History Archives - Page 3 of 3

Copy of a lithograph "Mouth of the Chippeway, Wisconsin," showing Native Americans with canoes on a riverbank.

Meskwaki Part 1: Last of the Natives

Updated February 20, 2023

The Meskwaki tribe was the last Native American tribe to live in Iowa and hunt on Owl Acres. Before they came to Iowa, though, they had a long history of conflict and migration. Their name, which translates People of the Red Earth, speaks to their origins in the St. Lawrence River Valley in northeastern Canada. […]

History

A portrait painting by American artist George Catlin. Native American Male in ceremonial garb. Tunic of white fur. Necklace of animal’s claws strung on a cord. Oblong medallion displayed at throat. Headdress of a headband decorated with feathers. Face paint on right cheek of four slashing parallel lines of green color.

Namesake: The Ioways

Updated February 13, 2023

Owl Acres formed a tiny part of the tall grass prairie that evolved after the last glaciers receded. As such, it would have seen the changes that made mammoths and other giant wildlife extinct and the rise of native hunter-gatherer groups. For over 300 years prior to European conquest, a group of tribes collectively known […]

History

American Bison. A large bovine with brown, shaggy fur and a pronounced hump atop his shoulder, stands in a tall grass prairie.

Beneath My Feet Part 5: Layers of Grass

Updated January 30, 2023

Grass seems to be everywhere. On Owl Acres, it covers the yard around the house, the open spaces around the barn, and the ditches along the road. Most of the species are not native to Owl Acres, though. They’ve been introduced as forage species for cattle, or lawn species for the yard. Most of the […]

History

A group of Woolly Mammoths with long, curving tusks, treks across a snow-covered landscape. Glaciers in Iowa stopped in and near the Pleistocene habitat of these elephant-like animals.

Beneath My Feet Part 4: Layers of Ice

Updated January 23, 2023

It’s winter, so it’s not very hard to imagine ice and snow on Owl Acres. But it is hard to imagine thousands of feet of it, compressed into a gigantic glacier that stretches from here back north to the north pole. That’s what Owl Acres looked like though some 2.3 million years ago when the […]

History

An asteroid slams into tropical, shallow seas of the sulfur-rich Yucatan Peninsula in what is today southeast Mexico, precipitating the latest of the Five Mass Extinctions

Beneath My Feet Part 3: Layers of Life

Updated January 16, 2023

Back in the far ancient past, around 2 billion years ago, a supercontinent called Rodinia is thought to have formed. It started breaking up around 780 million years ago, but the core of it stayed together and in time became the Laurentian Craton. This mass of rock would eventually form the foundation of the continent […]

History

Animation of Pangea supercontinent breaking up into continental masses that move about the Earth's surface

Beneath My Feet Part 2: Layers of Time

Updated January 9, 2023

Owl Acres stands on a specific if tiny place on the earth’s surface. It can be measured in longitude, latitude and altitude coordinates and thus pinpointed precisely. With the help of satellites, my phone can give me those exact coordinates, and they would be unique to this very spot on the entire globe. But Owl […]

History

A blue and green ball is cut to show the layers of earth

Beneath My Feet Part 1: Layers of Earth

Updated January 2, 2023

When we were kids, playing in the mud, we used to dream about digging all the way to China. Wouldn’t that be fun? To escape through a tunnel into a completely different place? We didn’t realize, of course, that we’d end up in the Indian Ocean instead of among the Celestials. Our excavations never got […]

History