The Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Rivers That Frame Iowa

Iowa is the only state in the contiguous forty-eight whose eastern and western borders are both defined almost entirely by rivers. On the east, the Mississippi. On the west, the Missouri. Between them lies a wedge of high rolling ground, draining south through the Des Moines, the Iowa, the Cedar, the Skunk, and dozens of smaller streams into one great river or the other.

The Mississippi is the older border and the bigger presence in Iowa's history. It was the avenue of arrival for the first American settlers, who came by steamboat from St. Louis and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh starting in the eighteen thirties. Dubuque, the oldest city in Iowa, grew from a lead-mining camp on the Mississippi's west bank. By the eighteen fifties, the great river cities of Davenport, Burlington, Keokuk, and Muscatine had become Iowa's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan towns, connected by water to the whole arc of American commerce.

The Missouri is lower, muddier, more volatile, and historically less navigable than the Mississippi. It forms Iowa's border with Nebraska and South Dakota and has always marked the edge of something: the edge of the tallgrass prairie, the edge of the agricultural heartland, the beginning of the drier shortgrass plains beyond. Council Bluffs, Iowa's major western city, grew precisely because it sat on the east bank of the Missouri, directly across from what would become Omaha, Nebraska, at the point where travelers heading west had to cross the river and commit to the Plains.

The rivers are still the margins of Iowa's imagination. Drive to either edge of the state and you feel it: the land drops toward water, the landscape changes, and you understand that you are standing at a boundary between one version of America and the next.