by Jim Noles
For the most part, however, most drives headed up the Shawnee Trail, where, once again, they began meeting increasing resistance from local farmers still fearful of the dreaded tick-borne Texas fever. By 1867, six states had essentially barred herds of Texas cattle from crossing their borders.
Fortunately, Illinois cattle buyer Joseph G. McCoy stepped into the picture with the vision to establish a marketplace away from settled areas—and vulnerable local cows. For his new market, he picked Abilene, Kansas, near the center of the mostly uninhabited Great Plains. Amid this sea of grass, McCoy convinced the Kansas Pacific Railroad to not only provide him with rail yard facilities but even to pay him a commission on each carload of cattle it shipped from Abilene.
Equally important, McCoy persuaded Kansas officials not to enforce the state’s quarantine law at Abilene in order to attract trail herds. McCoy also successfully lobbied the Illinois legislature to allow entry of Texas cattle that had been “wintered” in Kansas—a key proviso that enabled McCoy to ship his cattle to Chicago’s stockyards.
In response, Texans began driving their cattle north along what became known as the Chisholm Trail. In 1867, O. W. Wheeler, his partners, and 2,400 steers blazed the way. Originally, Wheeler had planned to drive his herd up the Shawnee Trail from San Antonio through Austin and Waco, and then, after striking north, to winter his steers on the Great Plains before driving them on to California.
But at the North Canadian River, Wheeler spotted wagon tracks— a trade route established by the Scot–Cherokee Indian trader Jesse Chisholm that led north to Wichita, Kansas—and decided to press on for the railheads of Kansas. Eventually, Chisholm lent his name to the entire trail that stretched from the Rio Grande to central Kansas. That larger trail split from the old Shawnee Trail in Waco, ran north (through Johnson County) to Fort Worth, and passed east of Decatur to cross the Red River. Today, U.S. Highway 81 parallels the old trail’s path as it runs on to Newton, Kansas, although eventual destinations of a cattle drive coming up the trail could include Ellsworth, Junction City, Wichita, Abilene, or Caldwell as well.
Spurred on by Wheeler’s success and McCoy’s aggressive advertising of his railhead in Abilene, a veritable flood of cattle followed in the months and years to come. Some 35,000 cattle arrived in Abilene in 1867 for shipment; McCoy’s numbers continued to double every year until 1871. By 1873, more than 1.5 million cattle had reached the railhead, as well as rival railheads in Wichita and Ellsworth.
In total, before the Chisholm Trail was finally closed by barbed wire and an 1885 Kansas quarantine law, it had been followed by more than 5 million cattle and 1 million mustangs. Some have called it the greatest migration of livestock in world history. Even railroad connections with Northern and Eastern markets, available in Texas after 1873, did not immediately diminish trail traffic because freight rates were two to three times more expensive than drovers’ fees.
Such a massive migration would have been impossible but for the cowboys—or, less romantically, simply “drovers”—who shepherded the vast herds up the trail to Kansas. On a typical drive, a trail boss (or “ramrod”), ten cowboys (or “waddies”), a cook, and a horse wrangler (in charge of the extra mounts, called “remudas”) were capable of trailing 2,500 cattle on drives that lasted three months and covered ten to fifteen miles a day. For a greenhorn waddie tasked with riding “drag”—following in the dust at the rear of the herd—it made for a long, monotonous journey.
As the encyclopedic Handbook of Texas observed, “the gun-totin’ image of cowboys owes more to Hollywood than to history.” Nevertheless, the Handbook could not help but also declare that “youthful trail hands on mustangs gave a Texas flavor to the entire range cattle industry of the Great Plains and made the cowboy an enduring folk hero.”
In time, the Chisholm Trail, stymied by new quarantines enacted by Kansas, relinquished its prominence to the new Western (also known as the Dodge City or Ogallala) Trail blazed to Dodge City. And despite its success for several years, even the Western Trail eventually fell victim to quarantines and barbed wire, leading Texas cattlemen to turn to railroads to transport their animals to market.
Nevertheless, the ramrods, wranglers, and waddies of the Shawnee, Chisholm, and Western trails wrote a critical and colorful page in the history of the Lone Star State and earned a place for a symbolic lariat on the 541.8 million Texas state quarters eventually minted. It was quite an accomplishment in the face of stern competition from nearly 2,600 initial alternative designs, some of which featured such iconic images as the Alamo.
“The Texas quarter will serve as a timeless representation of our state’s proud and storied history,” said Governor Rick Perry at the quarter’s official launch. “When Americans reach into their pockets, this quarter will remind all of the proud and rich history of the state that was once its own sovereign nation.”
29
IOWA
An Education in Art
When Iowa picked a design for its state quarter, it followed the lead of New Jersey and relied on a famous painting to best illustrate and create an emblem for the Hawkeye State. Whereas Washington Crossing the Delaware was the work of German-born Emanuel Leutze, Iowans could count on native son Grant DeVolsen Wood to provide its iconic image.
Even Wood’s home-field advantage, however, did not assure him of victory. Tasked with developing a series of candidate designs for the U.S. Mint’s initial consideration, Governor Thomas J. Vilsack established the sixteen-member Iowa Quarter Committee in May 2002 to aid him in that endeavor. Working with libraries, banks, and credit unions to solicit ideas for the state quarter design, the committee eventually received nearly 2,000 submissions. It winnowed those submissions down to five finalists and submitted them to Vilsack for his consideration that August.
Two of the ultimately unsuccessful designs were, like the eventual winner, based on Grant Wood paintings. One depicted the farm couple—actually, Cedar Rapids dentist Byron H. McKeeby and Wood’s younger sister, Nan—featured on Wood’s American Gothic, standing in front of the soon-to-be famous (and still standing) white farmhouse in Eldon, Iowa.
The other Wood-inspired design, labeled “Beautiful Land,” relied on his painting Young Corn, painted in 1931, to illustrate an idealized Iowa landscape of softly rolling hills and the promising growth of neat rows of spring corn.
Corn also featured in a competing design, “Feeding the World,” submitted by Lennis Moore. Moore, an artist, illustrator, and designer living in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, grew up on a small family farm in northeastern Iowa. Loyal to his family’s livestock, Moore’s design worked a cow and a pig into the mix as well.
Equally stiff competition, however, came from Waterloo, Iowa, artist Kim Behm, who crafted a design featuring Waterloo’s five Sullivan brothers. The Sullivan brothers were all lost at sea during World War II when their cruiser, the USS Juneau, was sunk by a Japanese torpedo.
The loss of the Sullivan brothers came to symbolize the sacrifices being made by America’s families during World War II. However, the legislation that enacted the Mint’s 50 State Quarters® Program specifically excluded imagery of busts or portraits of any person, living or dead, on state quarters. The brothers’ row of heads apparently fell too close to the mark.
In the end, therefore, a Grant Wood–inspired design triumphed, one based on Wood’s painting Arbor Day. On its face, the painting, which depicts the planting of trees in front of a wooden-frame schoolhouse, readily complements the quarter’s explicitly proclaimed theme of “Foundation in Education.” But Wood’s own ties to public education in Iowa run even deeper than the quarter suggests.
Wood was born on a small farm outside Anamosa, Iowa, in 1891, the second of four children. His father was a farmer; his mother, Hattie, was a teacher. Grant’s father died in 1901, sparking Hattie to sell the family land and move to Cedar Rapids.
In Cedar Rapids, Wood—nicknamed “Gussie”—attended Washington High School, where his extracurricular activities included work
for the Pulse, an artistic journal published by the school’s students every six weeks. He also worked on the school’s yearbook, drawing comics and designing headings and frontispieces.
Even as a high school student, Wood’s artistic talents were so evident that Emma Grattan, the art director of city schools, often conspired to have him excused from other classes so that he could repair to her office to work on his art. At age fourteen, he won third prize in a national contest for his crayon drawing of oak leaves. Later, Wood said that the prize inspired him to become an artist.
Wood graduated from Washington High in 1910, and the very night of graduation, he caught a train for Minneapolis to study wood and metal techniques with Ernest Batchelder. That fall, he began pursuing a teaching degree at the University of Iowa and later attended the Art Institute of Chicago. Despite being exempted from the draft, Wood waived his exemption and spent most of World War I putting his artistic skills to work designing army camouflage at stateside bases.
Back in Iowa following the armistice, Wood earned his teaching credentials by teaching for a year at the Rosedale country school, a one-room building near Cedar Rapids. Later, he taught at Jackson Junior High School (1919–1922) and at McKinley High School (1922–1925). Shy, quiet, but with a disarming sense of humor, Wood earned a popular reputation with his students and inspired them to take on such projects as completing a frieze for McKinley High’s cafeteria.
During breaks from teaching, Wood spent his summers in Europe, traveling the continent, taking art classes at the Academie Julien in Paris, and in Munich, being inspired by the German primitive movement and the work of such northern Renaissance masters as Jan van Eyck.
But Wood’s heart remained in Iowa, as is evident in one of his most enduring, and endearing, quotes:
I found the answer [about what I knew] when I joined a school of painters in Paris after the war who called themselves neo-meditationists. They believed an artist had to wait for inspiration, very quietly, and they did most of their waiting at the Dome or the Rotonde, with brandy. It was then that I realized that all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa. (Roberts 1995, 32)
Back in Iowa, Wood found increasing popular and critical success, even as he worked as an interior designer, led an amateur theater group, and promoted the local art community. In 1927, he earned a commission from the city of Cedar Rapids to design the stained-glass windows for its Veterans Memorial Building, now the Cedar Rapids City Hall.
Meanwhile, a number of his early artistic works underscored Wood’s own foundation in education. The Cedar Rapids School District began commissioning Wood to produce art for its school buildings; one of the first was a mural for the Harrison School, entitled Democracy Leading the Way onto Victory. Later commissions included Pine Tree and Back of the Pantheon at Sunset for Jackson School; Paris 1924—Bridge at Moret for Roosevelt School; and Indian Creek for Franklin School.
Wood broke onto the national scene in 1930 when his oil painting American Gothic captured a $300 prize at the Art Institute of Chicago. From that point on, his fame and commercial success seemed assured. Nevertheless, his artistic path remained intertwined with education in Iowa.
In 1931, students at Wilson Junior High School mounted a penny campaign and commissioned Wood to paint a memorial for favorite teacher Linnie Schloeman. Wood and the students selected a landscape outside of Amana, where the rich soil nurtured young corn in the same way that Schloeman had nurtured his students. The result was 1931’s Young Corn. Although it did not make it onto Iowa’s state quarter in 2004, Wood devotees could take some solace in the fact that it represented the state on the U.S. postage stamp that commemorated the state’s sesquicentennial in 1996.
The following year, the school district commissioned Wood for a work in honor of two of McKinley School’s teachers, Catherine Motejl and Rose Waterstradt. According to legend, Wood put a female friend behind the wheel of his car and, with a quart of whiskey in hand, combed the Iowa countryside one cold winter day, looking for just the right schoolhouse for what would become the inspiration for Arbor Day—and, as it turned out, Iowa’s future state quarter.
That same year, Wood and others founded the Stone City Art Colony in 1932, intent on providing a laboratory and venue for participating artists to create artworks capable of expressing the unique character of his beloved Midwest. “A true art expression,” Wood wrote, “must grow up from the soil itself.” With such words, Wood easily articulated why he became not only one of America’s outstanding regional painters but an articulate spokesman for the Regionalism art movement as a whole.
By 1933, Wood was a University of Iowa art professor and, the following year, received an appointment as the director of all Iowa Works Progress Administration (WPA) art projects. Making the most of the opportunity, he gathering his team of artists and began designing the murals for Parks Library at Iowa State University.
Ironically, Wood’s longstanding ties to art education could not shield him from bitter battles with the more traditional academics in the University of Iowa’s art department. From such antagonists, Wood faced increasingly vehement criticism regarding his lack of formal education, his teaching style, and his ideas about mural projects for public schools and buildings. Turning back to his art, he opened a studio in Clear Lake, Iowa, where he focused on lithography, book illustration, carpentry, metalwork, and painting.
Toward the end of his life (which came in 1942, from liver cancer), Wood offered the following observations about his work: “In making these paintings, as you may have guessed, I had in mind something which I hope to convey to a fairly wide audience in America—the picture of a country rich in the arts of peace; a homely lovable nation, infinitely worth any sacrifice necessary to its preservation.”
One wonders if the same could not be said of the 50 State Quarters® Program in general.
30
WISCONSIN
Got Milk? Got Cheese?
Got Corn?
“Forward!” That is the intrepid declaration on Wisconsin’s state quarters, all 453.2 million of them. They echo the state motto, adopted in 1851, that is intended to “reflect Wisconsin’s continuous drive to be a national leader,” according to the state’s Web site.
After voicing its motto so boldly, however, the excitement quotient on the Wisconsin coin drops precipitously. In addition to the state motto, the quarter features an ear of corn, a round of cheese, and, most apparently, the head of a Holstein cow. It is not clear which of the trio the coin is exhorting to move along.
The agricultural theme wended its way to Wisconsin’s quarter starting in December 2001, when Governor Scott McCallum appointed twenty-three people to the Wisconsin Commemorative Quarter Council to review and recommend candidate design themes. The committee collected 9,608 suggestions, eventually narrowing the concepts down to a total of six finalists (and rejecting suggested submissions that would have featured, among other ideas, beer mugs, bratwurst, and the Green Bay Packers).
The six finalists were: “Early Exploration and Cultural Interaction” (honoring such early explorers as Jean Nicolet, Jacques Marquette, and Louis Joliet); “Scenic Wisconsin” (paying homage to the state’s scenic lakes, bluffs, rivers, and metropolitan skylines); “State Capitol Building”; “Old Abe” (the live eagle mascot that accompanied the Eighth Regiment of the Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry into battle during the Civil War); “Badger” (symbolizing not only the University of Wisconsin but also the early “burrowing” lead miners who ranked among the state’s first settlers); and “Agriculture/Dairy/Barns.”
Subsequent consultations with the U.S. Mint reduced the options to three—“Scenic Wisconsin,” “Early Exploration and Cultural Interaction,” and “Agriculture/Dairy/Barns.” In an online poll, Wisconsin’s citizens voted for the last one, trumping the quarter council’s favored design, “Early Exploration and Cultural Interaction.” Bowing to his constituents, Governor Jim Doyle opted for “Agriculture
/Dairy/Barns.”
In the end, the inclusion of such agricultural components on Wisconsin’s state quarter makes eminent sense—although reliance on a cow, cheese, and corn to represent the state’s agriculture would certainly have surprised a farmer in mid-nineteenth-century Wisconsin. Back then, wheat was king.
At the time, wheat’s popularity could be traced to the territory’s early settlers from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Those set tlers brought with them an appreciation of wheat’s advantage (namely, its relatively low labor demands and ability to be readily stored), sowed their fields with that grain, and, in the 1850s and early 1860s, reaped healthy profits. Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, J. I. Case’s thresher, and enthusiastic investment in railroads spurred the enthusiasm for wheat farming.
In 1860, wheat production in Wisconsin peaked at over 27 million bushels in what farmers called “the golden year.” But then the bottom fell out. Prices began dropping, just as the effects of years of sowing wheat on the same fields (which depleted the soil of essential nutrients) began to be felt. Plant diseases and pests added to the farmers’ woes. In short, it became harder and harder to grow wheat that was worth less and less.
Fortunately, the same climate and soil that had produced large wheat crops were ideal for forage crops, and the land that was unsuitable for cultivation was good for pasture for livestock. Furthermore, many of the newest wave of immigrants—New Englanders, New Yorkers, and European immigrants (particularly those from Northern Europe) were skilled dairymen.
By 1867, Wisconsin was home to 245,000 dairy cows. The work of the Wisconsin Dairymen’s Association, founded in 1872, helped fan milk production in the state, as did the opening of the University of Wisconsin’s Dairy School in 1887 (the first in the nation). In 1912, Wisconsin could boast of 1.46 million dairy cows; it was home to more than 2 million by 1925.
