Tributaries, Trade, Treaties, and Transgressions
A site-responsive installation in the City Park historical cabins by Jeremy Chen.
Used bedsheets, glue, pine wood, pine plywood, birch plywood, screws, relief prints on handmade paper, battery operated LED lights, fishing line, sisal rope, steel links, brain tanned bison hide.
Completed October 2025
The installation is within a replica of the 1837 dogtrot cabin of the John Gilbert and American Fur Company trading post built by Old Settlers members and supporters in 1913.
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When I encountered this specific cabin at City Park and its historical connections, I tried to fathom the tipping point where Iowa land changed from the diverse, pristine prairie (that sustained massive bison herds and indigenous ways to live on and care for the land) to the impacts of settlers staking “claim cabins” that rapidly transformed the deeply rooted sod to soil for agriculture and eventually became our current big agribusiness monoculture or monocropping. I began to imagine this cabin, and perhaps another like it, a few miles south of Iowa City in the 1820s and 1830s on the Iowa River where Snyder Creek empties into it. I started to imagine it conducting business there until the fur trade in Iowa essentially evaporated by 1839. Fashion swung from fur to silk. The American Fur Company declared bankruptcy in 1842 and was dissolved in 1847.
This cabin is a tangible sign marking how this extractive mentality led Iowa to lose 99 percent of its prairies and 75 percent of its forest lands within a relatively short 200-year period. From the 1803 Louisiana Purchase to present day agribusiness, Iowa, and those of us living in Iowa, extract more than we give back. Iowa’s current circumstances are not sustainable for the people, land, waters, air, and wildlife of Iowa. Working together, we can imagine and realize something better for Iowa.
As a young boy growing up in Iowa City, I always saw these cabins in City Park, but only faintly remember an elementary school field trip tour where I might have been told this cabin is a replica of an American Fur Company trading post originally located south of Iowa City where Snyder Creek enters the Iowa River.
This trading area was possible because a small tributary spills into a larger river which in turn conjoins with another river before all this water enters the Mississippi River. It was possible because the US Government allowed fur trapper and trader Stephen Sumner Phelps to establish a trading post in this area around 1830-1832.
Stephen Sumner Phelps (Wah-wash-e-ne-qua or “Hawkeye” in Algonquin language) was a fur trader and temporary resident of this area who traded with native peoples and built a trading post near the junction of Snyder Creek and the Iowa River.
This business was so lucrative that John Gilbert/John Prentice working with the American Fur Company established a full-service trading post around 1835. This replica cabin in City Park was modeled after that original trading post and was completed in 1913.
This type of trading post run by fur trappers and other early settlers began as places after first contact of White settlers with indigenous groups. This trading post was a site of exchange between Sauk and Meskwaki groups and White representatives of American Fur Company or independent traders.
This trading post likely sought to acquire furs from native groups that included beaver, fox, muskrat, mink, river otter, skunk, perhaps raccoon, as well as deer, elk, and bison hides. In exchange for these pelts, native groups might receive an item such as an axe, pots/pans, wool blanket, cotton clothing, musket, corn, flour, liquor, etc.
There was a global demand for furs, particularly beaver pelts, in China and Europe. Fashion and global trade drove the extraction of natural resources from this land we call Iowa. If we know history, even in this age of Amazon, the internet, and massive container ships, it really doesn’t seem too strange to contemplate a trapper, a canoe, a river, and eventually the Port of Canton (now Guangzhou) just as we consider the trade routes of the Silk Road.
Please feel free to sit or lie on the buffalo robe (bison hide) under the canoe form long enough to contemplate, if you can, a herd of five thousand bison roaming the prairies and plains. Consider the beaver, river otter, muskrat, and other creatures in their winter coats roaming the river valleys and streams. Or perhaps you can imagine their pelts piled high in this cabin and the smoky smells after the craft of brain tanning their hides. Reflect on the native canoe, a graceful, efficient yet humble and useful craft for carrying goods and people on the many waterways of the Mississippi River valley watershed and Missouri River valley watershed. Paddlers might bring goods to buy or sell and horses on the banks might pull heavily loaded boats against the current. You might imagine freshwater mussels nestled in muddy riverbeds but with clear water flowing above. You might think about the native species such as beaver, otter, deer, bison that were decimated by the fur trade. Iowa went from a state with plentiful deer to a state where deer were almost fully extirpated by 1900 and did not begin to recover until the 1960s. Now, Iowa City has a “deer problem” where urban deer feast without any predators to fear other than vehicles who only kill them by accident.
Please gather on this bison hide to think, to feel, to discuss. Alone, quietly in your own head, or in the company of and conversation with others, realize how our history brought us here. Now, where do we go?
NOTES:
The Sauk and Meskwaki of Iowa (WE ARE STILL HERE)
The American government officially named/names these peoples Sac and Fox, but my understanding is that the more accurate name is Sauk and Meskwaki. They are currently located in Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska.
Other native groups that lived/live in Iowa or moved through these lands include the Ioway, Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, Oto, Dakota. I am heartened to hear about individuals and groups giving LAND BACK to native groups such as the Ho-Chunk who have been largely pushed out of Iowa but are in Nebraska or Wisconsin.
I capitalize the “W” in White (as I would with the “B” in Black) to emphasize that this term is not only an abstract label, but an abstract concept constructed by White people and White supremacy and that it is not actually a useful or accurate descriptive adjective.
Recommended reading for context: The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa by Cornelia F. Mutel (University of Iowa Press, 2008)
HISTORICAL TIMELINE
Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul of France agreement with Special Envoy James Monroe on behalf of the President of U.S. Thomas Jefferson.
Lewis and Clark expedition commissioned 1803. In Iowa in 1804.
American Fur Company founded in 1808 by John Jacob Astor.
War of 1812. Most indigenous groups side with British against the Americans to protect their native lands.
1830 Indian Removal Act.
Blackhawk Purchase 1832. (President of U.S. is Andrew Jackson). Opens territory in what is now Iowa to non-Native peoples.
1867 Extirpation of mountain lions/cougars in Iowa
The last sighting of two wild bison in northwest Iowa (Spirit Lake) occurred in 1870.
Beavers and river otters were so decimated by trapping and the fur trade that their populations only began to recover in the mid 20th century.
1871 Last elk sighting in Iowa.
1872 Beaver trapping closed by Iowa legislature. Not reopened until 1949.
1876 Last black bear sighting in Iowa.
1884-1885 last reported sighting of a gray wolf in Iowa.
The 1898 Iowa deer hunting season was closed due to near extirpation of wild deer in Iowa. Corn farming and urban and suburban development seem to have led to a robust return of deer to Iowa.
SITE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We inhabit systems and structures. Sometimes we inherit these, sometimes we consciously or unconsciously construct and maintain them. We take it for granted that Iowa City exists where it does and has the right to be here. I take it for granted I can buy a house and consider it my private property. It seems impossible to deny that settler-colonialism and White supremacy have histories that are not over. Instead, they are practiced and reinforced by systems we are all embedded in no matter what our backgrounds are. Our actions to resist and dismantle these harmful legacies are important if we truly want all people to live in a more just and inclusive world.
I want to acknowledge the land this cabin rests on was forcibly taken from peoples, including some who had been pushed off other lands before that. Many groups lived with this land for perhaps 14,000 years in a sustainable way. Since that forced takeover, the land and indigenous peoples that were here have endured many scars and traumas but have persisted in sustaining their indigenous culture.
From recent history and current times, we know part of the story of one of these resilient groups, the Meskwaki Nation. Their current settlement is only 78 miles from Iowa City, but their traditional lands also included lands along the Iowa River near and its tributaries near current day Iowa City. They traded with Stephen Sumner Phelps and John Gilbert and their regional associates of the American Fur Company or independent merchants. Contact between traders, trappers and the native leaders such as Chief Poweshiek (Meskwaki), Chief Keokuk (Sauk), and Chief Blackhawk (Sauk), Peosta (Meskwaki), Chief Wapello (Meskwaki), Chief Appanoose (Meskwaki) and their peoples benefitted both groups in specific ways but was ultimately destructive for the Meskwaki and Sauk peoples way of life and ability to live on the land called Iowa.
Meskwaki have Algonquin origins on eastern woodlands in Quebec and Ontario. For various reasons they needed to migrate west. The Meskwaki historically inhabited Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa and were intertwined with the Sauk peoples. The Meskwaki kept being forced off their lands by settlers, pioneers, and U.S. government armies. Their sustainable ways of life were disrupted. Part of the story of this cabin is the history of how rivers and tributaries allowed trappers and traders to encounter native peoples and to learn from them. It also is the story of local trade and exchange (often unfair) during a time of disruption to historically sustainable ways of life that was intertwined with global trade. Bartered goods included furs such as a single beaver pelt that could be traded for an axe head. But then that single fur could fetch the equivalent of 30 axe heads in the global market.
Despite destructive White supremacist actions including forcible removal to a reservation in Kansas, the Meskwaki peoples survived and persevered. In 1857, they purchased 80 acres of land along the Iowa River and now own more than 8,000 acres. For context, there are several individual farmers and farm corporations in Iowa who own 10,000-acre farms. Individual farmland owner Kent Kiburz owns 47,300 acres of land. Robert Van Diest and the Van Diest family own 34,500 acres.
This Meskwaki settlement is not a reservation. The Meskwaki are a sovereign nation located about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Grinnell College. They value their privacy and independence but there are events and relationships where non-Meskwaki peoples are invited to the settlement. The public is welcomed to a four day, multiple First Nations powwow held on settlement land each August; I encourage you to go sometime. When considering the history of what outsiders have done to the Meskwaki, I am amazed that I and others are welcomed to this event. I have learned so much from attending this and other powwows and hope to continue to grow healthy relationships with native peoples that work toward healing and reconciliation.
Much of what I share about the Meskwaki (and more) can be found at https://meskwaki.org/about-us/history/
I call each of you to continually reflect on every one of the locations you inhabit now and throughout life as places with rich history, and to realize how the land’s use has impacted the indigenous cultures of past and present or people who have been marginalized. I call on you to interrogate how your place, the patterns of land use, and the political, economic, social, and cultural structures still impact the lives of all peoples living there from various groups. This is very relevant to how we live our lives as artists who use energy, materials, generate waste, and interact with people. I ask us all to continually reflect on the ethics and aesthetics of our actions as artists (cultural producers) and as humans and implement constructive actions that work toward the healing and repair that seek liberty and justice for all.