twenty-first century. 
Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival, by Laurence Gonzales. New 
York: W. W. Norton, 2014. ix, 415 pp. Illustrations, notes on sources, list 
of interviews, notes, index. $27.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Frank Durham is associate professor in the University of Iowa’s School 
of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research and writing have focused 
on critical analyses of media framing processes, including news coverage of the 
failed attempt to frame the cause of the crash of TWA Flight 800 in July 1996. 
When United Airlines Flight 232 made an emergency crash landing at 
the Sioux City, Iowa, airport, on July 19, 1989, the DC-10 had lost its 
steering when its tail engine exploded. En route from Denver to Chi-
cago, it had sustained irreparable damage to its hydraulic steering 
system, making a crash inevitable. In heroic fashion, the plane’s pilot, 
Alfred C. Haynes, and a passenger who was a licensed DC-10 instructor 
muscled the plane down, using the throttle to control the rudderless 
plane. Amazingly, 185 of the 296 people on board survived the massive, 
fiery crash.  
 The challenge for author Laurence Gonzales in telling this tale of 
heroism, loss, and survival was how to narrate such a traumatic event 
that lasted such a brief time. He settled on an organizing device that 
works quite well by alternating eyewitness accounts of the moments 
leading up to, during, and after the horrific crash with a more linear 
analysis of the forensic analysis of the plane’s mechanical failure. An 
effect of this two-part approach—which carries through nearly each of 
the book’s 24 chapters—is to take the reader to the center of the trauma 
over and over again in the words of survivors, only to relieve the stress 
of those vivid accounts with discussions of how and why the titanium 
in the lost engine failed and why the McDonnell-Douglas design for the 
DC-10 was flawed.  
 The effect of this rhythm is to produce a story that is at once in-
formative and compelling without ever resorting to melodrama. In the 
personally focused vignettes of life on the doomed plane, we are given 
a sense that every witness’s account is being heard and that every vic-
tim’s last moments are being accounted for in a dignified and meaningful 
way. In this mix, the science of metallurgy and engineering is explained 
in plain language, but in a way that unwinds the detective work needed 
to explain the miniscule but fatal flaw that led to this massive plane’s 
destruction. Achieving a tale of this scope and depth in such readable 
214      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
form is a great accomplishment for Gonzales, a nationally acclaimed 
magazine journalist who has written about aviation for years.  
 A key organizing theme that Gonzales develops to unify more than 
400 pages is just how unlikely jet flight is at all. Apart from detailing the 
mysteries of the jet engine, which he does without ruining the allure of 
that question, he develops this point about technology within his dual 
personal-technological narrative to explain the humanity of the disaster. 
And he does this in a way that draws readers in by allowing them to 
identify with the innocence of everyone on Flight 232 that day 25 years 
ago.  
 Sociologist Anthony Giddens explains this trusting effect in terms 
of our faith in “expert systems,” which “bracket time and space through 
deploying modes of technical knowledge, which have validity inde-
pendent of the practitioners and clients who make use of them. Such 
systems penetrate virtually all aspects of social life.” And, he concludes, 
we trust them implicitly. (The Giddens Reader, ed. Philip Casell [1993], 
292–93.) As Laurence Gonzales tells us, that kind of unblinking faith in 
things we don’t understand is how humans believe we can fly. And in 
this book, he shows us that it is how we sometimes survive, as well. 


Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

Review of: "Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains," by David B. Danbom

Bremer, Jeff

196      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
for democracy and equality for “propagandistic purposes” throughout 
the world after World War II. As America flexed its international muscle, 
ideals of democracy and equality became an international mantra of 
American identity, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address became a beauti-
ful conveyor of that message. Peatman argues convincingly that it was 
in that specific context that the speech became a revered document not 
only for Americans but also for people throughout the world striving 
for freedom and democracy for themselves. 
 As Peatman concludes, “For a hundred years, the nation had lost 
Lincoln’s meaning at Gettysburg, for almost no one in the ensuing cen-
tury discussed or acted on Lincoln’s demand that democracy must 
include equality” (191). But by January 19, 1963, at the centennial com-
memoration of Lincoln’s speech, the Gettysburg Address was as im-
portant to American identity as the U.S. Constitution and the Declara-
tion of Independence. And it was then that the Gettysburg Address had 
the power to inspire the unprecedented equal rights legislation of the 
1960s. 
Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains, by 
David B. Danbom. How Things Worked. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 2014. x, 129 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographical 
essay, index. $44.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper. 
Reviewer Jeff Bremer is assistant professor of history at Iowa State University. 
He is the author of A Store Almost in Sight: The Economic Transformation of Mis-
souri from the Louisiana Purchase to the Civil War (2014). 
This concise book is a volume in Johns Hopkins University Press’s 
series How Things Worked. Written by historian David B. Danbom, 
author of the best one-volume history on rural America, Sod Busting is 
an excellent introduction to the challenges and opportunities of agricul-
tural life in a difficult region for farming. Written for nonspecialists, it 
is an accessible and clear survey of the settlement of the Great Plains. 
Danbom breaks no new ground, using only published sources, but this 
is a rewarding story, focused on the struggles of individuals and fami-
lies fighting to prosper in an unforgiving region. 
 The book focuses on four states—Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, 
and North Dakota—that have similar topography and climate. All were 
settled after the Civil War, and agriculture dominated their economies. 
In the 1860s and the 1870s Indian tribes were forced onto reservations, 
opening up the northern plains for settlement. Railroad construction 
and the Homestead Act helped to populate these territories and states. 
Book Reviews and Notices      197 
The region was hard on American and European settlers. Winters were 
severe, wood was scarce, and water could be hard to find.  
 Danbom’s story details the acquisition of land, the building of farms, 
and how families paid for their property, as well as the creation of com-
munities and towns. Policies of the federal government were crucial to 
the settling of the northern plains, making land available for sale and 
encouraging economic development. While the Homestead Act did not 
account for more than 20 percent of land distributed in these four states, 
federal land policy and support for railroads helped bring settlers to the 
region. 
 There were many challenges to building farms. Weather on the north-
ern plains could be treacherous, with blizzards, hailstorms, and torna-
does endangering humans, crops, and livestock. A lack of timber forced 
many families to build sod houses or dugouts. Insects and snakes found 
such housing hospitable. Hordes of grasshoppers threatened crops, and 
tough prairie grass made breaking land difficult. It took many years for 
new farms to become a success. Costs were high, and everyone in the 
family labored for years to build a home. A boom-and-bust cycle in the 
late nineteenth century only exacerbated these challenges. 
 The third chapter details the importance of credit for families on the 
plains. Most people needed $500–$800 to meet costs in their first year. 
Farmers needed short-term credit to pay for seed, animals, and emer-
gency expenses. Family members, local banks, and general stores met 
this need. Long-term credit included mortgages on land, but such loans 
were different from today. Mortgages usually lasted less than ten years 
and required annual interest payments, with payment of the principal 
at the end of the loan. 
 The fourth chapter reviews how settlers built communities. Mi-
grants brought institutions and values with them to the Great Plains 
from eastern states or Europe. Churches and schools operated as cen-
ters for local people. Shared labor, such as barn-raising or quilting par-
ties, bonded neighbors. Towns provided commercial opportunities and 
often hosted fraternal organizations. Capitalism did not threaten com-
munities, and people did not see themselves as competing with each 
other as much as battling railroads and banks, which seemed to exploit 
average folk. 
 Danbom’s Sod Busting is an outstanding survey of farm making on 
the Great Plains. This elegantly written, well-researched volume will find 
an audience with students, historians, and general readers. Those with an 
interest in Iowa history will find much useful information here that helps 
to explain settlement in the western part of the state. Anyone teaching or 
studying the Great Plains will want to add this book to their library. 


Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains

Back Matter, The Annals of Iowa, v. 74. no. 1 Winter 2015

Review of: "So Far, So Good," by Ralph Salisbur

Dean, Thomas K.

Book Reviews and Notices     93 
the post–World War II era was fear: fear of the atom bomb, fear of Com-
munism, fear of radiation, fear of irradiated milk, fear of fluoride, fear 
ad infinitum. Although Riney-Kehrberg does suggest that the public em-
phasis on missing children ratcheted up parental fears, she might have 
investigated how parental fear for their children’s safety outside fit into 
society’s general anxiety. Despite these criticisms, The Nature of Child-
hood is a solid addition to the history of childhood; it offers a provoca-
tive argument and raises interesting questions that invite historians’ 
further consideration. 
 
 
So Far, So Good, by Ralph Salisbury. Lincoln: University of Nebraska 
Press, 2013. 274 pp. $19.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Thomas K. Dean is senior presidential writer/editor at the University 
of Iowa. His extensive writings about the importance of place include Under a 
Midland Sky (2008). 
Ralph Salisbury, noted poet and fiction writer, presents here a life-span-
ning memoir from his Great Depression boyhood growing up on an 
Iowa farm to his recent days in retirement from teaching at the Univer-
sity of Oregon. Born of a half-Cherokee father and an Irish American 
mother, Salisbury’s work often emphasizes his Native American back-
ground. Self-identity in a world of prejudice plays a major role in the 
book, but, as in much of his writing, Salisbury emphasizes the “tribe of 
the world.” As he states, “I am a Cherokee-Shawnee-English-Irish per-
son, not part this part that but all everything, whatever it is” (242). 
 Salisbury’s memoir, which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction 
Prize, is chronological in only a general sense. The broad strokes of the 
book’s organization move from his birth to the present, but the writing 
is often associative. Stories and memories spin out from each other and 
spiral back, creating more of an impressionistic exploration of his expe-
rience and identity as opposed to a linear chronicle. Generally, scholars 
of Iowa history and culture will be most interested in approximately the 
first half of the book until Salisbury joins the service (underage) at age 
17, as well as a later portion dealing with a brief teaching stint at Drake 
University in Des Moines. Even so, the entire book should be read to 
capture all Iowa references as well as to understand Iowa influences on 
the author’s later life. 
 The book is not a farm chronicle per se, but Iowa historians will 
most likely find interest in specific descriptions of changes in farm life 
and technology from the early to the mid-twentieth century, especially 
from the perspective of a poor farming family. Even more compelling, 
though, is Salisbury’s perspective on the role of violence in his life and, 
94      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
by extension, human life in general. Salisbury explores the violence per-
petrated on the family by an abusive father (whom he also admires in 
many ways, including for his musical talent) but broadens his scope to 
the violence-fraught world at large. Growing up on a farm, Salisbury 
was often exposed to the castration and slaughter of animals. But he 
also senses the violence of, for example, removing kernels from corncobs 
by rubbing a striker ear against another ear, and then compares that 
“divide and conquer” technique to dividing Native peoples against 
themselves in the name of Manifest Destiny and the subsequent “sei-
zure of homelands” and “genocide” (14), leading inevitably to the ulti-
mate violence of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II. 
 Some may find Salisbury’s memoir overly diffuse, and traditional 
historical scholars may find his at-times unusual linguistic construc-
tions jarring or somewhat less than transparent, but consider that the 
book covers the 70-plus-year life span of a poet. Still, common themes 
can be traced throughout the stories and detours, most notably the 
struggle between Salisbury’s growing Native sensibilities and how 
those values conflict with modern violence, particularly war. As he 
says, “Within myself two worlds had collided, the Indian world of 
hunting and planting and harvesting, in harmony with nature, and the 
white world of greedily ravaging nature and pirating weaker countries’ 
goods by means of scientific war” (174). 
 


So Far, So Good

Review of: Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War, by Lowell J. Soike

Morrison, Michael A.

Book Reviews and Notices     423 
cemetery’s story to life. Property owners past and present were less help-
ful: the developer filed lawsuits and eventually abandoned the project; 
the archdiocesan archivist stonewalled requests for information.  
 The authors draw thoughtful conclusions about what society owes 
the dead it decides to relocate, and they suggest a template for how that 
can be accomplished with respect and dignity, while at the same time 
recording what can be learned from the site. The experience in Dubuque 
underlines the challenges of such an undertaking, perhaps making a 
case that avoiding the disturbance of burial grounds may be the best 
policy except in the most compelling cases of public need. This volume 
itself honors the lost cemetery by gathering together what can be known 
about it and providing rare evidence from a pioneer immigrant ceme-
tery in a river town. By doing so, it makes an important contribution to 
the history of Dubuque, Iowa, and American burial practices. 
 
 
Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude 
to the Civil War, by Lowell J. Soike. Lincoln: University of Nebraska 
Press, 2014. xvi, 288 pp. Map, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $30.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Michael A. Morrison is associate professor of history at Purdue Uni-
versity. He is the author of Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest 
Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (1997). 
In this deeply researched, closely argued, revelatory, and highly readable 
monograph, Lowell Soike situates the Kansas territorial crisis within the 
larger context of midwestern sectional politics. He clearly shows how 
Iowa was both affected by and itself influenced events in that troubled 
territory. It did so primarily in three ways: as violence escalated in Kan-
sas, the state sent settlers, furnished arms from its arsenal to free-state 
combatants, and offered a refuge to antislavery forces who temporarily 
fled the territory. Iowa also provided a training ground for John Brown’s 
supporters who would attack Harpers Ferry in October 1859. After the 
violence in Kansas abated (it never completely disappeared), settlements 
in Iowa, particularly those populated by evangelicals, were havens for 
slaves fleeing Kansas as they passed through the state on their way north 
to freedom. 
 Whereas most studies of the conflict focus on the pro- and antislavery 
struggle within the territory, Soike’s is an outward-looking perspective 
that demonstrates how it shaped Iowans’ growing commitment to the 
Free-State cause. Encouraged by David Rice Atchison and Benjamin 
and John Stringfellow, unorganized proslavery bands dramatically 
upped the level of violence, closed the Missouri River to northerners 
424     THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
migrating to the territory, and for good measure plundered the emi-
grants’ belongings. Iowans previously unconcerned with the outcome 
in Kansas increasingly and fervently became Free-State sympathizers.
 Soike’s argument is nuanced and balanced. He reveals differences 
between those who favored aggressive retaliatory measures against pro-
slavery forces in Kansas and raids in western Missouri to free the en-
slaved on the one hand, and, on the other, “conservative Free State men 
who wanted the movement’s actions kept defensive and lawful” (107). 
There were limits to the antislavery sentiments, however. Many Iowans 
—indeed most northern Republicans—strongly supported and abetted 
a Free-State resolution in Kansas to ensure white, free-labor settlement 
there without necessarily advocating immediate abolition everywhere 
in the United States. 
 Iowa Democrats, fearing that Free-State arrivals would “dictate to 
us a government to preach Abolitionism and dig underground Rail 
Roads” (211), asserted (one would hardly say they proved) that the 
emigrants were the source of all the conflict in that unhappy territory. 
Democratic editors insisted that western Missourians were the “victims 
of northern aggression by organized Free-State colonization” (211). 
Ironically, Democratic efforts to assail the Underground Railroad and 
in so doing incite racial intolerance and bigotry led Republican leaders 
to oppose the attacks and pass measures for black equality. Taken to-
gether, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repeal of the Missouri Compromise 
ban on slavery, and staunch Democratic opposition to the Free-State 
movement and support for proslavery forces in Kansas had the effect—
if not the intent—of reducing the party to minority status in Iowa by the 
late 1850s. 
 One of the many qualities of this book is Soike’s ability to give a 
human face to abstract political conflict in Iowa and armed combat in 
Kansas. A case in point is John Brown’s legacy and influence. After his 
trial and hanging, free-soil Kansans remembered his attacks on slavery 
and raid to liberate slaves in western Missouri. Brown’s opponents de-
nounced him for his killing—brutal murder, actually—of five proslavery 
settlers along Pottawatomie Creek. Moreover, Brown’s violent opposi-
tion to slavery in Kansas, his Missouri raid, and the attack on the arsenal 
at Harpers Ferry fired the hearts of other Iowans like Charles Ball, Ed-
win Morrison, Albert Southwick, and Joseph Coppoc. Quakers all, they 
were inspired to launch a similar raid to aid the escape of 25 slaves 
owned by Morgan Walker of Missouri. Like Brown’s assault at Harpers 
Ferry, the raid ended in abject failure and the deaths of Ball and Morri-
son. Their zeal could not compensate for the combination “of having 
too few men and equipment, of having selected poor leaders, of suffering 
Book Reviews and Notices     425 
abandonment at the scene by wagon mates, and of being betrayed by a 
presumed friend” (191). Idealism had its limits. 
 This is a work of a mature scholar. Soike brings to this study a 
wealth of knowledge amassed over 36 years as a historian at the State 
Historical Society of Iowa. By recentering the Kansas imbroglio away 
from Congress and out from the territory, he has made an important 
contribution to understanding the way the territorial issue transformed 
Iowans who thought of themselves as westerners into partisans of the 
Free-State movement and participants in a sectional conflict that issued 
in and was resolved by the Civil War and more than 640,000 deaths. 
 
  
Necessary Evil: Settling Missouri with a Rope and a Gun, by Joe Johnston. 
St. Louis: Missouri History Museum, 2014; distributed by the University 
of Chicago Press. 336 pp. Maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. 
$24.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Catherine McNicol Stock is the Barbara Zaccheo Kohn ‘72 Professor 
of History and director of the American Studies Program at Connecticut Col-
lege. She is the author of Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain 
(1996); and Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on 
the Northern Plains (1992). 
Necessary Evil is not intended as an academic history of vigilante vio-
lence in Missouri in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It in-
cludes no overview of books on similar topics, no footnotes, and only a 
brief bibliography. The author freely admits that he “created” and 
“added” some of the details in his descriptions of events (12). Similarly, 
Johnston asserts that “the level of vigilante activity . . . of this length and 
depth of depredation, happened only in Missouri” without providing 
specific data to back up the statement (8). For readers in Iowa, this is 
particularly disappointing, because one of the frontier areas that John-
ston claims did not fall into the habit of solving every problem through 
vigilante justice was Iowa. It would be interesting to know more about 
how different parts of the Midwest came to develop so differently. 
  For a non-academic audience, Necessary Evil proves a literally unfor-
gettable read—full of violent deaths, torture, revenge, all in the name of 
what Johnston calls justice. Each chapter concerns a different saga of vig-
ilantism, beginning with the “Mormon wars” and including the regulator 
movement, Wyatt Earp, the Bald Knobbers, and other infamous and 
anonymous vigilantes. As his title reveals, Johnston believes that this car-
nage was a “necessary evil,” a stage of society on the way to a more reg-
ulated community. He even suggests that we can turn our horror at the 
pain and suffering of the victims into “love” for the perpetrators and ap- 


Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War

Review of: Gathering the Potawatomi Nation: Revitalization and Identity, by Christopher Wetzel

Bowes, John P.

440     THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
amounts of a desperately needed raw material at a critical point. On a 
second level, Kimble argues that the campaign was successful in altering 
the experience of the war in such a way that civilians were able to see 
themselves as home front soldiers” (147). As for that critique of World 
War II iron scrap drives, I believe my 90-year-old defender would have 
wholeheartedly agreed with Kimble. 
 
 
Gathering the Potawatomi Nation: Revitalization and Identity, by Christopher 
Wetzel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xii, 196 pp. Illustra-
tions, maps, graphs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer John P. Bowes is associate professor of history at Eastern Kentucky 
University. He is the author of Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-
Mississippi West (2007). 
Nation is a familiar word, one that at first glance appears easy to define. 
Yet in the cultural and historical contexts of colonialism, indigenous 
communities, and the twenty-first century, nation as a word, concept, 
and assertion of political identity takes on greater complexity. In Gath-
ering the Potawatomi Nation, Christopher Wetzel addresses those very 
concerns in a clearly articulated analysis that illustrates how the concept 
of nationhood currently manifests among the disparate Potawatomi 
communities in North America. Most important, Wetzel argues that 
contemporary Potawatomi expressions and conceptions of nationhood 
reflect, more than anything political or economic, “a decisive shift to-
ward an affirmative collective self-identification” (137). The Potawato-
mis have found in the concept of nationhood a way to rebuild, maintain, 
and convey vital social and cultural connections. 
 The book is divided into two sections, titled “Roots of the Nation” 
and “Routes to the Nation.” This organizational structure illustrates 
Wetzel’s emphasis on how decisions made by contemporary Potawa-
tomi men and women exist within their specific historical experiences 
and cultural traditions. For the Potawatomis, that historical context finds 
its most common expression in two events: the Chicago Treaty of 1833 
and the Trail of Death that took place later that same decade. Wetzel ex-
plains that whereas the treaty symbolized fragmentation and then bore 
the blame for interband conflict during the Indian Claims Commission 
hearings of the twentieth century, a more recent emphasis on govern-
ment forced removals and diaspora has oriented the larger Potawatomi 
community toward present and future opportunities for reunion. 
 The path to creating those connections and building the Potawa-
tomi Nation began on the individual level and continues through the 
efforts of national brokers, men whose “life trajectories, cultural fluency, 
Book Reviews and Notices     441 
structural position, and gender” (90) provide them the means to build 
networks that span the nine communities located in the United States 
and Canada. Just as important, because of the emphasis on cultural and 
social connections grounded in language revitalization organizations 
and the annual Potawatomi Gathering that started in 1994, this evolving 
Potawatomi nationhood has not competed with the political and eco-
nomic interests of those nine distinct sovereign governments.  
 This is a critical point that rests at the core of the book. Wetzel em-
phasizes that “changing economic and political circumstances, rather 
than being directly causal, create conditions of possibility for the Pota-
watomi Nation to develop” (72). The Potawatomis are building a nation 
that relies on their history and culture, not one built on external notions 
of economic and political institutions. Wetzel directly confronts this idea 
near the end of the book when he writes that at “the community level, 
the Potawatomi national renaissance is a shift away from the arbitrary 
imposition of ‘tribes’ by non-Native governments” (137). Yet in this rel-
atively brief book he does not pursue that idea in much depth. It would 
be particularly interesting to put his analysis in conversation with Glen 
Couthard’s recent study, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial 
Politics of Recognition (2014).  
 Wetzel developed his analysis in collaboration with the Potawato-
mis, and the inclusion of their responses to his analysis substantiates the 
conclusions he draws. My primary critique of Gathering the Potawatomi 
Nation arises from his comparison of the Potawatomi experience to that 
of other fragmented Native communities to explain why the Potawato-
mis in particular have experienced this revitalization. Why choose the 
Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles and not another Great Lakes com-
munity? Yet that question does not overshadow what is ultimately a 
very good introduction to contemporary expressions of a Potawatomi 
collective identity and the need to place indigenous conceptions of na-
tionhood within proper historical and cultural contexts. 
 
 
Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities, 
by Chad Broughton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 399 pp. 
Illustrations, notes on method, notes, index. $29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Ralph Scharnau, a U.S. history instructor, recently retired from North-
east Iowa Community College, Peosta. His publications and ongoing research 
and writing focus on Dubuque and Iowa labor history.  
Twenty years ago, Daniel Nelson’s book, Farm and Factory: Workers in 
the Midwest, 1880–1990 (1995), synthesized the secondary literature on 
the two dominant economic institutions in America’s heartland. The 


Gathering the Potawatomi Nation: Revitalization and Identity

Review of: The Iowa Route: A History of the Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern Rail-way, by Don L. Hofsommer

Cordery, Simon

428     THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
the Little House books and other writings by Wilder. Hill makes cogent 
observations about Wilder’s prose, noting the ways that it draws on her 
farm newspaper columns but lacks the polish of the finished children’s 
books. A rough estimate suggests that notes, photographs, and maps 
take up almost as much space as the text of the manuscript itself. The 
exhaustiveness of the notes at times does make reading the book an ex-
ercise in turning pages back and forth. While it is possible to read the 
memoir through by itself, the notes draw readers in, and one often finds 
oneself relying on the notes to explain background and context. 
 In sum, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography is not just the pub-
lication of Wilder’s memoir. The editor and publisher have successfully 
blended two types of books for two audiences. One book is the memoir 
itself, the entertaining story of Laura’s youth, including many details 
that are not given in the Little House books. These include the birth and 
death of a younger brother, the family’s year-long stay in a small town 
in Iowa, and descriptions of several neighbors’ teenage pregnancies. 
This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in true stories about 
women and childhood in the nineteenth-century American Midwest. 
The other book is a compendium of what we know about Wilder’s life, 
how she came to write the memoir, and how Pioneer Girl fits with her 
other works. This book is a work of scholarship that will set the stand-
ard for Wilder studies for years to come.  
 
 
The Iowa Route: A History of the Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern Rail-
way, by Don L. Hofsommer. Railroads Past and Present. Bloomington: 
Indiana University Press, 2015. xii, 292 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, 
notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Simon Cordery is chair of the Department of History at Western Illi-
nois University. He is the author of The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of 
Illinois Railroading (forthcoming, 2016). 
Railroads opened Iowa to settlement and cultivation, integrated the 
state into a national economy, and challenged local power. By 1900, they 
were numerous and nearly omnipresent, but much of the state’s railroad 
network has disappeared since then. Don Hofsommer, a veteran histo-
rian of the midwestern railroading scene, offers a useful, informative, and 
thorough history of one of those vanished corporations, the Burlington, 
Cedar Rapids & Northern Railway (BCR&N). He builds on his earlier 
histories of the Minneapolis & St. Louis and the Iowa Central railroads, 
both of which figure prominently in the book under review, to show how 
the BCR&N was “representative of innumerable enterprises that popped 
up around the United States during the age of railways” (ix). 
Book Reviews and Notices     429 
 Events beyond Iowa drove the creation of the BCR&N. As Chicago 
grew in prominence and power, Iowa’s civic leaders sought ways to 
avoid fueling that city’s development. The BCR&N was one of several 
efforts to do that. The line opened in 1871 as the Burlington, Cedar Rap-
ids & Minnesota, its boosters hoping ultimately to connect St. Louis 
with Minneapolis. By 1877 passengers and freight could travel from 
Minneapolis to St. Louis, with the BCR&N providing the link from the 
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) at Burlington to the 
Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad at Albert Lea. Strategic alliances, most 
notably with the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad (CRI&P), and 
occasional antagonisms, especially with the CB&Q, show how the 
BCR&N was neither master of its own destiny nor even a particularly 
important player in the world of railroads. 
 Building ahead of demand to create customers was a tried and true 
technique of the railroad age. The BCR&N did exactly that, nowhere 
more spectacularly than in its race to Spirit Lake, an expanding vacation 
spot it marketed as “a little bit of Eden” (153). Reaching the lake in 1882 
ahead of rival Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, it built a hotel and oper-
ated steamboats to attract vacationers from as far away as Georgia. 
Competition dampened revenues already reduced by government 
regulations, however, and by 1884 the CRI&P controlled the BCR&N, 
squeezing the smaller company between two behemoths, as the CB&Q 
was angered by the Rock Island’s incursion into its backyard in Burling-
ton. Under Rock Island patronage, the BCR&N expanded into Dakota 
Territory, and in 1902 the CRI&P purchased the BCR&N outright. Un-
fortunately the Panic of 1893, successive dry seasons that dropped Spirit 
Lake by eight feet, and the disastrous takeover of the Rock Island by an 
investment syndicate ended the BCR&N’s independent life. An epi-
logue recounts an extended denouement to the abandonment of the 
Rock Island in 1980. Four separate lines continue to use track originally 
built by the BCR&N, including the thriving Iowa Northern Railway, but 
the “Iowa Route” itself is a distant memory. 
 This is an important book for anyone interested in the history of 
railroading and in nineteenth-century Iowa. The Iowa Route is written 
from the perspective of and about the major investors and managers 
who funded and operated it. It is well produced, boasting excellent il-
lustrations and many maps, though the latter are all from contemporary 
railroad publications and some parts are difficult to decipher. Never-
theless, this elegantly written book places the history of the BCR&N in 
its larger context and serves as an admirable addition to the growing 
literature on Iowa’s railroads. 
 


The Iowa Route: A History of the Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern Railway

Review of: "Creating the American West: Boundaries and Borderlands," by Derek R. Everett

Lass, William E.

Book Reviews and Notices      185 
American Indians in U.S. History, by Roger L. Nichols. The Civilization 
of the American Indian Series, vol. 248. Second edition. Norman: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press, 2014. xxiv, 191 pp. Illustrations, maps, chro-
nology, suggested readings, index. $24.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Donald L. Parman is retired from Purdue University. He is the author 
of Indians and the American West in the Twentieth Century (1994). 
This book, concisely covering the history of American Indians from pre-
history to the present, was first published in 2003. (I reviewed it in the 
Spring 2004 issue of this journal.) For this second edition, the author has 
retained the earlier chapter structure while promising to put greater 
stress on Indians’ social and cultural issues and to correct factual errors 
and omissions. One new feature of the second edition is the addition of 
six biographical sketches of notable Indians: Molly Brant, Sequoyah 
(George, Giss, or Guess), Sara Winnemuca, Carlos Montezuma (Wac-
caja), Alice Lee Jamison, and Ada Deere. 
 Comparing the texts of the two editions reveals mostly minor 
changes, such as different word choices and occasionally adding new 
sentences. In dealing with the Spanish in Florida, Nichols wrote a par-
agraph covering events after the De Soto expedition. He made numer-
ous changes in the chapter covering the period from 1970 to the present, 
discussing several topics that have been resolved since 2003 and sum-
marizing new issues that have arisen in more recent times. 
 What has not changed in the new edition is the author’s goal of 
writing for nonspecialists. He does not provide footnotes or a bibliog-
raphy but does offer a list of suggested readings at the end of each chap-
ter. The book remains an excellent introduction to Indian history. 
Creating the American West: Boundaries and Borderlands, by Derek R. Ev-
erett. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. xvi, 302 pp. Illus-
trations, maps, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer William E. Lass is professor emeritus of history at Minnesota State 
University, Mankato. He is the author of Shaping the North Star State: A History 
of Minnesota’s Boundaries (2014).  
Anyone seeing only the title of this book could easily make some mis-
taken assumptions about its nature. “American West” can and does 
mean different things to different people. The West considered by 
Everett is the trans-Mississippi West, so for the purposes of this study 
Iowans are westerners. Furthermore, many would-be readers might 
assume that the book deals with all state boundaries in the region west 
of the Mississippi River. Instead, Everett devotes six of his eight chap-
ters to specific boundaries—western Arkansas, Missouri-Iowa, Oregon-
186      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Washington, California-Nevada, New Mexico-Colorado, and North 
Dakota-South Dakota. These were apparently selected for detailed treat-
ment because they were either controversial or unique in some way. 
 In aptly noting the significance of state boundaries, Everett ob-
serves that “the creation and evolution of western state boundaries rep-
resented the single most important method of transforming a naturally 
anonymous landscape into a functional part of the United States” (4). 
In other words, state boundaries define a legal entity that is part of the 
federal union and clearly distinct from adjoining states. Iowa and Mis-
souri neighbors who live across a road from each other obviously have 
similar cultures and share a climate. But one has to look to Des Moines 
and the other to Jefferson City to determine such things as how fast they 
can drive and taxation, inheritance, and marriage laws.  
 Everett concludes that state-making in the trans-Mississippi West 
was influenced by precedents from America’s colonial and early na-
tional periods. The boundaries of the 13 colonies were a combination of 
natural (which Everett calls geographical) and artificial (latitudinal and 
longitudinal lines or geometric to Everett). The Ordinance of 1785, 
which provided for a land survey system with square townships and 
square sections helped solidify the notion that boxlike-shaped states 
were the most logical legal entities. Everett notes that geometric bound-
aries were ultimately the usual practice in the trans-Mississippi West. 
This sometimes resulted in the division of very homogeneous peoples, 
such as in the case of Colorado and New Mexico.  
 As an alternative to straight-line boundaries, Everett mentions the 
advocacy of the American explorer John Wesley Powell for each state 
to be limited by its natural drainage areas. While artificial boundaries 
have created some problems, it is difficult to imagine that Powell’s 
scenario would have been an improvement. In the nineteenth century, 
when most of the western states were formed, their creators could not 
comprehend the future impact of such forces as rapid population 
growth, industrialization, and urbanization.  
 The final shaping of a state was determined in part by the prefer-
ence of its residents, but Congress had the ultimate authority. Usually 
a territory aspiring to statehood was already partially limited by the 
earlier admission of adjoining states. Iowa Territory from its 1838 
founding was bounded on the east by the Mississippi River and on the 
south by the state of Missouri.  
 But during its territorial period (1838–1846) Iowa became em-
broiled in a vitriolic border war with its southern neighbor. The conten-
tion was sparked by Missouri’s decision to claim and survey a northern 
boundary about ten miles north of its original one. That shift was justified 
Book Reviews and Notices      187 
on the grounds that such a line would conform to its statehood act pro-
vision that the northern boundary had to be on the latitude of the Des 
Moines River rapids. Iowa Territory officials charged that there were no 
rapids in the Des Moines River and Missouri was only promoting an 
illegal land grab. Contention peaked in 1839. An acerbic war of words 
between Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs and Iowa Territorial 
Governor Robert Lucas led to the activation of rival militias. Despite 
their bombast, the governors and their supporters realized that the dis-
pute could only be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court—the final arbi-
ter of interstate boundaries. Finally in 1849 the court ruled that the 
Iowa-Missouri boundary had to be the one that existed before Missouri 
attempted to adjust its northern boundary. 
 The Iowa-Missouri boundary dispute has been covered previously 
to varying degrees in Iowa’s histories. Nonetheless, it is certainly worth 
retelling, and Everett’s well-documented and entertaining description 
should be of great interest to anyone concerned with Iowa’s history. 
[See also Everett’s article on this topic in the Fall 2008 issue of this jour-
nal.—Ed.] 
 I highly recommend this excellent book to anyone specifically in-
terested in the development of Iowa’s southern boundary as well as 
those who are curious about the political evolution of the trans-Missis-
sippi West. 
  
 
Shaping the North Star State: A History of Minnesota’s Boundaries, by Wil-
liam E. Lass. Saint Cloud, MN: North Star Press of Saint Cloud, 2014. x, 
230 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $16.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Derek R. Everett is adjunct professor of history at Metropolitan State 
University of Denver. He is the author of Creating the American West: Boundaries 
and Borderlands (2014). 
In this comprehensive and enthusiastic explanation of how the Land of 
Ten Thousand Lakes came to be, the dean of Minnesota history turns 
his attention to the invisible bounds of the North Star State. William E. 
Lass incorporates vital events and issues of local, regional, national, and 
even international importance to create a thorough and well-contextu-
alized story, illustrating well the complicated process by which Minne-
sota took shape. 
 Drawing on a blend of his previous scholarship as well as new re-
search, Lass leaves no stone unturned in his quest to depict the physical 
creation of Minnesota. He organizes the work chronologically as well 
as geographically, focusing on each of Minnesota’s boundaries as it 
emerged through factors both near and far from the future state. First, 


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