Notes on Iowa

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On June 7, 1835, the 1st United States Dragoon took up a line of march through the Des Moines River Valley under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny. In the first major American military expedition up the Des Moines, the government tasked the Dragoons with documenting the lands that would become Iowa.

An expedition stretching over 1,100 miles from First Fort Des Moines Montrose on the Mississippi, up the confluence of the Boone River with the Des Moines, over to the village of Dakota leader Wabasha, and back to the Des Moines near the headwaters in modern-day Minnesota, roughly 160 men made the summer 1835 journey into the relatively unknown.

The Dragoons, mounted soldiers who fought on foot, were a forerunner of the more familiar cavalry of the late 1800s. Brought to Iowa to document lands, develop military forts, and enforce boundaries between overly eager settlers and Iowa’s Indigenous peoples, the Dragoons represented a key presence on the Iowa frontier.

Kearny’s men separated into three companies for the journey up the Des Moines. Additionally, five four-horse wagons and a herd of cattle accompanied the Dragoons across a landscape of bison-filled prairies, oak savannah, and slough, hard to imagine today. The commander of Company B, Lieutenant Albert Lea, recorded his observations of the journey in a little book called “Notes on the Wisconsin Territory, Particularly Pertaining to the Iowa District.”

You might notice a similarity between Lea’s book title and “Notes on Iowa,” and the cross-over is intentional. The “Notes on Iowa” project started with a 2021 walk across Iowa following the route of the 1835 Dragoons expedition. To learn more about the Dragoons, the walk across Iowa, and many other Iowa topics, check out the new book “Retracing the Dragoon Trail in Iowa.”

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On June 7, 1896, industrialist Vivien Kellems was born in Des Moines. She went on to use her company, her courtroom battles, and her public persona to question how far Washington could conscript private citizens into enforcing federal tax law.

By the late 1920s, Kellems had founded a cable grips manufacturing company, accumulated considerable wealth, and learned firsthand how war contracts, regulations, and tax rules shaped the fortunes of industrial firms. In January 1944, she refused to pay her federal income tax, a deliberate act that drew national attention and was framed by critics as unpatriotic in the midst of war.

Her best-known stand came in 1948 when she announced that she would no longer withhold federal income taxes from her employees’ wages, invited indictment to challenge the constitutionality of withholding, and used the resulting case and press coverage to build a grassroots movement of tax resisters who saw themselves as defenders of constitutional limits and individual liberty.

Over the following decades, she signed and mailed blank tax returns to protest what she described as discriminatory treatment of unmarried taxpayers, published a book, ran for office, and maintained a steady stream of speeches and commentary linking feminism, voting reform, and opposition to compulsory withholding.