Monette, John W. History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi, by the Three Great European Powers, Spain, France and Great Britain, and the Subsequent Occupation, Settlement, and Extension of Civil Government by the United States, Until the Year 1846, in two volumes, Volume II . New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1846. [format: book], [genre: history]. Permission: Schingoethe Center for Native American Cultures, Aurora University
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great advantages presented by the "beautiful and fertile prairie country, which abounded in groves of tall forest trees, and was watered by crystal streams flowing among the variegated drapery of the blooming prairies." Transported with the prospect, the venerable patriarch exclaimed, "Now have mine eyes beheld a country teeming with every good thing, and hither will I come, with my children and my children's children, and my flocks and herds ; and our dwelling-place shall be called ‘Salem,’ after the peaceful city of our fathers." ⁶⁷⁰

Next year witnessed the commencement of the town of Salem, on the frontier region of the Black Hawk Purchase, the first Quaker settlement in Iowa. Five years afterward this colony in the vicinity of Salem numbered nearly one thousand souls, comprising many patriarchs bleached by the snows of seventy winters, with their descendants to the third and fourth generations.

Such was the first advance of the Anglo-American population west of the Upper Mississippi, within the "District of Iowa," which, before the close of the year 1834, contained nearly five thousand white inhabitants.

Meantime, for the convenience of temporary government, the settlements west of the Mississippi, extending more than one hundred miles north of the Des Moines River, had been by Congress erected into the "District of Iowa," and attached to the District of Wisconsin, subject to the jurisdiction of the Michigan Territory.

The District of Iowa remained, with the District of Wisconsin, attached to the jurisdiction of Michigan Territory until the latter had assumed an independent state government in 1836, when the District of Wisconsin was erected into a separate government, known as the Wisconsin Territory, exercising jurisdiction over the District of Iowa, then comprised in two large counties, designated as the counties of Des Moines and Dubuque. ⁶⁷¹ The aggregate population of these counties in 1836 was 10,531 persons. It was not long before the District of Iowa became noted throughout the West for its extraordinary beauty and fertility, and the great advantages which it afforded to agricultural enterprise.