Early Events in Cass County History

At the time of the earliest settlements by Caucasians in Cass County, the area was inhabited by the Pottawattamie Indians, who lived in villages along the banks of the creeks and rivers. The largest Pottawattamie village was Mi-au-mise, one mile west of the present town of Lewis, where the tribe had its burial ground. The Pottawattamies were a peaceful tribe who hunted, fished, and gathered their food from the land; they were not cultivators of the soil. The first white pioneers to settle in the area now called Cass County were Mormons fleeing religious persecution by envious neighbors in the Mormon colonies around Nauvoo, Illinois, in the summer of 1846. Approximately 16,000 Mormons vacated their settlements on the Mississippi and migrated along the Mormon Trail. They established communities along the way which were responsible for maintaining the Trail and providing food and shelter for the migrants to follow. The main settlement was at Kanesville (Council Bluffs), where wagon trains and handcart companies were re-grouped and outfitted for the migration across the Plains to the Salt Lake Valley in Utah. Smaller colonies were scattered along the Missouri Valley and inland to shelter and feed Mormons who were destitute, in poor health, or who, in other ways, were not prepared yet to cross the Plains. The first settlement in Cass County was one of these colonies along the Mormon Trail. It was comprised of about twenty Mormon families who settled at Cold Spring, near the old Pottawattamie town of Mi-au-mise, close to Lewis. Cold Spring provided a ready and plentiful supply of fresh water for the Mormon migrants moving West, and was a logical site for an agricultural colony to sustain the refugees. A post office was established at Cold Spring in 1847, and received mail weekly from Kanesville. In the same year, all of Southwest Iowa was organized into a new county, to be named Pottawattamie, to provide a means of government for the thousands of settlers in what had been wilderness the year before. Although there was a large number of settlers in Southwest Iowa at this time, this society was in a constant state of flux, as westward-bound pioneers were always replaced by migrants from the East; some Mormons, however, remained here for five or six years before moving West. By 1850 the Mormon migration had largely been completed, only to be succeeded by the larger migration of Americans to California and the gold fields. The first non-Mormon settler in what is now Cass County was Vincent M. Conrad, originally from New York State. He arrived here in 1850 and erected a cabin near what remained of the Mormon community at Cold Spring, since most of them had departed for the Great Salt Lake Valley by then. Mr. Conrad, his wife and child soon depleted their provisions and returned to Dubuque for the winter. They came back to Cold Spring in the spring of 1852, and moved the cabin to a hill on the site of Mi-au-mise. In 1851 and 1852, other settlers arrived in present Cass County, most of them filing claims in the west central part of the county, in the vicinity of Cold Spring. In the winter of 1852-1853, the town of Iranistan was laid out one mile west of the site of the chief Pottawattamie village, Mi-au-mise. Iranistan rapidly developed into a general trading center and market town for the scattered settlers and for wagon trains on the Mormon Trail. Although it is doubtful that the town ever contained more than 100 citizens, Iranistan enjoyed a large trading area and substantial business community for that period, since there were no other towns for many miles in any direction. Prior to the founding of Iranistan, crops could be sold and provisions purchased only in Des Moines, Council Bluffs or in Rockport, Missouri. Vincent M. Conrad had sold his homestead to W. M. Dickerson, who in 1853 platted and recorded the town of Indiantown on the site of Mi-au-mise. The village quickly became the business and social rival of Iranistan one mile to the west, although Indiantown was never as large in population. Iranistan was the more important commercially and in numbers of citizens ofthe two towns, but Indiantown was the better-known village; travelers would inquire of the way to Indiantown before they were within one hundred miles of the village. Because of the recent influx of settlers in eastern Pottawattamie County and the distance of Iranistan from the county seat at Council Bluffs, the Iowa General Assembly formed the county of Cass on December 6, 1852, and appointed three commissioners to locate a site for the county seat. These commissioners were to be paid two dollars a day for their services and were to be reimbursed from the proceeds of the sale of town lots in the new town. The commissioners located the county seat one mile east of Indiantown and named the town Lewis, in honor of Lewis Cass, the 19th-century politician. The plat of Lewis was filed on February 6, 1854, but the settlement of the town was slow at first until a public auction of the town lots was held in October, 1855. By the year 1856, Lewis had become by far the largest town in the new county, and had in fact absorbed the business and most of the population of the two earlier towns, Iranistan and Indiantown. Many of the buildings of those towns were physically removed to Lewis, so that both villages had more or less disappeared within a few years. The town of Grove City was platted in 1856 and was located two miles southeast of the present site of Atlantic. This town was quite prosperous in its day and the citizens twice petitioned the court to have the county seat removed to Grove City, but when the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific railroad bypassed the town and went on to F. H. Whitney's new town, Atlantic, the greater part of the populace and all of the commercial enterprises moved to Atlantic in October, 1868. Within eighteen months of its founding, Atlantic included 1,200 citizens. Since Atlantic was the only town in Cass County with access to a railroad and due to the rapid influx of immigrants brought by the Rock Island throughout the northern half of the county, a petition was presented to the court in June, 1869, to which 682 of the 841 qualified voters of the county had afixed their signatures. This petition asked that the county seat be removed to Atlantic from Lewis, and this was approved in the October 12th elections, with Atlantic becoming the seat of government on the 20th of October, 1869. The opportunities afforded by a railroad with transcontinental connections resulted in a new plat being filed in 1870 for the town of Anita in northeastern Cass County. On May 17, 1875, a group of farsighted investors from the German settlements at Davenport filed the plat for a new town to be established on land they had purchased from Thomas Meredith in Brighton Township. This new city was to be named - Marne. Our town and its subsequent history will be treated in a later chapter.

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Transcribed from "The First Century, A History of Marne, Iowa 1875 - 1975", published in 1975, Marne, Iowa: The Marne Centennial Historical Committee, pp. 4-6. Transcribed (2015) by Cheryl Siebrass and contributed September, 2019.