Iowa: it means the beautiful land. A land whose beauty lies in her natural wealth. Land of green and brown, of sky and earth, of wind and rain, of grasses waving in the breeze. Land of hybrid grasses, of cornfields, of yellowing kernels encased in drying blades of grass etched against the hot blue sky. Iowa: for many thousands of years, a land of grasses.
Settlers of the mid-1800s found it thus, although the grasses differed then. An ample land whose June torrents might give way either to humid, sweat-belabored summers or to desiccating winds, Iowa lay in the heart of one of Earth's largest and most productive grasslands, the tallgrass prairie. Yet the settlers, wading from moister forests to the east into the grassland sea, must have wondered whether they would survive the prairie's pelting sprays of rain, its tornadoes screaming across the flatlands, its frothing fires. They must have marveled at the living color of prairies cresting higher than a horse's head: the bobbing golden rays of compass plant and sawtooth sunflower, the rich autumn rusting of big bluestem, the lavender spikes of blazing stars directing the dances of bobolinks. And at the sounds: the thunderous herds of shaggy bison, wedges of long-billed curlews whistling on the wing, the calls and cackles of migrants flying through by the millions, the stillness of a blue-sky summer oc
It is said that the settlers first feared this land of limitless grass, sky, storm, and fire, and clung instead to the woodlands that sheltered them from the broiling sun, wailing wind, and blinding snowstorms, woodlands that strung through the state alongside the ribbons of rivers and which, toward the moister east, expanded to cover the hillsides. They clung to the hillside and ridgetop savannas that dawdled as grass and flower-carpeted parklands along the prairie edge, where one could drive with ease for miles beneath the spreading limbs of widely spaced, broad-crowned white and bur oaks, darkened by huge flocks of passenger pigeons, crossed by great herds of elk and by roaming bear and wolves. These lands they conquered first, hacking away the trees for heat and houses.
Then the settlers discovered that Iowa's grasslands had created their own demise. For thousands of years, while the climate had remained too dry and warm for dense forests like those farther east, fire had nourished a dense profusion of prairie grasses and forbs that had created Iowa's "black gold," her thick friable topsoil, fed for eons by the prairie's decomposing remains and kneaded by dense root masses of grasses, sunflowers, and legumes stretching 5, 10, perhaps 20 feet down to resurrect buried nutrients. The settlers set out to mine these rich prairie-bred soils and transform a heaven of sound and sight into something more tenable by human standards. New tones pierced the prairie air: the thud of oxen hooves, the twang of the plow. Pawing bison and booming prairie chickens, once numbering in the countless thousands, yielded to bawling cattle and baying dogs. Quenched were the raging fires that could outrace a horse, so loved by prairies and savannas but feared by the new settlers. Finally even sloughs and potholes were ditched, tiled, and planted to rowcrops. Thirty million acres of Iowa prairie, for millenia purified and purged of trees by fire and drought, now were forced to yield their riches without return.
Today the scattered remnants linger here and there: a russet patch of prairie grass alongside a dirt roadway, a brilliant orange cluster of butterfly milkweed near a deserted train track. Here and there a lone white oak, round-topped and massive, outlines its savanna reminiscences against the setting sun. Whirlwinds of glistening snow geese, winging north along the Missouri each March, honk the memories of the countless thousands that once flew here.
Perhaps the settlers who first pierced this land peered into the past and sensed that the border between woodland and grassland had always been restless. Whenever the climate warmed and dried, over periods of hundreds or thousands of years, the drought-resistant prairies expanded and trees retreated many hundreds of miles to the east. When the rains returned and the climate once again became moister, the supple oaks rebounded and savannas and woodlands returned to eastern Iowa. Perhaps the early settlers had noticed strange drought-loving remnants of earlier arid periods scattered through Iowa on the very driest sites: ornate box turtles crawling along sandy banks of the Iowa and Cedar Rivers, plains pocket mice leaping along the Big Sand Mound near Muscatine. Cowboy's delight and other Great Plains species flourishing in the Loess Hills, relicts that remain even today to remind us of the power of the skies to shape life on Earth.
Perhaps Iowa's settlers intuited that prairies of the last 8,000 or 9,000 years had been quiet and gentle residents compared to their ice-burdened predecessors. For more than two million years, the Earth's temperature slid downward, prompting glaciers to slowly surge from the Subarctic southward over ancient Iowa, only to ebb when warmth returned, pulsating in tempo with the climate. Smoothing the land with a harsh frozen mitt, they had dumped their ground leavings of grit and rock in thick blankets and stoney ridges. The settlers, facing the winter's northern skies, might in their mind's eye have glimpsed the frigid still air wafting from the glaciers' frozen walls, smelled their moist cold, heard their thousands of feet of ice ponderously grinding and compressing the land into new shapes. They certainly saw the bolder signs of glacial presence that still mark the landscape: the thick layers of unsorted pebbles, angular rocks, and other glacial debris that blanket nearly all of Iowa, and the sharp-edged boulders, scratched and planed by the ice, which speckled the farmers' fields and slammed the plow.
Even as the wandering fields of ice smeared the earth flat, winds and waters played upon the land. Each glacial recession released torrents of meltwaters which carved the broad flat valleys of the Missouri, Des Moines, and Mississippi Rivers, and frosted them thickly with fine-textured sediments. Strong winds rising from the glaciers' cold margins scoured the valley floors, lifting their sediments to cloak the state with a softer quilt of silt, called loess. The settlers who later traversed the landscape cursed the difficulties of the deepest loess deposits, the maze of western Iowa's sharp-peaked Loess Hills, where horses struggled to find footing and wagons teetered precariously along bluff edges.
Glaciers last covered the entire state a half-million years ago. Since then the rains have sculptured the raw landscape, etching ever-deeper and more intricate drainage networks. The process continues: today, even though the glaciers and arctic-bred winds slumber, ribbons of water continue to cut through Iowa's thick layers of rock and soil and wash them to the sea. The Mormons, setting out from Nauvoo, Illinois, to forge a major pioneer trail across southern Iowa, crossed the deeply creased billows and swales of this water-carved land, fingered everywhere with drainages. So do today's travelers of Interstate 80.
But not those who drive Interstate 35 north from Des Moines, for there about 14,000 years ago, during the last major cooling, the glaciers made one final crunching play, lapping down the middle third of ancient Iowa, recasting the hills and drainages south to modern Des Moines. Flooding once again the river valleys, flattening and feeding them with sand and silt, licking flat and washing regions to the east and west with a frigid tongue, the glaciers carried in the last load of rocky parent material that would be weathered and nurtured into today's rich soils. They gouged out Spirit Lake and Clear Lake, Lake Okoboji, and thousands of potholes, melting back a mere 12,000 years ago to leave this "Des Moines Lobe" of north-central Iowa a boggy flatland laced with garlands of hummocky hills. Then, as the land we call Iowa quieted, as the last glaciers melted and their gushing meltwaters narrowed, as the silt-laden winds were stilled and a drying sun bathed these lands, trees yielded to grasses and the modern prairies first held dominion.
Iowa's early settlers must have guessed that creatures of a different ilk inhabited Iowa's icy past. Perhaps the settlers found a mastodon tusk along the eroding banks of a creek, or plowed up a mammoth tooth that made their horses' molars look like toothpicks. Maybe when digging a well, they pulled up the cranium of a giant sloth. If so, they must have guessed that gigantic animals once trumpeted their deafening calls here: elephant-like mammoths and mastodons, beavers the size of bears, camels, lions, giant armadillos. A megafauna tracked by the settlers' own predecessors, for the first humans had arrived in North America on the tails of the last glaciers, when the cold pulled Earth's waters into frozen rank and the edges of oceans shriveled. Two-legged hunters then had leapt the islands of a land bridge stretching from Siberia to Alaska and started a methodical march south through the Americas. They crept into Iowa about 12,000 years ago, their sharp-edged spears ready for hunting the giant mammals.
At various times the Ice Age creatures fed among short, patchy grasses that nestled near the glacial margins, or in parklands of spruce, or with dwellers of the arctic tundra. These cold-adapted communities followed the receding glaciers north, only to march south again with the next onslaught of ice. Their remains, pollen grains of the larch and fir, fossilized seeds and bits of wood, lie buried within peat bogs. Today's living remnants cling to survival in northeastern Iowa, where balsam fir, Canada yew, and bearberry thrive in crevices and crannies that are cold and moist enough to meet the species' northern cravings. Nearby, where air flowing through ice-coated bedrock escapes onto north-facing talus slopes, tiny Pleistocene land snails creep among golden saxifrage and northern monkshood -- all now endangered species.
Settlers examining fossil-laden layers of exposed limestone and shale may have understood that an even stranger past, governed by the moist warmth of tropical and subtropical climes, lay recorded beneath Iowa's glacial remnants. Life first surged and swayed throughout ancient Iowa within the salty belly of shallow tropical seas. Our continent then hunkered with other land masses near the equator. For hundreds of millions of years, life evolved within warm lapping waters which receded only to advance once again, now as a salty lagoon, now as a vast coastal swamp, now as the broad plain at the mouth of a great river. The remains of each passing environment sank to the watery floor to be added to the thousands of feet of rock-forming sediments, as if the lifeforms to follow would need the sure footing of a firm rock bed. Today the slosh and gurgle of this ancient watery Iowa can be sensed along rocky roadcuts and riversides which are exposed especially in Iowa's "Little Switzerland," the northeastern corner of the state where glacial-age deposits are thinnest. Fossils of Iowa's earliest inhabitants, the crinoids and corals, trilobites and sponges, the steaming swampy forests of tree ferns, call out from the building stones,crushed rock,and coal mined from Iowa's depths.
Wind, water, and ice: for millions of years they blew, ground, and carved Iowa into the forms we see today, providing the substance and substrate for grasses, for prairies. But now the prairie has been broken, and the human hand has set out to transform Earth's shape itself. The land of water and ice and wind has been carved into terraced farmlands and leveled roadways, into cities and suburbs, into farmed wetlands, into straightened and dredged rivers. We have transmuted the land so accustomed to growing mounds and seas of prairie grasses into a fenced land of straight-rowed, domesticated grasses, as if the land and its wealth could be held within the dominion of the human fist.
Yet it was not always this way. The signs of earlier times lie everywhere if one knows where to look. They peek at us from roadsides as we speed by, they wink at us from riversides and waysides. The leavings of oceans and glaciers firm the ground beneath our feet. The remnants of prairie earth feed us. They live still, reminding us about the past and nurturing the present. They live still, tempting us to release our clutch just a bit, to reflood the potholes and restore the prairies, to return some of the land to its original inhabitants. Whispering to us to let the land go, to watch and see what returns. Witnessing to us what yet might come to be.