Council Bluffs

By Dr. Richard Warner and Ryan Roenfeld

All traces of Captain Caldwell s Potawatomi settlement and the Mormon safe haven of Kanesville were gone from the Indian Creek hollow by 1900, when Council Bluffs already seemed a 20th-century city of bright lights, steam, and smokestacks. The old western trails and steamboats disappeared as the city on the east bank of the Missouri River opposite Omaha became a major American railroad center and the industrial and commercial hub of southwest Iowa. Vineyards and orchards surrounded a growing city, with more acres under glass for greenhouses than anywhere else in the country and a daily stop for the Zephyr, Hiawatha, Rocket, Challenger, and other streamlined passenger trains. The West End was filled in, and new neighborhoods like Danetown and Little Vienna grew with new immigrants. All of the people of Council Bluffs faced fires, floods, and tornados as the Blue Denim City, where America s mail was sorted survived economic upheaval, urban renewal, and eventual resurgence in the last decade of the century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Oct 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781439647981

Dr. Richard Warner

Images of America: Council Bluffs presents images from the Historical Society of Pottawattamie County that illustrate the people and places in the evolution of the modern city. Dr. Richard Warner is a dentist in Council Bluffs, and Ryan Roenfeld is a local historian.

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INTRODUCTION

At the start of the 20th century, there were almost 26,000 people in Council Bluffs, the oldest and largest city in southwest Iowa, and not even 60 years had passed since Capt. Billy Caldwell died of cholera at his home somewhere along what is now East Broadway. Caldwell’s father was Scotch-Irish and his mother was Mohawk, and he had earned his military rank from the English as part of the Canadian Indian Department during the War of 1812 while fighting American expansion. He became the first justice of the peace at Chicago and served as spokesman for Potawatomi interests since the 1830s, when they relinquished northern Illinois and the Wisconsin woods for the wide-open prairies of southwest Iowa with its jagged loess hills and swampy sloughs near the shifting and sandy Missouri River.

The Potawatomi found themselves strangers in this new western land of bluestem grass that grew eight feet or more tall that was previously claimed by the Otoe, Omaha, and Ioway Nations, whose relations with these newcomers from the East, and with each other, was not always the friendliest. The Potawatomi’s insistence that all their annuities be paid in silver, not blankets and trade goods, was long a thorn in the side of American interests until four years after Caldwell’s death, when a delegation went to Washington, DC, to demand fair compensation. They did not get what they wanted, but the next year a treaty was signed at the home of Metis interpreter Joseph Laframboise at Trader’s Point near the mouth of Mosquito Creek, where the Potawatomi finally agreed to relocate to a new reservation in what is now Kansas. The log cabins and wikiups of Caldwell’s Potawatomi town alongside Indian Creek had disappeared decades before 1900, and even the sheltering bluffs had been cut back for fill.

Likewise long gone by 1900 were the cottonwood cabin remnants of Mormon Kanesville that was first established in 1848 near the old Potawatomi town. The Mormons had already been driven out of Missouri in 1838 under the infamous extermination order of the state’s governor, and the unique American religious sect faced a similar situation less than a decade later in Illinois. They abandoned their town of Nauvoo after their prophet Joseph Smith was killed and fled west along the muddy Mormon Trail across Iowa to find a new refuge along the Missouri River. Those were the days of polygamy and religious schisms when Nebraska was still Indian Territory and Brigham Young was named head of the church in a log tabernacle later reconstructed on East Broadway during the 1990s. After the California Gold Rush swept through in 1849, the pious community was turned upside down with hardened gamblers and tenderfoot suckers eager to see the elephant both wanting to strike it rich any way they could. After the Mormons mostly left west for Salt Lake City in 1852, the population of the community plummeted into boom and bust with every spring rush west across the Great Plains, while the remaining residents decided to rename Kanesville as Council Bluffs City, at least until the Iowa Legislature decided to shorten it.

There was money in speculation and steamboats from St. Louis in the days when Broadway was lined with hotels and saloons that never closed. The owners of the Council Bluffs Ferry Company across the Missouri River were quick to establish a new town they originally dubbed Omaha City when Nebraska Territory was first opened to American settlement in 1854. It was the Council Bluffs Ferry Company that donated a brick statehouse for use as the first capitol of Nebraska Territory that then stretched west to what is now Wyoming and Montana. It was the Council Bluffs Ferry Company that platted Scriptown to hand out lots as bribes to newly elected territorial legislators, almost all of whom lived in Iowa or Missouri, to vote for Omaha as the territorial capital and ensure the future success of their new real estate venture. Among the many complaints downriver in other rival Nebraska towns also recently founded was that all of the real business of the territory was run out of Council Bluffs, where the acting governor of Nebraska Territory, Thomas Cuming, lived with his wife at the Pacific House Hotel at West Broadway and Pearl Street. The hotel was owned by Col. Sam Bayliss, who was, of course, one of the founders of the Council Bluffs Ferry Company.

The city limits of Council Bluffs were expanded in 1857 all the way west to the banks of the Missouri River. The next year, in a sign of times to come, a Council Bluffs railroad convention was held to organize the Council Bluffs & St. Joseph Railroad. It was founded to build a railroad line from Council Bluffs south along the river to Missouri, but economics soon brought it all to a halt. The Panic of 1857 had already crashed the economy, as the wild cat banks of Nebraska Territory that printed their own currency without regard for deposits all went bankrupt, and then the Pikes Peak Rush swept through to move the American frontier from the Missouri River west to the front range of the Rocky Mountains, where a new town called Denver appeared. Abraham Lincoln paid a visit to Council Bluffs in 1859, staying at the Pacific House and discussing plans for a transcontinental railroad with a young surveyor from Putnamville, Massachusetts, named Grenville Dodge. A few years later, after Lincoln was elected president, he made the transcontinental railroad a reality with the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. The Civil War brought strife in the streets of Council Bluffs, where Unionists, Copperheads, German and Irish immigrants, farmers, confidence men, and Army deserters all tried to find their own place while Dodge organized a military company that marched south to war, eventually being promoted to major general. The promise of the railroads remained strong, and in 1863 the Union Pacific held its ground-breaking ceremonies on the banks of the river in Omaha as the transcontinental railroad began building west with ties cut from the woods north of Council Bluffs. Grenville Dodge was named chief engineer of the new Union Pacific and was tasked with locating the best route west across the Great Plains and through the Rocky Mountains that was also the most profitable for the railroad’s