Friendly Fire (3 page)

And just to the west of the Dobshires was another landmark: a huge, lone boulder that must have been left behind by the glaciers. It lies atop the next slight hill like the fallen plinth of some vanished Stonehenge or the brow of some half-buried monolithic Easter Island head. Hubbard Frost, who came to Black Hawk County after the Civil War and homesteaded the land on which the boulder rests, would drive his wagon into La Porte City—then but an infant town—and if he were unable to return before nightfall, his wife would light a fire atop the rock as a beacon to guide him home.

It is difficult to comprehend the terrible isolation the Dobshires must have felt. One can only try to imagine that most awful, poignant, physical loneliness endured by the young daughter, Mary Ann, whose entire life centered on her mother, this strange father she barely knew and an occasional encounter with the two German-speaking Walker boys. For those living on that unbroken prairie sea, the simple act of getting from one place to another required a major effort of planning and preparations and, in Mary Ann's case above all, a liberty she was doubtless denied. Even had she been free to travel and wished to, there was no place for her to go. In 1852 La Porte did not exist. There were no settlements larger than a few cabins and a sawmill anywhere within miles. Dubuque, the closest “city,” was more than a week's travel away.

The land alone sustained the Dobshires; they depended on it to survive. What they could grow, they ate. They chopped through the thick matted roots of the prairie grass to reach the soil, planted their corn, their wheat, cleared more and more of the prairie so they could plant more crops. The abundance harvested then had to be measured out and put away to carry them through the harsh winters. There were wildfowl and game, and they ate what meat John Dobshire could kill. Dobshire's gun was not for taking life, but for maintaining it; his ability to provide for his family was dependent upon his ability to shoot. And if there were no meat from Dobshire's winter hunts, and if his women had failed properly to preserve the produce harvested before, the family could expect only a cold and unforgiving death. But even if the land supported them, they had still to contend with Iowa's brutal weather.

Winter brought gale-force Arctic winds, blizzards, weeks of twenty-below-zero cold. Monstrous snowdrifts crushed in roofs, buried wagons, livestock, woodpiles. Settlers sickened in the iciness and could not survive the fifteen-mile lung-searing journey to the nearest doctor. Hailstorms killed hogs, chickens; cabins caught fire, and their inhabitants froze to death going for help.

In the spring torrential rains washed the earth from the hillsides, gullied the ditches into streams that overflowed the homesteads, drowned the freshly seeded fields, flooded the rivers which fed the Mississippi and swept the topsoil out to sea. Oxen and wagons mired down in the mud, and John Deere's newly invented sodbuster iron plows had to be abandoned in midfield.

Then suddenly it would be summer and thunderstorms would savage the air; wind-whipped prairie fires would race across the shoulder-high grasses with frightening speed. Thick, gargantuan, kettle-black clouds would explode with lightning, and tornadoes would visit Armageddon upon tiny, unsuspecting religious settlements. The Dobshires learned to sense a tornado's coming, smell it, feel its heavy breath on the darkening air. And always there would be that heat, that incandescent whiteness that bubbled the pitch in raw wood or left the air so webbed and close the birds would not even bother to fly. Then the evening sky flashed and flickered with summer lightning; moths beat themselves to ashes against the kerosene lamps. The moon would rise huge and full, and the prairie wolves would howl with summer madness beneath the canopy of stars.

In the fall the winds would come and cool the cornstalks. The months of jarring and preserving, of grinding flour and tanning hides would be upon them. John Dobshire, out gathering wood along the banks of the Cedar River, would look up at the great skeins of duck and geese, watch them form their august Vs and beat their way south. The corn would be harvested, the wheat gathered and threshed. The grouse would call, the incredible swarms of passenger pigeons (whose numbers then could be measured only by square miles) would whirl and scatter like an old lady's handwriting, gather again, then flash away. The buffalo would pass, fewer and fewer with each succeeding year. The first snow would fall, and at night, looking out their cabin window, the Dobshires might see the lantern of a far-off wagon glowing as brightly as a distant boat across a glaze of frozen water, like some ephemeral voyager upon a tideless sea.

Since John Dobshire could neither read nor write, no record exists of what homesteading meant to him. The Mullens do know that the Dobshires spent their first winter, the winter of 1852, in their prairie schooner and three times fled their homestead when Indians, coming up the Cedar River from Tama to hunt and fish, scared the family away. John Dobshire took his wife and daughter for refuge to Sturgis Falls, where there was a sawmill and a gristmill and a couple of cabins. (Sturgis Falls would later grow into the City of Cedar Falls.) There was a closer settlement at Waterloo—called Prairie Rapids then—containing six cabins and a post office. But Dobshire chose Sturgis Falls because of the sawmill, and when he built his house the following spring, it was made of cut boards, not logs like those of the Black Hawk County homesteaders around him. John Dobshire's small house, completed in 1853, sheltered his descendants off and on for the next 100 years. It was the house to which Peg and Gene Mullen returned with their infant son, Michael, following Gene's service in the Second World War.

In 1855 Dobshire had occupied his homestead for three years and was qualified to receive his forty-acre site free for his service during the Mexican War. The land grant is “for the North West quarter of the North West quarter of Section Nine, in Township Eighty-Seven, North of Range Twelve, West,” and the document states:

the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in consideration of the premises, and in conformity with the several acts of Congress in such case, made and provided, HAVE GIVEN AND GRANTED, and by these premises DO GIVE AND GRANT unto the said JOHN DOBSHIRE and to his heirs, the said tract above described, TO HAVE AND TO HOLD the same, together with all the rights and appurtenances of whatsoever nature belonging unto the said JOHN DOBSHIRE and to his heirs and assigns forever.

There is a special quality to that document's language, a self-portrait of America at that time: a slight swagger, an unconscious arrogance, a need to impose man's orderly straight-lined numerical boundaries upon nature's abundant chaos, a sense that all that open space must be filled. But most of all, there must have seemed to John Dobshire, when the land grant was read to him, a boundlessly optimistic promise, an absolute certainty in all that goodness to be his family's …
forever!

The year Dobshire received his land grant, the Geographical & Historical Society Building in Burlington, Iowa, was consumed by fire. Among those display cases totally destroyed was the one containing Black Hawk's bones.

That same year also the Illinois Central Railroad reached the east bank of the Mississippi opposite Dubuque. Among the section hands laying track was young Patrick J. Mullen, Michael's paternal great-grandfather-to-be. Patrick, who had emigrated from Ireland five years before, was then twenty-one, stood about five feet eight inches, was thin but hard and broad-shouldered. He had thick black hair, a narrow face with prominent cheekbones and dark eyes that appeared deepset and somewhat close together because of his nose, which projected out from above his wide, straight mouth like a hatchet blade. Patrick Mullen quit the railroad at its river terminus and crossed the Mississippi to Dubuque.

Dubuque, by then, had already become a thriving river port, a lumber and milling center and a major supply and jumping-off place for settlers heading west. Patrick probably stayed in one of the two-story brick-front and wood-sidinged hotels—they were more like boardinghouses, really, with gaslit parlors and kerosene lamps in the rooms. He might have shared the front parlor with the ebullient salesmen, the dour merchants, grizzled soldiers, adventurers and small-time gamblers looking for a stake. He would certainly have shared a meal with other young settlers and discussed their hopes in the future or seen in their faces their despair at what the past had failed to provide. Patrick J. Mullen, like all the others, must have suffered the disorientation and anxiety of waiting. They were all alike in these frontier towns, stalled on their journeys from some
place
to some
where
. And so they sat around those gaslit parlors, eagerly scanning the newest issue of the Du Buque
Visitor
with its advertisements for land, the latest business opportunities, the most recent settlers' reports, searching for some sign, some indication, some hint of what to expect when next they moved on.

Late in 1855 Patrick continued west and met John and Ellen Dobshires' daughter, Mary Ann. He courted her through the harsh winter, and she consented to be his bride that spring. They were wed by a French missionary priest in a little log cabin church across the Cedar River at Gilbertville. About this time John Dobshire bought out the two German Walker boys and took title to their eighty acres northwest of his land grant forty, the same eighty-acre piece that Michael Mullen worked his last night of leave. After their marriage Patrick and Mary Ann moved to Waterloo.

That summer Calvin W. Eighmey built a small log house about two miles west of John Dobshire's homestead site. Eighmey's younger brother recalled:

One day Calvin and his wife were afforded a peculiar spectacle. A wagon pulled by a yoke of oxen, driven by a man and woman, was seen approaching in the distance. And it was a sight so unusual to see anyone passing over the prairie that they watched them with interest. When within a short distance of the house, the man stood up in the wagon, took off his hat, waved it about, and gave some lusty whoops that might have done credit to an Apache. Calvin had never before seen the people, and their unusual actions were explained by the man to be only expressions of joy at seeing someone else living on the wild prairie. The couple proved to be settlers who lived farther east and the two families became very intimate friends.
(1910 Atlas of Black Hawk County)

The man in the wagon who had whooped with such joy might have been John Dobshire. He and his wife had already been living to the east for five years, and with the departure of their only child and the Walker brothers, they must have felt awesomely alone.

Two years later, on August 5, 1858, the last great meeting of Indian tribes in Black Hawk County took place. The Sauk had long since been moved to their reservation outside Des Moines, the new state capital, but the Potawatami, the Winnebago, the Musquakie and the Omaha still drifted back and forth across the land. However, despite rumors of trouble caused by occasional marauding bands, no serious incidents since the settlement of that part of Iowa had occurred. The meeting, between the Winnebago and Potawatami, was held just north of Waterloo.

The meeting was called by Little Priest, a Winnebago chief, who with his band had arrived at the Fork of the Cedar near Newell's in Washington and Union townships. The Pottawattami braves had been invited to meet them there.

The Pottawattami arrived opposite Janesville and ferried over, the river being very high. They formed in battle array a mile north of Newell's house, and marched to the Winnebago tents in columns twelve deep, breaking into a circle and firing their guns and beating their drums every hundred yards. When they reached the Winnebago tents, they dismounted and fired a salute, the squaws taking care of the horses.

A great feast was served and at night they had a dance witnessed by many white settlers. The next morning a Council was held, speeches made, followed by smoking “the pipe of peace” at which each Indian took a puff, the Pottawattami chief lighting it and passing it to Little Priest.

The whites tried to induce the Indians to repeat the dance of the night before, but to no purpose. The Indians packed up at once and were all gone at the time announced.

(Mrs. Julian W. Richards,

History of Black Hawk County
)

C. A. Rownd of nearby Cedar Township witnessed that meeting, too, and his impression in its succinctness is even sadder: “The last Indian Council between the Winnebagoes and Pottawattamies was smoked at Turkey Ford Forks. Then they drifted west to die or become ‘cabin indians.'” (
1910 Black Hawk County Atlas
)

In 1860 Patrick and Mary Ann Mullen left Waterloo and bought a parcel of land in the northwest corner of Section 18, two miles west of John Dobshire's farm. There Patrick Mullen opened a creamery route and quarry—many of the stone buildings in nearby communities were built of Patrick Mullen's stone. But his primary reason for moving was that the Dubuque and Sioux City Railroad reached Waterloo that year and Patrick knew it was time to farm.

It would be difficult to overestimate the impact the railroad made on that area. The years of isolation, loneliness, the estrangement born of living separated physically and emotionally from the rest of the country were ended. The solitary homesteader adrift in his acres of wheat and corn could hear, in the steam engine's slamming, shrieking passage across the plains, the boisterous, welcoming call of a nation which not only wanted but needed all he could produce. Patrick quit his job as a laborer in Waterloo because now that distant markets had become accessible the demand for farm products created a financial opportunity he could not ignore.

Patrick J. Mullen and Mary Ann Dobshire Mullen had seven sons and five daughters; two of the sons, however, died in infancy. Patrick put every piece of money he could spare into purchasing more land. As soon as he had a son old enough to drive a team of horses, he would buy more acres for that son to work. Gene Mullen's father, Oscar L. Mullen, was born on July 29, 1880. John Dobshire died when Gene's father was six years old.