Traveling Iowa by plane, train and ox-drawn wagon

The last time I entered Iowa, was across the Mississippi River from Illinois.

My wife read aloud from a travel book about Paris as we planned a future trip. I glanced at the river architecture.

Around any bridge crossing the Father of Waters, clumps of businesses and homes cling to the hillside. Take a road along the shore, and you'll find houses and boat docks hugging the waterway.

Much of the river has been converted by locks and dams into what essentially are lakes, reducing the number of and severity of floods.

I wonder if a fur trader or American Indian who canoed down the Mississippi 200 years ago still would recognize the river. Do enough landmarks along Iowa's eastern edge retain their appearance from when it was merely wilderness in the French empire?

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The river acted as a barrier in those days. But it didn't keep settlers in search of untried country and dreams from crossing it, usually by ox- or horse-drawn over frozen ice or via ferry.

Judge Eugene Criss, the father of Sac City, was one such man. In the winter of 1855, he left Wisconsin and began a settlement on the North Raccoon River. The spot had the distinct advantage of being able to provide waterpower.

Criss wisely established a hotel, stage station and general store in what one day would become Sac City. A 14 by 17 feet log house, The Criss Hotel was expanded in 1857 to seven rooms. Travelers considered it the best lodgings between Fort Dodge and Sioux City.

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Having breached the mighty Mississippi, many settlers stayed close to water so they could get around. Considering modern cars, ATV's, trains, bicycles and airplanes, their reliance on boats strike me as a bit myopic. But it was practical.

So practical - and myopic - in fact, that during the mid 1800s the state erected a series of locks and dams along the Des Moines River to encourage steamboat travel.

Bentonsport was the site of Lock and Dam No. 6. During its heyday, Bentonsport boasted a population of more than 1,000 as town mills and the tourism industry boomed.

In 1870, the railroad displaced steamboat traffic. By decade's end, a flood knocked Bentonsport dam over. Today, about 40 people reside there.

Many of them rely on a newly created tourism industry that celebrates those Victorian days. The tourists get there by road.

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The railroad, unlike Iowa's diagonal and shallow rivers, could take settlers directly west. And the key to any settlement's success not only was waterpower but if it could boast a railroad stop.

Judge Samuel L. Lorah, was smart enough to see this. When the Audubon branch line of the Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Rail-road came near his house, he platted a village. The community, named after him, featured a post office, bank, general store, blacksmith shop, grain elevator and a train station. It largely served area farmers.

The arrival of the Model T and roads gave people a certain independence, however. Train schedules and routes became as restrictive as river depth and bed.

As in so many rural communities, farmers and villagers drove to more populous towns that offered larger product lines and services.

Lorah's last grocery store burned in the 1940s, and the grain elevator was torn down in the 1960s. The town had seen its day.

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Another western Iowa town facing a parallel fate in the mid 20th century was Shelby. The Rock Island Railroad left Shelby after constructing a short cut from Council Bluffs and Atlantic, saving 17 miles of winding route.

Only Shelby's size relative to other rural towns kept it from entirely declining as Lorah had.

In the 1970s, however, Interstate 80 connected Des Moines to Omaha. It passed by Shelby.

These days, travelers take the freeway's exit ramps into town for food, fuel and rest. Visitors stop to see Shelby's famed purple martins, the Carsten's Farm that demonstrates agricultural methods of the 1880s and a park featuring prairie grass.

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I didn't need to drive to the Missouri River on my last trip but did pull off on a freeway ramp into Coralville. As doing so, a jet circled in a holding pattern for the Eastern Iowa Airport while a small Cessna descended for a runway south of Iowa City. The radio newscaster read about when NASA officials thought the space shuttles would be back in orbit.

My wife asked if I intended to use the computer that night.

I shook my head, asked why.

There was a Web site on the Louvre listed in the guidebook, she said. We could do virtual tours of the great museum via the Internet.

She planned to travel the world in the comfort of our own home.

(originally published July 27, 2003)