Excerpt from Iowa, Vol. 1: Its History and Its Foremost Citizens; Home and School Edition A purpose long under consideration has at last taken form in a history of Iowa written from the viewpoint of personality. - a history the aim of which is to show the extent to which great minds - minds possessed of vision, ambition, initiative, - developed a sparsely inhabited wilderness, with undreamt of resources and possibilities, into a great commonwealth set apart on the map as "Iowa." Here is an area of 56,000 square miles, lying between the upper Mississippi and the Missouri, over which for centuries there roamed the savage descendants, or conquerors, of an ancient civilization, - mere nomads with only a traditional past and without thought of the future beyond provision for their immediate necessities and the treasuring of tribal hatred and revenges. The Indian preemptors of this region hunted and fished and fought and died and left behind then? a scarcely more authentic memorial of their existence than we have of their contemporaries, the elk and the buffalo. But for the oncoming of the while man, Iowa would today be little if any further advanced toward the dreams and ideals of a world-civilization than it was in that far-off summer of 1673, when the pioneer priest and the intrepid explorer, floating down the Wisconsin and out into the Mississippi, feasted their vision on "the beautiful land." The superficial Chesterfield saw in history "only a confused heap of facts"; but the thoughtful student of history cannot fail to find that the social and political movements of his own time have sprung from roots deeply buried in the past. The greatest fact in history is the Great Man - the man in whom are happily combined broad vision, well-directed purpose, forceful yet tactful initiative, and unabating industry. Regarded from this viewpoint. Iowa has been fortunate in her history. The first white man known to have set foot upon her soil was a missionary imbued with a great purpose; and piloting him was a voyageur with an absorbing passion for discovery. Adventurers floated past her eastern boundary but saw no promise in mere land, however fertile it might prove to be. Fur traders penetrated her inland streams but remained no longer than was necessary to possess the treasures of the chase. Then came the soldier-explorers, investigators, and defenders of savage weakness against savage strength, - Kearny. Albert Lea, Fremont, Street, and Allen, who separately invaded the interior, not to destroy and lay waste, but to conserve, to build up. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.