Where Two Rivers Met: The Meskwaki and the Confluence

Stand at the point where the Raccoon River runs into the Des Moines River and you are standing at a site that has drawn people for a very long time. Long before a fort was staked here, long before a legislature convened here, the confluence of these two rivers was a meeting place and a crossroads for the peoples of the central prairies.

The Meskwaki, whose name translates roughly as the Red Earth People, along with the Sauk Nation, lived and hunted along these river valleys for generations. The Des Moines River itself takes its name from a French corruption, likely of Riviere des Moines, meaning River of the Monks, a reference to Trappist missionaries who had a presence in the region in the early eighteen hundreds, though some scholars have argued for alternative indigenous origins for the name. The river had been a highway through the tall-grass prairie long before French traders gave it a European label.

The confluence at present-day downtown Des Moines was a natural campsite, a place where travelers on foot or canoe could resupply, fish, and shelter. When American soldiers arrived in eighteen forty-three to establish a garrison, they were not discovering empty land. They were occupying a place that indigenous peoples had used for generations.

The Meskwaki, unlike many native nations, never fully ceded their presence in Iowa. After being pushed west of the Missouri River following the treaty of eighteen forty-two, a group of Meskwaki individuals purchased eighty acres near Tama, Iowa, in eighteen fifty-seven, an act believed to be unique in American history, a native community buying land back within a state that had expelled them. Their settlement, still called the Meskwaki Settlement, endures today.

The two rivers at downtown Des Moines still meet at the same bend. The confluence is visible from the pedestrian bridges near the Western Gateway. It was the reason anyone came here in the first place.