Discovering the world around me.
Although the United States had purchased the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, Iowa was still considered Indian Territory. Land-hungry settlers moved inexorably across the woodlands of Ohio and Indiana into the Illinois prairies up to the Mississippi River. The river was a hard boundary, remaining in the nominal possession of the Sauk and Fox […]
Continue reading Settlement Part 1: Land Rush
The Meskwaki and Sauk people were driven from their ancestral home in northeastern Canada, through Massachusetts, to the Great Lakes, and eventually into Iowa by 1735. Until 1803, Iowa remained part of the territory claimed first by the French (1699-1762), then the Spanish (1762-1800), and then again, the French (1800-1803). In spite of what the […]
Continue reading Meskwaki Part 3: Removal and Return
The Meskwaki and Sauk tribes lived in Iowa during a period from about 1735 to 1845. They established villages on the Iowa and Des Moines rivers and hunted across Iowa. The eight acres that comprise Owl Acres today would have been a tiny part of the millions of acres they claimed as their hunting grounds […]
Continue reading Meskwaki Part 2: Woodland Culture
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. […]
Continue reading Meskwaki Part 1: Last of the Natives
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 […]
Continue reading Namesake: The Ioways
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 […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 5: Layers of Grass
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 […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 4: Layers of Ice
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 […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 3: Layers of Life
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 […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 2: Layers of Time
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 […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 1: Layers of Earth