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Iowa: More Than Just Corn & Soybeans
Tipped off by a hack driver, the police sat in the darkness at 2 a.m. across the street from the gate closest to the receiving vault of Des Moines’ Woodland Cemetery. Two well-dressed men emerged carrying a body. What happened next shocked everyone in that growing coalmining city. One of the men was the head of the Drake University Medical School. People were horrified. This was a time when Christians still believed in the bodily resurrection of true believers. Many of the faithful believed that an individual might not be able to ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven if their body was dissected. Here was a well-known doctor engaging in grave robbery. While the newspapers called them “ghouls,” men like this had gained the nickname “resurrectionists” because they made physical bodies rise from the grave long before God would with the rapture.
It was not the first time prominent Iowa medical doctors had been involved in such practices. Residents of Iowa City protested the opening of the first public medical school in the state because they knew that it meant local graveyards would be emptying. Before the first semester had even started, a family went out to visit the grave of their mother only to find the ground disturbed. Upon further investigation, turned out, she was missing. No one present needed two guesses as to where the body was. By the time a search warrant was obtained, the body was nowhere to be found in the school. Strangely, after the sheriff met privately with the head of what would later become the University of Iowa Medical School, the woman’s body - her face missing - was returned in the middle of the night to the funeral home that had buried her a few days earlier. Medical schools and doctors often removed the faces of cadavers obtained through less than legal means as to destroy the main identifying feature.
Nor would this body snatching be the last. Before Drake closed its medical school in the 1910s, they would get caught on at least two other occasions. A quick-eyed railroad baggage claim clerk noticed a single drop of blood drip from a steamer trunk that was waiting to be claimed. Summoning the police, the trunk was opened and out fell a woman in a burial shroud. A similar trunk was discovered near it. The body of a gentleman was found in that one. The police then simply waited for a deliveryman and a gentleman named “John Smith” to pick the body up and haul it to the medical school, which later was the first home for Broadlawns Hospital. “Smith” and the worker claimed that they had been promised payment by the head of the school and had no clue what was inside the trunks.
On another occasion, police arrested fourteen medical students who were caught in the act of dissecting a body. The laughing and joking future doctors were released the next day by a judge when they claimed they had no idea where the body came from. Grave robbing was such a profitable business that there were gangs of men who made their living doing such. The most famous of these gangs worked out of the Council Bluffs area. Almost no one did time for these acts.
While most people see Iowa as just a land of corn, soybeans and hogs, of stoic Norwegian farmers who raise a single finger to say hi to you as they pass you in their pickups and rarely tip at restaurants if they can help it; the birthplace of Glenn Miller, John Wayne, Johnny Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody, Bob Feller, Grant Wood, two First Ladies, a President, the current Superman, and the future Captain of the Starship Enterprise; the home of The Field of Dreams, the bridges of Madison County, wrestling, the first place Ronald Reagan got behind a microphone, where Mark Twain wrote for a couple of years, and Buddy Holly fell from the sky; it is so much more. It is easy to understand, given that so many Norwegians and Swedes relocated there that the state would pass a law to make it illegal to kiss another person for more than five minutes. (Given the population base, was this law really necessary? Why not making hugging illegal while they were at it? Doubt many Norse are going to break that law either.) Yet, Iowa is so much more.
It is also the state where Richard Nixon was stationed during World War II. It is the place where one future serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, managed a Kentucky Fried Chicken and another, Jeffrey Dahmer, spent part of his childhood. It was at the Iowa State Fair that Amelia Earhart saw her first airplane and dreamed of flight. In a secret basement laboratory on 5th and Grand, called “the cave” in Des Moines, that an eccentric Scottish immigrant named William Morrison invented the first successful electric car that operated on rechargeable batteries. More than 110 years later the world is still trying to catch up with Morrison’s vision. There are makeshift cemeteries were the tall prairie grass crackled, popped and burned and entire wagon trains disappeared. Hundreds of riverboats lie at the bottom of the Mississippi, Missouri and interior rivers of the state. In one 100-mile section of the Missouri River near Sioux City, there are at least 40 known steamboat wrecks.
Iowa is home to one of the greatest unsolved crimes in American history, the Villisca Ax Murders. On June 10, 1912, the bodies of Josiah and Sara Moore, their four children and two other kids, were discovered butchered in their home. No one was ever convicted for the crime. While nearly forgotten today, the state is also the location of one of the most sensational murders of the 19th century. Newspapers across the country detailed the trial of 11-year-old Wesley Elkins who murdered his father and stepmother in their remote Clayton County farmhouse in 1889. Treasure hunters can comb the area around the town of Weston where Jesse James and his gang are believed to have buried $35,000 worth of loot, or at least visit Corydon, were the gang made off with $6,000 from the local bank. Frank and Jesse also performed the first moving train robbery in history when they derailed a train near Adair, making off with $3,000.
Harvey Logan a.k.a. Kid Curly of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Hole In The Wall Gang fame was born in Tama County. Wyatt Earp and his brothers spend part of their childhoods in Pella before going on to gain fame for their shoot out with the Clanton-McClaury gang at the O.K. Corral. John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson robbed the First National Bank in Mason City. The pair made off with $52,000. Bonnie and Clyde not only robbed two banks in Iowa, Stuart and Knierim, but also engaged in a shoot out with police that ended with the capture of Clyde’s brother Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche just north of Dexter. During Prohibition many law enforcement officials feared that Iowa could become a linchpin for the mob during prohibition.
Not only was Iowa a hotbed for moonshiners producing “alky” and a crossroads for moving liquor across the Midwest, but Des Moines was also a dumping area for bodies. Under the leadership of Charlie “Cherry Nose” Gioe and later Louis “Cockeyed” Fratto, who might have been involved in Gioe’s slaying, the Chicago mafia had a stranglehold over the state. (One of the more interesting Prohibition stories involves a sheriff who while raiding a local farm noticing that there were no bees swarming around some nearby hives. Upon investigation he discovered they were full of booze. Also, the extremely popular Templeton Rye was first produced during Prohibition.)
Amateur sleuths can see if they can solve the disappearances of two Des Moines paperboys, Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin, in the 1980s or what happened to Mason City news anchor Jodi Huisentruit in 1995. Who knew Iowa was such a hotbed of crime?
Criminal activity not your thing? While everyone might know your name at the Cheers bar in Boston, in Ottumwa, people can eat at the Canteen Lunch, the restaurant on which the Chatter Box Café in the television show “Roseanne” was based on. While for some unknown reason, Laura Ingalls Wilder felt no need to include her family’s two years in Iowa in her Little House books, fans can still visit Burr Oak’s Masters Hotel, the only Ingalls home still standing. Seven Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings still stand around the state, including one in Mason City, the only remaining hotel designed by the genius. Not only can people visit the Val Air Ballroom in Des Moines where Howard Dean screamed and lost the Presidency, and the stage where Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat, and Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom, where Buddy Holly performed for the last time, but travelers can take a tram up the shortest and steepest railroad incline in the world (Dubuque), visit the smallest church (Pella), drive down the crookedest street (Snake Alley), or get married at the Little Brown Church in the Vale (Nashua) of Christian hymn fame. People can purchase a bottle of wine at any of the fifty-two wineries found in the state, eat at the first Maid-Rite in Durant, enter the Drake Relays Bulldog Beauty Contest, visit the site of the Honey War between Iowa and Missouri, or pose like the farmer and his wife in front of the American Gothic house. Just do not try to lick the butter cow at the Iowa State Fair. Iowa is a lot more than corn and soybeans.