December is a big month for important birthdays, and this year marks the 175th birthday of the state of Iowa (if you ask me, it doesn’t look a day over 150). Of course, there are those who might push the date back 8,400 years or so to when the archeological record shows evidence of the first human settlements in what is now Iowa. You can visit the Effigy Mounds burial sites that date back to about the year 300 C.E. near the town of Marquette, named, not after the indigenous people who built them, but for the French explorer, Jacques Marquette who, with Louis Joliet, was, in 1637, the first European to reach the Hawkeye state. (Yeah, and Columbus “discovered” America.)
Iowa had been part of Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, although Iowa isn’t even close to Louisiana, which was named not after Louis Joliet but for King Louis XIV of France who, as far as I know, had never been to Louisiana or Iowa either. President James Polk signed up Iowa as our 29th state on December 28, 1846, as part of a dubious deal to balance slave and free states in a futile attempt to stave off the Civil War. These were rugged and lawless times in Iowa, with Germans, Scandinavians and Irish pouring into the territory, giving rise to suspicion of immigrants. It provided fertile ground for nativist political organizations like the secretive Know-Nothing Party. When its members were asked details about their group, they were supposed to reply that they know nothing. Thankfully, few of the Know-Nothings remain today, except for those working in customer service at T-Mobile.
Iowa is sometimes referred to as a “flyover state.” But it would be a mistake to dismiss Iowa as provincial and uninteresting. Even some of the names of towns in Iowa suggest there is more to the state than meets the eye. Take Ionia, for example, population 279. Is that a Native American name? No. Greek? No. Czech? Not hardly. The story goes that in the late 1800’s, a representative from the fledgling railroad came to town to drum up business and demanded that they pick a name for the place. “I don’t care what you call it,” one enterprising fellow replied. “I own the lumberyard. I own that land. I own that building.” The exasperated railroad man said, “We’ll call it Ionia!”
Then there is Elkader, which as it turns out, has nothing to do with elks. It was named after Agbd El Kader, a Muslim emir who had been instrumental in resisting the French invasion of Algiers. And how about Jamaica, Iowa? The name was the result of a frustrated attempt to call the town Van Ness, but there already was a town by that name so the mayor was blindfolded and pointed to a map. His finger landed on Jamaica, known today to tourists as the Caribbean home of reggae music, Red Stripe beer and ganga. In 2019, the mayor of Jamaica, Iowa, population 217, was arrested for growing her own ganga and given two years’ probation.
RAGBRAI stands for the “Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa,” started by some wacky folks at the Des Moines Register. Every summer, on the hottest week of the year, 10,000 or so adventurous individuals descend on Iowa, winding through backroads in a line of cyclists, stretching for miles, legs pumping like that 9-foot-long millipede fossil they found in England, devouring all the pork chops and lemonade they can find, making friends with the smalltown residents, learning about their history and their way of life and promising to return one day. And if that doesn’t say “Iowa,” I don’t know what does. Happy birthday!