The French claimed possession of the territory that would become Iowa only until the mid-1700s. The end of the Seven Years’ War, often known as the French and Indian War, resulted in France relinquishing its North American territorial claims. The territory east of the Mississippi River became part of the British North American colony. Land west of the Mississippi River did not become British at that time, as France had ceded possession to Spain. The land was subsequently retroceded to France in 1800 and then sold to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
Between 1763 and around 1800, nonetheless, there were some people of French and French-Canadian origin who chose to settle west of the Mississippi River in what is now Iowa. In 1799 Louis Honoré Tesson (1733-1807), a native of Québec, received permission from the Lieutenant Governor of the Spanish Province of Louisiana to settle on 7056 arpents (about 5900 acres) near the Des Moines rapids on the Mississippi River, near today’s Fort Madison. Tesson was known for planting an apple orchard on his property as well as working in the fur trade. Similarly, Basil Giard, a trader in Prairie du Chien (in today’s Wisconsin) at the mouth of the Wisconsin River, petitioned the Governor of Upper Louisiana in 1800 for a grant of 6808 arpents (5760 acres) of land across the Mississippi from Prairie du Chien at present-day Marquette, Iowa.
A settler with a longer legacy than Tesson or Giard, however, was Julien Dubuque. It had long been known—by Natives and subsequently by the French—that there was lead in the region around the Mississippi River in what is now southwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa. In 1788 Julien Dubuque, a French-Canadian born in Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets in 1762, obtained permission from the Meskwakis to mine lead at a spot on Catfish Creek near present-day Dubuque. He had traveled to the Great Lakes area with his brother and worked in the fur trade out of Michilimackinac until he settled in Iowa. As this territory was still part of Spanish Louisiana, Dubuque also obtained a grant to the land from the Governor of New Spain, the Baron de Carondelet, in 1796. In recognition of this grant of 189 square miles of land and the right to mine it, Dubuque referred to his concession as the Mines of Spain. Today it is a National Historic Landmark.
At his mine, Dubuque employed French speakers from nearby Prairie du Chien as well as Meskwaki, who had exploited the lead resources here for many years. Dubuque’s settlement featured a trading post with cabins for his workers and a sawmill and blacksmith’s shop as well as the mine and a smelting furnace.
Dubuque was well known in the upper Mississippi River region, including in St. Louis, where he became business partners with (and became indebted to) Auguste Chouteau. Dubuque was visited by Zebulon Pike in 1803, when the Louisiana Purchase meant the territory of the Mines of Spain had become American by virtue of the Louisiana Purchase. Pike was on an official mission to investigate the source of the Mississippi River and met with Dubuque on September 1, 1805. Though Dubuque declined to show the actual mines to Pike, his claim to the territory was nonetheless approved by the American Board of Commissioners in St. Louis.
It is believed that Dubuque was married to a Potawatomi woman, Potosa, but no wife was mentioned when his estate was settled after his death in 1810. There is no verified record of children from the relationship. Dubuque is buried beneath a monument erected in 1896 on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River in the Mines of Spain State Recreational Area.
The Louis Arriandeaux log cabin also recalls the presence of French speakers in the Dubuque area. The structure was built sometime prior to 1828 by fur trader Louis Arriandeaux and features a distinctive style with a dogtrot, or breezeway, separating the two parts of the house. Originally built in what is now downtown Dubuque, it is currently located on the Mathias Ham Historic Site in Dubuque, part of the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium.
Another French-Canadian connected with Mississippi River communities is Antoine LeClaire. He was born to a French father and Potawatomi mother in St. Joseph, Michigan in 1797 and came with his family first to Milwaukee and then to Peoria and St. Charles, Missouri, where his father worked as an interpreter for the Potawatomi. After the Black Hawk Purchase Treaty was signed in 1832 and land in Iowa was made available for settlement by non-Native people, LeClaire received two sections of land and built the first two structures in the place that would become the city of Davenport. LeClaire was Davenport’s first postmaster and was an important part of the early development of the city. The present-day town of LeClaire is located on what was his property, above the Rock Island Rapids of the Mississippi River.
French presence in Iowa in the 19th century can also be seen in the institution of the Roman Catholic church. After the Diocese of Dubuque was created in 1837, its first bishop, Pierre-Jean-Mathias Loras, born in Lyon, France, arrived in 1839. He was accompanied by a number of compatriots who would serve the church in the upper Mississippi Valley and establish 31 Catholic churches throughout Iowa. Under his leadership, St. Raphael’s Cathedral in Dubuque was completed. In 1839 Loras founded the Seminary of St. Raphael, which later became Loras College in Dubuque.
Two other individual Frenchmen played notable roles in 19th-century Iowa. Joseph Nicolas Nicollet (1786-1843) was born in the Savoie region of France and came to the United States in 1832. Trained as a physical geographer, Nicollet explored the Territory of Iowa, assisted by John C. Fremont, between 1838-1840 as part of the larger project to create a map of the hydrographic basin of the Mississippi River. Finally, architect Alfred Piquenard (1826-1876), born in France and trained at the Ecole centrale des Arts et manufactures in Paris, came to Iowa as a member of the French utopian socialist community called the Icarians. After leaving the Icarian community he worked as an architect and, together with John C. Cochrane, designed both the Iowa State Capitol and the Illinois State Capitol, as well as the Madison County Courthouse in Winterset, Iowa.
The Icarians
As the Native people were displaced from Iowa in the first decades of the 19th century, more and more land became available for settlement. Among the people who came was a French utopian socialist community called the Icarians. The Icarian idea was the brainchild of Etienne Cabet, born in Dijon in 1788. Cabet became interested in forming an ideal society in which all property was owned by the community. His novel A Voyage to Icaria, published in 1839, described this society, in which all was to be orderly and productive, and which emphasized equality, education, and the arts. His ideas gained followers in many of France’s cities, and in the late 1840s the decision was made to implant an Icarian colony in America. Part of the group would eventually move to Iowa.
A small group of Icarians arrived in New Orleans in January 1849, planning to develop the community in Texas. But the site turned out to be disastrously unsuitable, so the group turned their sights toward Nauvoo, Illinois, a town that the Latter-Day Saints had recently left behind as they moved to Utah. Some 300 men, women, and children arrived in Nauvoo, aiming to build the ideal society according to Icarian precepts. At first, all went smoothly, as the Icarians built multiple structures including a refectory serving as dining hall and theater, and organized work and recreation communally. Cabet himself was very much in charge, delegating work assignments and providing overall direction for the colony. But disagreement among the residents began, and financial trouble along with other problems led the colony to split, with an 1856 vote directing that Cabet and those who supported his side of the debate be expelled. With some 175 Icarians, Cabet went to St. Louis, where he died within days of their arrival, on November 7, 1856.
Those who had remained in Nauvoo also chose to leave the Illinois colony and move to property they had purchased in Adams County, Iowa, near Corning, arriving in January 1858. Though they found conditions difficult, they began work to break ground and to construct buildings needed for their socialist community. The colony, incorporated within Iowa law in 1860, was governed by two officers and a General Assembly. Residents did not own private property, but families did have small individual houses. Among the Icarians there were some skilled craftsmen like shoemakers and a blacksmith, but, overall, work was communal, with tasks like laundry or cooking done together and rotated on a weekly basis. Meals were taken together in the community’s refectory. The 1870 census noted that the Icarians had 700 acres in crops and 400 head of livestock, but observers criticized their farming techniques, noting that they did not rotate crops or seek to use manure as fertilizer.
Education and culture, as well as healthy recreation, were important in Cabet’s Icarian philosophy. Accordingly, the school was a central part of the colony’s life, and they owned a substantial library (400 volumes in 1870) and published a newspaper. Music and art lessons were part of the children’s curriculum, and the colony organized band concerts and wrote and performed operettas. They took picnic outings together, and their February 3 celebrations, commemorating the departure from France of the first group of Icarians, included speeches and the singing of Icarian songs. The language of the colony remained French.
The Icarians did accept new members, fellow believers in the communal life. But gradually conflict grew with regard to governance—for instance, whether women would be able to vote in the group’s assemblies—and rights to private property such as vegetable gardens. Some newer members wished the group to reach outward to support workers’ movements beyond Icaria such as those enacted in the 1871 Paris Commune. This contrasted with the views of some of the older members who wanted to remain faithful Icarians within the bounds of their community. More and more Icarians chose to leave the colony, and by the end of the 1880s, with only a small group of aging members, the colony was officially dissolved. The utopian experiment, born in France and transplanted to Iowa, was over.
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