Iowa History Journal

 

Nov/Dec 2025 (Volume 17, Issue 6)

 

By Kevin Mason

 

Most Iowans miss the signs. Brown and black, climbing from ditches and faded by sun, half-swallowed by weeds or flanked by gas stations to proclaim: “Dragoon Trail,” with a profile of a strangely equipped soldier silhouetted against a shrub-filled background. Drivers often pass by without a glance. But behind those fading road markers lies the nearly forgotten epic of a military expedition, a vanished wilderness and the beginning of Iowa’s greatest transformation. The modest signs trace the hoofbeats of the 1st United States Dragoons, a company of horse-mounted soldiers who carved a path in 1835 across what would soon be called Iowa.

 

“Taking this District all in all… it surpasses any portion of the United States with which I am acquainted,” wrote the dragoon Lt. Albert Miller Lea in 1836. The young topographer still stood spellbound by the wild and unbroken beauty just traversed by his regiment on an expedition into a relatively uncharted territory the summer prior. The dragoons crossed a land of waving prairie, horizon-wide skies and rivers curling like ribbons across a living map still unnamed by American cartographers. The records they left behind provide a snapshot of Iowa in the moment before everything changed.

 

The dragoons came to map, measure and make contact with Indigenous peoples who had already long called the area home. What they left behind was a new beginning. Perhaps no place on Earth changed as much as Iowa during the 19th and 20th centuries. Following the 1st United States Dragoons’ march up the Des Moines River in the summer of 1835, at least 98 percent of Iowa’s land surface changed as American settlement spread swiftly from the Mississippi River to the Missouri River. As many as 28 to 30 million acres of prairie disappeared as eager pioneers plowed under prairie grasses, erasing more than 99 percent of the prairies present when the dragoons set out in 1835. An estimated 56 percent of forests fell rapidly to provide fuel, fences and raw materials for farms that populated every quarter of the countryside in the decades which followed. During the state’s first 100 years, Iowa also lost up to 97 percent of its wetlands in one of the most ambitious draining projects ever attempted. Iowans ditched, drained and straightened more than 4,000 miles of waterways within the state, while dropping the water table four feet on average in a project estimated to cost more than the construction of the Panama Canal. Today, almost nothing remains of the wilderness traversed by the dragoons save their ink-blotted maps and prose-filled memoirs.

 

 

Long before the dragoons’ boots pressed into mud or cornrows marched in neat lines across the landscape, Iowa was already a realm of abundance. For millennia, Indigenous nations, including the Dakota, Sauk, Meskwaki, Ioway, Otoe, Missouria, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and others, shaped and stewarded Iowa’s lands. Each wove their lives into the rhythm of seasons and cycles, tending the land with fire, ceremony and communal care. The homelands of Iowa’s Indigenous inhabitants spread out under a vault of endless sky, sprawling across a sea of tall-grass prairie whose emerald waves rippled in the summer breeze. Forests of oak, hickory, maple and cottonwood cloaked the river valleys, their limbs providing perches for birds from four continental flyways who filled the air with a cacophony of song. Across the gently rolling hills, bison thundered in herds numbering thousands, so numerous that in 1820 Lt. Col. Stephen Watts Kearny marveled at a herd estimated at 5,000 near the Little Sioux River, the largest ever recorded in the state. Elk and deer densely populated the banks of creeks and rivers. Wetlands consisting of shallow marshes, bogs and sloughs brimmed with waterfowl: migrating ducks, swans and cranes often turned the horizon into a living tapestry of wings. Iowa’s Indigenous nations did not occupy a “wilderness” but instead sculpted the landscape through lifeways developed over centuries. The delicate web, laid down over centuries, would soon feel the weight of treaties and plows, of displacement and settler ambition. As the dragoons cinched saddles and prepared to embark on the first major American military expedition across the area, Iowa was already alive, intricate and overwhelmingly abundant.

 

Capt. Nathan Boone, son of the legendary Daniel Boone, rode across the hills and prairies of the Mississippi Valley during the winter of 1834-1835. He worked to entice frontiersmen to try their hand at soldiering. Boone crisscrossed taverns and trading posts along the frontier, extending an alluring pitch: steady pay of $8 a month, uniforms and the promise of adventure. He covered 1,181 miles on a borrowed horse, signing up 78 recruits for service at a new post scheduled to rise on the western bank of the Mississippi River just north of modern-day Keokuk.

 

 

Soon the recruits arrived at the newly founded Fort Des Moines. Many had never even heard the word “dragoon.” The name itself stretched back centuries to European battlefields, where mounted troops wielded muskets adorned with dragon-shaped stocks. Fast-moving and highly adaptable, dragoons became a commander’s best weapon for striking swiftly and repositioning on the battlefield. George Washington had called for dragoons during the American Revolution, their speed and agility proving invaluable in the fight for independence. Though they faded from history after the War of 1812, the demand for dragoons returned as the young republic pushed westward. On March 2, 1833, U.S. Congress officially revived the regiments, forming the 1st United States Dragoons to patrol the vast, untamed edge of an expanding American empire.

 

Upon the dragoons’ arrival in Iowa in fall 1834, the post’s commander, Kearny, found little more than a cluster of hastily pitched tents and scattered supplies. Axes soon bit into logs, hammers rang and men labored in a race against the oncoming winter to complete stables and barracks. But the dragoons were soldiers, not carpenters, and their crude craftsmanship showed. As the first snowflakes drifted down, the men moved from canvas tents into the drafty, poorly built log quarters. A visitor to the post later described the soldiers as “pale and sickly.” With morale sinking, deserters started slipping away.

 

As the winter months dragged toward spring, Kearny voiced his concerns up the chain of command. “I should like to know,” he wrote during the bitter cold months at the fort, “if it is contemplated that we are to occupy this post after the ensuing winter… also what is required of this command while stationed here?” The U.S. War Department’s response finally arrived on March 9, 1835, as spring started to spread across the Midwest. The dragoons’ time at Fort Des Moines wouldn’t last. “(Enter the) Sioux country in the spring and locate a site for building a permanent post,” read the directive.

 

 

The order of “forward, march!” rang across the parade ground at Fort Des Moines (Montrose) on June 7, 1835. Kearny, a West Point graduate with a reputation for exacting precision, stood poised to lead three companies on a journey into the relatively unknown. The dragoons would spend months crossing more than 1,100 miles and report back on the soon-to-be settled territory’s rivers, plants, wildlife and peoples. The vanguard of Manifest Destiny, Kearny’s dragoons slogged through spring rains that failed to dampen the spirits of those who had finally embarked on the adventure of a lifetime promised by Boone in backwoods taverns. 

 

Among the riders was the young topographer Lea. As the dragoons slowly ascended the Des Moines River to the Boone River before striking northeast, Lea scribbled notes that became the basis for his 1836 book “Notes on the Wisconsin Territory.” His map and detailed descriptions called to settlers back East, urging them westward with promises of rich soil and open skies. While spring turned to summer, the men forded swollen creeks and sought the thrill of a bison hunt. Despite their enthusiasm, the men encountered few bison and elk on only one occasion. A stark contrast to Kearny’s observations of 15 years prior on a minor expedition from Council Bluffs to Fort Snelling across western Iowa, the 1835 expedition saw the decline of wildlife as the course of the coming American empire. “The larger Game will, of course, soon disappear from the settlement; but at present there is a great deal of deer, some bear, and some buffalo within reach,” wrote Lea. 

 

By late June, the dragoons arrived at the modern-day site of Des Moines. Kearny found the potential site of a new post underwhelming. The low, waterlogged lands served as a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Floods often enveloped the site. While Kearny had his doubts, others saw potential. Lea, ever the optimist, believed the site could serve as a strategic stronghold, its location offering a commanding view of the floodplain, a fordable crossing in the river and a point of American power between the Sauk and Meskwaki to the east and south and the Dakota in the north. By 1843, official orders would lead to the construction of a fort which would ultimately become Iowa’s capital city.

 

Continuing their journey, the dragoons measured progress in miles, not minutes, and nature presented a challenge at every step forward. The group left the Des Moines River to follow the Boone River, passing just south of modern-day Mason City before continuing on to the Dakota leader Wabasha’s village near the modern-day site of Winona, Minn. After spending time in council with the Dakota, the dragoons struck west, eventually finding their way back to the west fork of the Des Moines River. While the summer turned toward fall, Kearney’s men finished descending the Des Moines River. After the dragoons’ return to First Fort Des Moines on Aug. 19, 1835, Iowa entered a new era measured in fields of opportunity rather than military exploration.

 

 

The dragoons’ march and mapping opened new routes for wagons and cleared acres for plows, setting the stage for Iowa’s human and environmental transformation. In the following decades, forced removal, new fences and freshly plowed fields brought cataclysmic changes. Soldiers turned into settlers, Indigenous leaders fought for control, captives turned chroniclers and the land sustained a new republic. Oaks and hickories, felled for fence posts and firewood, faded from more than half the landscape in a single generation. By 1860, Lea’s promises of open skies and rich soil had drawn nearly 750,000 Euro-American settlers, up from fewer than 23,000 just two decades earlier. Those who came built Iowa’s towns in brick and clapboard, and planted fields in a patchwork of wheat, corn and oats. As towns grew, the memory of the dragoons faded like the thunder of their horses’ hooves.

 

Today, the spirit of Kearny’s 1835 expedition survives in subtle monuments, often overlooked and strewn across the state. A lone log cabin marooned in a sea of parking asphalt outside Principal Park in Des Moines declares itself the “Birthplace of Des Moines” to baseball fans who hurry past to find their seats before the first pitch. Nearby, a granite marker blends with electrical boxes to read: “Here passed the Dragoon Trail—Blazed by the First U.S. Dragoons under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny.” One of 15 markers of bronze and stone planted by the Daughters of the American Revolution starting in 1911, each plaque marks a point of passage for Kearny’s men in 1835. A decade later, during the early 1920s, the Iowa Highway Commission wove those markers into a 200-mile corridor flanking the Des Moines River dubbed the Dragoon Trail Auto Route. From Fort Dodge to Knoxville, brown and black signs went up to serve as a tribute to the state’s frontier past and a lasting reminder of the dragoons’ role in shaping Iowa’s development. The Dragoon Trail endures as a winding path of cabin boards, fading signs and living stories, each one a testament to the relentless motion of history.

 

(Kevin Mason is an assistant professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa and the founder of Notes on Iowa. Mason’s book, “Retracing the Dragoon Trail in Iowa: Environmental Transformation along the Des Moines River,” is due out on Michigan State University Press in early 2026.)