Iowa Almanac
Iowa Almanac -- Thursday, August 15, 2024
The neutral ground. More from the Iowa Almanac in a moment. Aloha! Attached at the island! Right here in Iowa. Hi there. Andy Peterson, joined Gary Dolphin and I as we host the annual Tate and Dotty Cummins Memorial Pineapple Gala to benefit Camp Courageous. It's Friday, August 16th at 6 p.m. at the Double Creek Convention Center in downtown Cedar Rapids. Enjoy a Hawaiian dinner, live in South auction and more. To view auction items or for tickets simply go to Camp Courageous.org and we'll see you there! Before 1830, the land that is now Iowa was in full possession of two Native American tribes, the Sax and the Foxes. North of their territory, in what is now Minnesota, the Sioux tribe hunted. The Sax and Foxes were constantly at war with the Sioux, and since formal boundaries were unknown to them, there were frequently bloody conflicts when one crossed into what the other thought was their territory. Various efforts to secure peace were attempted by the US government, including drawing boundaries, but those lines were not followed by either tribe very closely. On August 15th, 1830, the United States bought a strip of land 20 miles wide from the Sioux along the southern edge of their land. The government bought another 20 mile wide strip of land from the Sax and Fox along the northern edge of their land. This 40 mile wide buffer was called the neutral ground. Both tribes could hunt and fish in the area, provided they did not fight or interfere with each other since this land was now under the direct control of the federal government. The neutral ground stretched from Prairie Dushin, Wisconsin, southwest to Fort Dodge, Iowa. It's hard to tell if it would have worked, since just three years later the federal government used the neutral ground as a place to move members of the Winnebago tribe, displaced from their ancestral home in Wisconsin. But it was an attempt to bring peace between two tribes when the United States established a neutral ground to separate the 2nd Fox and the Sioux on this date in 1830. And that's Iowa Almanac for August 15th. Follow us on Twitter @IowaAlmanac. Until tomorrow, I'm Jeff Stein.