Floodgap Roadgap's Summer of 6 -- U.S. Highway 6, Part 24: US 6 in Iowa (Des Moines to Iowa City; Jasper, Poweshiek, Iowa and Johnson Counties)

Jasper county was established in 1846 and is named for Sergeant William Jasper, a Revolutionary War soldier who distinguished himself in the defense of Fort Moultrie, South Carolina by holding the state flag on a temporary staff after it had been shot away by a British ship, maintaining it under fire until a new staff was placed. He was later mortally wounded during an assault on British forces during the Siege of Savannah, Georgia, in 1779; as in Fort Moultrie, he held the regimental standard in safety, this time until his death. The county has 37,147 residents [2019] with its county seat and largest city at Newton.

I-80/US 6

Poweshiek county was established in 1843 and named for Meskwaki/Fox Indian chief Wabokieshiek, born Poweshiek around 1794, who was one of the signatories to the treaty ending the 1832 Black Hawk War. The Fox and Sauk/Sac tribes were and are closely related, and two federally recognized Sac-and-Fox tribes have reservations today. The modern county has 18,699 residents [2018] and its county seat in Grinnell.

The Black Hawk War was the result of Sauk/Sac chief Black Hawk attempting to quietly resettle former tribal land ceded by the disputed Treaty of St. Louis. His so-called "British Band" of Sauks and other allied tribes was noticed by U.S. officials who erroneously believed they were belligerent, opened fire, and provoked a counterattack in the Battle of Stillman's Run. The war was complex, involving shifting alliances with Ho-Chunk/Winnebago and Potawatomi bands who took advantage of the conflict to settle scores with the white Americans, other bands who allied with the Americans to settle their own intertribal disputes, and still other Indian bands even within the same tribes who sought to avoid direct confrontation. It also featured a who's-who of future American politicians in Army service including Jefferson Davis, Zachary Taylor and even Abraham Lincoln, though he never actually saw combat. After around four months of repeated clashes the U.S. Army managed to successfully prosecute a war of attrition culminating in the Battle of Bad Axe, in which many of the tribal remnants were killed and most of the rest imprisoned.

Black Hawk and Wabokieshiek managed to elude capture initially but a passing Ho-Chunk man spotted their party and his chief convinced them to surrender. On August 27, 1832, both men signed the document of surrender on behalf of their respective tribes. They were generally treated well and received as celebrities on the East Coast, which they were obliged to tour to demonstrate the futility of further resistance against U.S. western expansion. They were honoured guests at dinners and plays and even a military parade, though Western crowds were less welcoming and some burned and hanged effigies in protest.

Multiple memorials today stand to Black Hawk in particular, whose 1833 oral interview with a newspaper reporter became the first published Native American autobiography, and he became a symbol of tribal resistance admired even by his former tribal enemies. Indeed, the war was so identified with Native American resistance despite its relatively brief length that it drove the national policy of Indian removal forward at greater urgency. The Fox and Sac tribes were eventually compelled to sell about 6 million acres in eastern Iowa of their former range, leaving Iowa completely by 1842; even the Potawatomi bands, who as a whole had generally allied with the United States, sold the entirety of their lands east of the Mississippi River in 1833. Wabokieshiek was released from custody in June 1833 in Wisconsin and his tribe lived in diminished standing until his death in 1841 in obscurity.

Iowa county is named for the Iowa River, which in turn is named for the state, and is one of seven in the United States that shares its name with the state it exists in (the others again being Arkansas, Hawai'i, Idaho, New York, Oklahoma and Utah, which we first passed through in Part 6). One of Iowa's original counties when established in 1843, it has 16,141 residents [2018] with its seat at Marengo.

Johnson county was (originally) named for Richard Mentor Johnson, the ninth vice-president of the United States under Martin Van Buren, and the only vice-president elected by the Senate under the 12th Amendment. His political aspirations were limited by idiosyncratic personal behaviour and his openly conducted interracial relationship with Julia Chinn, a mixed-race slave whom he treated as a common law wife and acknowledged their two daughters as his. He became such a liability to the Democrats that Van Buren, already deeply unpopular himself, campaigned for re-election without a running mate instead and lost anyway to William Henry Harrison. Johnson ended his political career as it began, in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and died in state office in 1850.

In September 2020, the county changed the derivation to black historian Lulu Merle Johnson, the second African-American woman to achieve a PhD in history in the United States, and the first to do so in Iowa (in 1941). During her time at the University of Iowa, she was required to take a swimming class but not allowed to use the pool when white students did. She went on to become a professor of history, and later professor and dean of women students at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. Part of the first generation of formally trained black women historians in the United States, she died at the age of 88 in Delaware. The modern county has 151,140 residents [2019] with its seat in Iowa City.