176 PUBLIC PARKS OF IOWA 



able nesting place. Then the buds break out upon the trees and the 

 leaves come and the beauty of spring is here. 



Even though the traveler has viewed the lake region in all the four 

 seasons, he has yet missed its greatest beauty if he has not stood some 

 day upon the banks of one of these lakes and witnessed the gathering of 

 a storm; has seen the clouds gather and roll in forbidding streams down 

 upon the waters of the lake; has seen a gust of wind seize the still 

 waters and dash them into waves of fury; has watched the boatman seek 

 protection behind some projecting point; has witnessed the coloring 

 of sky and water as the storm approached; has stood in the windows of 

 his cottage and watched the storm break in its fury upon the lake, and 

 then a little later, from his porch has watched the storm pass on and the 

 quiet and calm of evening come over the lake that follows such an out- 

 break of nature; has witnessed the sun come from behind the clouds, 

 causing every raindrop still clinging to leaf and branch and every wave 

 still dashing upon the shore, to glisten and shine back the beauty of the 

 western sunlight. 



Until the visitor has seen the lake region in all of the different seasons 

 of the year and in all its varying moods, he cannot know of its beauty; 

 but here in Iowa within reach of its every citizen, here at home, we have 

 the most beautiful lakes to be found in all America, the most splendid 

 scenery within a thousand miles, a playground, if you please, for all 

 Iowa, for the men and women and the children who will be made better 

 citizens and have greater pleasure in life if they may be permitted to 

 enjoy these manifestations of God's bounteous gifts to us, His chidlren. 



The first white man to set foot in the lake region of northwestern 

 Iowa was doubtless Father Hennepin, who, with his two companions, was 

 brought to Spirit Lake and there held as a prisoner of the Indians, 

 almost two and a half centuries ago. 



At the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803, it is known 

 that a white man visited the lake region, as reference is made to the 

 greater Iowa lakes in the report of that expedition. 



The third white man to stand upon the shores of these lakes was John 

 C. Fremont, who in 1838 camped on the northern shores of Spirit lake 

 where Crandall's Lodge is now located. 



The first actual settlers came in 1856, consisting of forty or more men, 

 women and children, among them Abbie Gardner Sharp, survivor of the 

 massacre of 1857 and historian of those terrible events. 



The Spirit lake massacre occurred in the early days of March, 1857, 

 resulting in the death of about forty men, women and children and the 

 complete destruction of the settlement around the lakes. Four women 

 were made captives, two of them being killed in captivity and the other 

 two, after months of privation, being ransomed and restored to civiliza- 

 tion. The only monument of this earliest settlement remaining unde- 

 stroyed is the Gardner cabin at Pillsbury Point on West Okoboji lake im- 

 mediately adjacent to the beautiful monument erected by the state in 

 1894 in commemoration of the massacre of 1857. 



Dickinson county is the smallest county in the state of Iowa, yet it 

 has within its limits the most magnificent system of lakes between the 

 Allegheny and the Rocky mountains, and also has the distinction of hav- 



