As National Native American Heritage Month wraps up, Greene County has some history of some indegienous people living in the area.

In the mid-2010s Cooper resident Chuck Offenburger did an interview with the late James H. Andrew who was a local historian and talked about one of the main Native American tribes that was thought to have lived in what we now know as Greene County, prior to it being settled by Truman Davis in 1849. Andrew said these tribes were thought to have been peaceful and raised crops like corn and squash. 

“They didn’t seem to be the hostile type of Indians that you generally think of. Now some of those tribes would come here and attack these people to get the food that they had stored up.”

The then 91-year-old said the main tribe in the Greene County area was the Ioway, which he believed to be a migrant tribe that would come to Iowa in the warmer months and head south during the colder months. Andrew described what his grandmother saw on their farm southeast of Jefferson during the 1870’s. He said there was a group of Native Americans that would live during the winter months behind their farm.

“One winter they had a bad outbreak of smallpox. They would bury the children in graves in the winter. But the adults they packed with ice from the nearby creek. Then when the spring came and they came through their farm yard to take these adults who they had packed in ice on the wagons to the Indian burial grounds which were probably somewhere northwest of here.”

Andrew said no early settlers of the county were ever killed by Native Americans to his knowledge.