by Alex Wagner
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Iowa, my father’s birthplace, was impossibly Rockwellian. His portrait of home was a simple triptych: family, church, and community. Here was a place where children carried hot baked potatoes in their hands to keep warm and belly-full during wintertime, where the mailman (my grandfather) knew each and every home, where neighborhood children played stickball in the twilight hours of summer and sat down to home-cooked meals of steak and corn each night. It was hard to imagine unwrapping this golden folklore to find some molten core of hidden identity.
Our family weren’t farmers, exactly, but, as my father told it, much of his home life revolved around food: the growing, harvesting, cooking, and eating of it. With six children, a stay-at-home mother, and only a mail carrier’s salary to support them all, much of what the family ate was from the land.
In the sizable kitchen garden and orchard, herbs and vegetables and fruits were grown: endive and cabbage and potatoes, dill and thyme, peaches and apples. There was a summer kitchen where the food they grew was pickled and canned or made into jams. My grandmother rendered her own lard and fried doughnuts in it on Sunday. She baked her own pies and breads—bread purchased at the grocery store was designated specifically as “store-bought” and consumed with a certain amount of disdain. Meat came from the local butcher, but even in that transaction there was an old-timey element of the personal: A phone call from the butcher shop would alert my grandmother to the fact that a pig had just been slaughtered and would she like some pork chops? In these retellings, stories that I grew up with and could recite like they were my own, you could smell the scents wafting from the family dinner table…and they were delicious.
As for my great-grandfather Henry Wagner, the man who had brought the Wagner family name to the shores of the United States from the Old World, the very reason our clan was able to spread its seed in the land of opportunity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there was remarkably little to share. When I asked my father about Henry, he replied, uncharacteristically stingy in his recollection, “I have no memory of my grandfather at all. I’m not even sure I was alive when he was.” (Turns out he wasn’t.) The only memory he could conjure about my great-grandmother—Henry’s wife, Anna—was her death. “My father came home,” my dad explained. “It was a cold day and his glasses were all steamed up. And he was crying.”
From the evidence I’d heard thus far, I imagined Henry Wagner to have been a sort of stern character. From photos, he had a thatch of white hair and a formidable, do-not-fuck-with-me mustache—the kind of facial hair that meant business, not irony. (I enjoyed the fact that I was vaguely scared of him; it gave our family history a sense of weight.)
When the Jewish Theory presented itself, I hatched a hypothesis that Henry had been an educated Luxembourger who’d had reason to flee the Old Country with only the savings he could carry on his person, driven by scandal or necessity or curiosity to the shores of America, where he started over—never once looking back. He was a mirthless and highly focused man (probably) who had no time for remorse or nostalgia, and when he arrived in a state filled with Christians, well then, he decided to become one, too. Not because he was scared of being singled out or otherwise intimidated for his Judaism, but because to be Christian was to make a pragmatic break with the old and assume full membership in the new. This theorizing was held on tenterhooks—but this is the outline I drew for myself, eager to fill in corroborating details.
What my father did recall with clarity were details about his grandparents’ home. Henry was known as a businessman and “a merchant.” He owned a local establishment on Main Street, Wagner’s Bar and Grocery (of course), a small market with an adjacent saloon. In the bar, someone had painted a big mural of people wasted in a tavern, toasting one another with steins of ale. It was framed in mahogany, my dad explained, traces of wonderment still evident in his recollection, “and there was a big, long beautiful bar.”
Henry and his wife lived in a “really big house.” My father, not usually one known to notice home décor, offered that there were lace curtains and real silver for dining, “very nice” plates and crystal glasses. A formal dining table, chairs, and—hanging on one wall—a portrait of Henry in bow tie and suit. “He was very dignified,” said my father. “Henry and Anna were very European.” By way of an aside—or a clarification—or maybe both, he added, “It never occurred to me that I was from the working class, or different from the banker.”
If my father had been insulated from the discomforts of class consciousness, something similar was apparently the case with race. “There were no people of color in Lansing—none,” he told me. “A handful of Native Americans were the most ethnic people in town. The only person of color I saw before college was the dry cleaner. [He] was an African American man, and I remember being sort of struck by it. He was an incredibly nice guy,” my father noted, “and my mother liked him a lot. But we never talked about race.” I raised an eyebrow when my father said this—I’ve found in my adult life that it’s always a little iffy when someone white finds the only person of color (a person in some sort of servile position, no less!) “incredibly nice.”
In fact, he went out of his way to tell me that if Lansing had a persecuted population, it wasn’t based on skin color or religion. In the wake of the First and Second World Wars, “the pressure put on people not to emphasize their German origins was tremendous,” he explained. His father, Carl Wagner, Sr., was a rural mail carrier, and “there were numerous people who corresponded in German. Dad could read it because he spoke it as a kid.” But with the advent of war, speaking German became “one hell of a liability. And there was also a very subtle anti-Catholicism. I used to think of myself as being a minority.”
In this town, at this moment, my father would have me believe that the outcasts were more likely to be the German-speaking Catholics than the only Jewish family or the single black guy cleaning laundry. How was that for an ethnic alley-oop?! Here I was, assuming that the all-white denizens of Any Town, Iowa, would secretly harbor ill will for the traditionally persecuted: the Jews or the black people. But it turned out that that wasn’t really an issue: It was the Germans who got the sneers and sideways glances. Could it have really been this way? It would be a relief to believe that we weren’t implicated in the country’s foundational racist crimes: slavery, Jim Crow, anti-Semitism. It also seemed pretty unlikely.
After all, how could we have managed to reap all this—the bounty of America, with its peaches and dill and freedom—without extracting some price, taking something away from someone? Did the universe simply act with benevolence in the case of my father’s wholesome family, imparting gifts with no blood or plunder? My father explained Henry’s choice of Iowa as his destination because, “They were giving land away: forty acres if you could farm it. The land was free.”
Here it was, the snag. The unseen “they.” How had “they” acquired the land they so freely gave away? I knew that Henry Wagner arrived in Iowa somewhere in the 1870s or ’80s, but I had no idea what he found upon arrival—and I had already learned that the most interesting (read: complicating) truths were to be found in those snags. I set out to determine where, exactly, this land came from.
Lansing, Iowa, is in the farthest northeast quadrant of the state, situated in Allamakee County. On the east the county is bounded by the Mississippi River, and to the north it’s hemmed in by the state of Minnesota. The first Iowa history book I consulted had a fairly matter-of-fact explanation about how the area came to be settled by the Germans and Irish and Norwegians of the mid-nineteenth century: “Allamakee was long held as a peaceful hunting land over which hostile Indians pursued the chase without collisions. It was given to the Winnebago Indians in 1833, when they were forced to surrender their Wisconsin homes.”1
“Forced to surrender” didn’t sound very good—in fact, it sounded possibly terrible, and so I began looking
into histories about the Native Americans in Iowa to find out how the Winnebago ended up in Allamakee County—and what happened to them once they got there.
Flush with manifest destiny, the country was emboldened in the early part of the nineteenth century by a populist, racist Democrat named Andrew Jackson. Jackson, known popularly as “Old Hickory,” was a hero in the War of 1812, a successful lawyer, an unapologetic slave owner, a founder of the Democratic Party, a destroyer of the Second Bank of the United States, and a guiding hand behind the forced removal and displacement of tens of thousands of Native Americans from their home soil. In his most famous decision, Jackson—who had been greatly aided by the Cherokee against the Creek at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814—nonetheless ordered the forced removal of fifteen thousand Cherokee from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi so that American settlers could have sole dominion over the land. In so doing, President Jackson defied a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that had affirmed Cherokee sovereignty, and set a deadly precedent for the treatment of Native Americans elsewhere in the country. The expulsion of these Cherokee—as well as several other tribes of native peoples—and their long, forced march westward, was known as the Trail of Tears: Nearly four thousand Cherokee lost their lives along the way, felled by disease, exhaustion, and starvation.
Up in the Midwest, under Jackson’s guidance, the U.S. government in 1829 negotiated with representatives of several tribes2 the sale of eight million acres of land extending from the upper end of Rock Island, Illinois, to the mouth of the Mississippi—lands that are now most of Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota.3 In some cases, the federal government made these kinds of agreements with tribal leaders who were more receptive to the idea of land cessation, and (according to certain historians) more receptive to bribes, as well.4 The sale of this land resulted in a massive expulsion of native people from their ancestral homelands—and it was, not surprisingly, a deal that few were happy with.
Here’s a letter from Potawatomi chief Senacheewane to Jackson:
Father, we wish to be shaded by one tree. The black cloud has long since disappeared—and we were in hopes it should never return. It is, Father, in your hand to keep it off, to let the Influence of that great tree keep us in unity & friendship. To go away from our home is hard. But to be driven off without any hopes of finding home again is hard to think of, and the thought is equal to death. You do not know, Father, our situation and if you did you would pity us, for these very same woods that once made our delight, have now become the woods of danger. The river where we once paddled our canoes uncontrolled, has now become the river of alarm and of blood. Several of my young men have been killed by your white children & nothing has been done to cover the dead.
Father—we cannot go away. This is our land, this is our home, we sooner die. Come Father, speak to us, and we shall try to please you.
I am done.
May the great Spirit above give you health and a long life—is the wish of all your red children.
I speak for my people—who are many.5
The Winnebago Indians back then were known as the Ho-Chunk Nation, for Hochungra, meaning “People of the Big Voice.” As part of that massive sale of tribal land,6 the Ho-Chunk were forced to give up nearly a third of their land for $540,000 dollars7 (payable in thirty annual installments) to make way for miners who had their eyes on the territory, especially the mines in southeastern Wisconsin—though that didn’t put an end to encroachment and hostilities.
Certain factions of the Winnebago remained resistant even after that sale, splitting with the rest of their tribe and taking up arms to reclaim their land in the Black Hawk War of 1832. When they lost, the Winnebago were forced to cede remaining homeland in Wisconsin in exchange for “neutral ground” in Iowa (plus $270,000 in twenty-seven annual payments). This “neutral ground” was a forty-mile-wide “buffer zone” in the northeast part of the state, where the feds insisted that the tribe would have protection from predatory settlers, frontier hustlers, and other warring tribes. The government assured skeptical tribespeople that they would be relocated to “better lands” when those became available. (They never did become available.)8 In the meantime, America set about “civilizing” the Winnebago children in Indian schools.
That so-called neutral ground included what is now Allamakee County—and it was hardly neutral. The Winnebago were forced onto territory that was being battled over by the Sauk and Fox tribes (also known by their tribal name, the Meskwaki), and their common enemy, the Sioux. While the Winnebago had ancestral bloodlines that linked them to the Sioux, they were effectively people without a home, caught between warring factions, and unsafe in their new territory. I read this and was reminded of Senacheewane’s plea: “To be driven off without any hopes of finding home again is hard to think of, and the thought is equal to death.”
Some resisted this forced exile and traveled to Washington, D.C., to make their case in 1837. Tribal elders purposefully sent representatives who weren’t designated to sign treaties, as a sort of insurance policy against crappy deals. It didn’t work. The representatives were told they couldn’t leave Washington without signing a treaty—one that would give away the rest of the Winnebago lands. It didn’t matter that these particular tribal signatures were meaningless, nor did it matter that the feds said they’d give the tribe eight years to pack up and move out. In the end, the Winnebago were allowed only eight months to relocate. I thought of Senacheewane again: “Father—we cannot go away. This is our land, this is our home, we sooner die.”
This chapter took a deadly toll—standard operating practice, as far as the history of Native Americans was concerned. What happened to the Winnebago is what happened to the Cherokee and Seminole, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw. In 1829, the Winnebago were estimated to number 5,800. By 1837, that population was reported to be 4,500—smallpox had killed off nearly a quarter of them.9 Less than two decades later, in 1855, the tribe numbered only 2,754. A quarter century of warring, negotiation, settlement, and expulsion had failed to yield any redemption for the People of the Big Voice.
Offering a grim assessment of the times, a resident and writer by the name of Alexander Fulton concluded:
Contact with our civilization seems to have wrought only misfortune and disaster to this once proud and independent tribe. The large amount of money annually paid them by the government attracted about them many mercenary white traders and liquor-dealers, and they were subjected to the temptations usual under such circumstances. Many of them became dissipated, and in consequence of the mortality induced by drunkenness, sickness and disease, we find them, in 1855 diminished. When the Winnebagoes first became known to the whites, they were described as of good stature, noble and dignified bearing, and as having straight black hair, piercing black eyes, and superior mental capacity. Contact with civilization seems not to have improved them, either mentally or physically.10
Decimated in number, diseased in body, broken in heart and soul, the Winnebago, who whites saw as a threat to their westward expansion, had been violently contained. By 1846, the tribe was uprooted yet again, moved out of neutral ground and over to Minnesota. Not surprisingly, the first white settlements in Allamakee County were established somewhere around this time. The town of Lansing was claimed and settled in June 1848.
The Homestead Act of 1862 opened up the great expanse of the American West to white settlement—and Allamakee County was no exception. If the fight to claim this land had been bloody and protracted, the process by which it was given away was, ironically, remarkably easy for most Americans (excepting, of course, native people, who weren’t considered citizens until 1926). Even immigrants could claim their acreage, provided they swore their allegiance to the United States, swore they were no longer faithful to whichever king or queen had once ruled their dominion, and further swore they would obtain proper American citizenship within five years.
All th
at swearing aside, the relative facility of this process was remarkable—the inherent generosity of giving away land, even to, ahem, illegals! (From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, in the gust and swirl of the roaring debate over immigration, it is nearly impossible to imagine any president ordering American land to be given away to “illegals,” refugees, or the undocumented.)
The Homestead Act was passed during the Civil War—and one of the driving forces behind it was slavery. Earlier attempts to parcel out western lands were met with resistance from Southerners, who feared the rise of small farmers on free land was a threat to their way of life: plantation slavery. What if the opening up of the West attracted anti-slavery Europeans or poor Southern whites? Many Northerners, meanwhile, wanted to ensure that the practice of slavery ended in the South and aimed to prevent it from corrupting the westward expanse of the United States, precisely by populating it with small farms owned by free persons, rather than wealthy landowners with slaves. (Not all Northerners were fans of this plan, however; some were concerned that the parceling out of free land would drain their factories of cheap labor.)
Anyway, there were several failed attempts to pass a homestead act, most of which were scuttled in Congress by the Southern states—until they seceded from the Union and departed the legislature. Once that happened, Lincoln was free to pass the law sans Southern resistance—and did.
So what did all this American bounty mean for the slaves themselves? My father had mentioned the lone black dry cleaner in town—shouldn’t there have been black-owned businesses sprouting up all over the Midwest once it was opened to homesteading and closed to slavery? Indeed, under the Homestead Act, and once the Civil War ended, former slaves were technically able to claim parcels of land for themselves. And with a southern landscape where racism and violence remained the order of the day, no doubt the West seemed enticing. But to migrate hundreds or thousands of miles required resources and networks that many newly freedmen and -women didn’t have—and so some were forced to stay put and work (for wages, this time) in service of those who had once enslaved them.