Driving across Iowa or even just through Mahaska County, we are witnesses to a landscape of change.

I often wonder how much of present day Iowa would be familiar to the Ioway Indians or even the early pioneers who once lived in this county.

Is the green growth we see all around this time of year natural to Iowa, or is it a condition we have created?  The native warm season grasses which grow in the tall grass prairie reconstruction behind the Conservation Center are, even now in early June, still dry dead stalks of last year’s growth.  The road ditches and fields around it have long since greened-up with the early growth of cool-season Eurasian species such as smooth brome, timothy, and clover.

The tall grass prairie ecosystem once covered 85% of Iowa and now 99.9 percent of it is gone.  In less than 100 years we’ve seen the total domination of our native vegetation by exotic species.

So what did Mahaska County look like to those early European settlers who arrived by horse and oxen-pulled wagons from the east?

One pioneer account from 1843 gives the following description: “The Narrows (the site of modern day Oskaloosa) where the timbers bordering on the Des Moines and the timbers bordering on the Skunk River were not more than a mile apart.  The timber and prairie are more evenly divided, there are no great patches of scrubby oak and hazel brush between the prairies and the main timber like there is near Salem, but the clean prairie extends up to the big timber and the trees stand out clear like an orchard.  There are a good many small streams and springs.

They say the reason there is so little brush along the edges of the timber is the Indians kept it burned off.  The Indians have just left there.  I saw Indian trails which looked like they had been used lately.” (Phillips)

The hundreds of trees now seen around Oskaloosa, mostly maples and evergreens of various species, stand where only grasses and wildflowers once grew.

Many of the plant species we are accustomed to seeing in our county today are pasture grasses planted intentionally by generations of Iowa farmers.  Plants such as Queen Anne’s lace and multiflora rose escaped cultivation and many weed species were just brought accidentally into Iowa.

Recent surveys indicate that at least 6,000 non-native plants have become established in the United States.  Many of these species thrive today because of the absence of one critical element in Iowa’s ecosystems-fire.  Fire was the prairies’s weapon against the armies of honey locust seedlings that tried to invade it each spring.

In an 1843 record of pioneer travels is found this passage: “After going through the woods bordering on Big Creek we came out on the open prairie and in sight of Mt. Pleasant.  The town stood out in bold relief and the country all around looked charming.  The prairies had been burned off, the grass was coming up and it had the appearance of a great smooth-mown lawn.”

Even by 1856 prairie fires were still prevalent in Mahaska County: “What great prairie fires we used to see out east between our house and Fremont.  There would seem to be a rim of fire miles and miles long.”

It seems that early pioneers as well as Iowa’s Indian tribes were using fire as a land management tool.  Quite a difference from today’s pervasive thinking that wildfires are something bad, something that needs to be put out quickly.

Fire also kept the forests clear of the thorny brush and iron wood saplings which choke our oak-hickory groves today and impeded the growth of the next generation of oaks.  Many of Iowa’s earliest pioneers first settled in the timbered hills and river bottoms where the terrain was more like their farms back east and the sod was more easily broken for planting.

Another reason is suggested in this early journal: “It may be supposed that the timber afforded some protection against those terrible conflagrations that occasionally swept across the prairies.  Though they often passed through the groves, it was not with the same destructive force.  By these fires much of the young timber is killed from time to time, and the forests kept thin and shrub less.  Since these fires have been kept out, our timber lands have become thickly set with new growth.” 

For many years after the settlement of Oskaloosa had sprung up, the surrounding prairie remained as pasture and was not plowed for crops.

In the summer of 1844 was written this description of the area: “I had a charming view of that wide expanse of unbroken, green, waving, undulating prairie.  After we had gone a few miles west we realized that we were in a place where, as far as we could see, no long string of oxen with massive plow had ever turned a furrow.  The tall bluestem grass, the yellow and purple prairie blossoms were being swayed to and fro by the mild August breeze.  We could see the Skunk River timber away off to the right of us, with now and then a point extending out toward that great mass of undisturbed grass and blossoms.”

Another early account describes a portion of Mahaska County lying to the southwest of Oskaloosa, called Six Mile Prairie.   “Six Mile Prairie was not all prairie, but bordered around and dotted here and there with some fine groves of timber, and the beautiful Des Moines River touches its southwestern limit, that grand and rich expanse of prairie on the border of that wide and clear and pebbly-bedded river.”

One glance at the Des Moines River today is all one needs to see that it is not “clear and pebbly-bottomed.”  It’s possible that it once was though, when the deep prairie roots held Iowa’s soil in place.  Now, when most of our ground is plowed year after year for more corn and beans, our fertile prairie topsoil erodes into the rivers and muddies the Des Moines as it moves seaward.

An early survey of Iowa’s prairie topsoil described it as “a black mould of vegetable formation, from eighteen inches to three feet deep.  There are also many small prairies along the streams, the black soil of which is four or five feet deep.”

According to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, today Mahaska County’s topsoil is an average of 7 to 8 inches deep.  It’s not hard to figure out why the rivers are muddy now.

For the early European settlers of Mahaska County the tall grass prairie uplands, oak savannas, and flood plain forests they encountered were a wilderness of such enormity, some thought it could never all be settled.

The landscape of Iowa however is one that was easily tamed, as seen in this account from the mid-nineteenth century: “The country between our place and the little village of Fremont, 10 miles east, was almost an unbroken expanse of prairie.  That 10 mile stretch of prairie which in 1856 we thought was going to be free pasture for flocks and herds for ages to come, was in the course of five or six years dotted over with farmhouses, groves, and young orchards.  Great fields of waving grain were to be seen where a short time before was a vast native meadow.  People who were called smart used to say that prairie would never be settled up; it was too flat, and another thing was, it was too far from timber.”

Even political decisions were made based on this belief, as found in the History of Mahaska County, Iowa, 1878: “A strong argument for locating the county-seat in the southern part of the county was that there was no likelihood that the present century would see the northern prairies of the county populated.”

Now of course those prairies are settled, and in doing so were destroyed.  Our county has changed dramatically in the past 150 years, but how many of us remember or were even aware of the original plant species in this area.

As Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac: “What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.”

Today, as you drive into Oskaloosa, if you use your imagination and squint your eyes just right, you can still see the Narrows, with its tall prairie grass waving in the breeze and far in the distance a wolf loping off into the timber.