The most significant landmark in the Cascade area is the waterfall on the North Fork of the Maquoketa River. The falls gave Cascade its name, and the original impetus for American and European settlement here involved the waterpower they offered for mills and industry. In the centuries before pioneers occupied the area, the falls were well known to the Indigenous peoples living here: they required a canoe portage, offered an opportunity for fishing, and likely held cultural importance as well. Today the falls sit in a city park in the town center, providing both a recreational spot and a scenic vista.
Thirteen thousand years of history
Indigenous people have made Northeast Iowa their home for a very, very long time, and Native peoples used the Maquoketa River Valley for centuries. Beginning about 13,000 years ago, people living by hunting and gathering entered the area. Big game hunting of bison and other large ice-age animals was central to their economy, but gathering edible and otherwise useful plants, roots, nuts and fruits — along with hunting and trapping small game, and fishing — also provided especially important food sources. Iowa archaeologists describe this culture as the Paleoindian period.
About 10,000 years ago the Archaic culture became prevalent, featuring greater reliance on gathering plant resources and the eventual beginnings of agriculture around 3,000 years ago. The ice-age mammals had long disappeared, but hunting bison and other game animals remained especially important. During this period and later, Indigenous groups seasonally occupied caves and rock shelters near Cascade.
Archaeologists identify the Woodland culture as beginning about 2,800 years ago. Pottery appears at living sites, as does archery. During the late Woodland period, the Hopewell Culture and their neighbors were marked by increasing urbanization, greater reliance on agriculture with maize making its appearance, extensive trade routes, and the construction of large earthen mounds and other earthworks. Peoples in our area were certainly part of these networks.
By the 1200s the Oneota Culture occupied much of Iowa, featuring earth lodge villages populated by people who focused on farming and bison hunting. Later historical tribes had roots in the Oneota culture, including the Ioway in our area and the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) living just to our north.
Contact and displacement
In the 1600s we begin to enter the period of contact with Europeans. European settlers, traders, missionaries and military brought huge changes to the Indigenous peoples. European diseases, to which Native peoples had little immunity, caused epidemics that devastated Native populations; combined with competition over trade and land, this led to migration. Members of the Illinek confederation were noted in eastern Iowa by the first French traders and missionaries. Later the Sauk and Mesquakies came to dominate the lands that became Eastern Iowa.
In the early 1800s many tribal groups from further east were forced to journey through Iowa en route to new lands west of Missouri, spending months or years in the state as they were pushed toward new homes in Kansas and Oklahoma by the US government. A few Mesquakie families clung to refuges in areas of Iowa just to our southwest, and were eventually joined by fellow tribal members who found life in the western land assigned to them difficult. The Mesquakie settlement at Tama was recognized by the state and eventually the federal government.
Native peoples shaped their natural environments, building cultures marked by impressive developments in art, ceremony, ingenious tools, and effective agricultural practices. They have left much evidence that Cascade — “The Place We Call Home” — has been a good place to live for a very, very long time.