Raccoon River

About

Raccoon River, Iowa — 1876 Railroad Era, 1840s-1880s Logging, 1990s-2010s Raccoon Trail 100-mi Des Moines. The story begins on a terrace. In 1843, Fort Des Moines No. 2 — a military post — rose on high ground overlooking the confluence of the Raccoon and the Des Moines, and that strategic position would grow into Iowa's capital city (per dmampo.org). From that meeting of waters the Raccoon runs 33 miles through Dallas and Polk counties, a tributary of the Des Moines River and, through it, a strand of the larger Mississippi River watershed.

Long before the fort, the Raccoon flowed through the ancestral territory of Indigenous peoples, serving as a primary travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place. The cession framework that displaced them was built through the 1800s-era treaties, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the allotment era spanning the 1840s to the 1890s.

The watershed's forests came next. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the Raccoon River watershed was logged to feed the regional timber industry of 1850 to the 1910s and the railroad expansion of 1860 to the 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. Large-scale logging ended with the 1910 exhaustion of the old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s.

The railroads left their own signature. In the late 1870s and early '80s — with 1876 as the defining chapter — a railroad route was built to connect Des Moines with the northwest corner of the state, a corridor that served for over half a century. Two former corridors running northwest of Des Moines eventually became the Raccoon River Valley Trail, now a major economic force for west-central Iowa, connecting Des Moines, Jefferson, and Perry. The river also lends its name to Saylorville Lake.

The river's water was studied as thoroughly as its banks were cut. The USGS survey work of the 1870s to 1890s, the gauging-station establishment of the 1880s to the 1910s, and the state geological survey streamflow assessments of the 1910s to the 1930s formed the first comprehensive hydrological studies of the Raccoon. Later came the state water pollution control studies of the 1950s to the 1970s and the Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 to 2000, all reckoning with more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts.

That reckoning continues today. Since 2010, the Iowa DNR, working with local watershed partnerships, has addressed those cumulative impacts through streambank stabilization (2015–2024), native fish restocking (2017–2024), nutrient reduction strategy implementation (2018–2024), and water-quality improvements (2020–2024). What began as a strategic terrace above two converging rivers has become the literal wellspring of a metropolis — the Raccoon quietly sustaining the homes and businesses that now crowd the banks its early soldiers once guarded.