Background Information On Albert M. Lea's Trip Through Eastern Iowa
A hundred years ago the area that now constitutes the state of Iowa was
a prairie wilderness. Indeed, the name Iowa had not yet been applied to
this territory or any part of it. Only the Indians and fur traders knew
the country between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The inhabitants
of the scattered settlements along the Mississippi may have been looking
west, but their vision extended only a few miles. No accurate information
about the geography of the interior was available. To be sure the eastern
and western borders had been explored years before and the general course
of the principal rivers was known; but the land had not been carefully
mapped. Sometimes even Indian guides lost their way.
During the summer of 1835 Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney was
ordered to conduct a military expedition through this region for the purpose
of learning more about it….he was instructed to proceed up the Des
Moines valley with three companies of dragoons from his newly established
quarters called Fort Des Moines on the site of the present town of Montrose.
The dragoons departed on June 7, 1835, and returned to Fort Des Moines
on August 19th, after an arduous but successful tour of eleven hundred
miles over the unexplored prairies of the interior.
Accompanying Kearny on this expedition was Albert Miller Lea, a young
dragoon lieutenant. Lea kept complete notes on the journey, upon the basis
of which he drafted a map of the country traversed by the expedition of
1835….
From: "Iowa in 1835," by William J. Petersen, The
Palimpsest, March 1935, pp. 87-102.
Use by permission of the State Historical Society of Iowa.
Primary Source Documents On Albert M. Lea
Following his 1835 journey through Iowa, he also wrote a
memoir of his journey and later published
his Notes on the Wisconsin Territory; Particularly
with Reference to the Iowa District, or the Black Hawk Purchase.
These documents provide an abundance of information about Iowa in 1835
in the actual words of Albert M. Lea.
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