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.

 

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.