EARLY IOWA LOCALITY RECORDS 
105 
EARLY IOWA LOCALITY RECORDS. 
B. SHIMEK. 
Students of plant and animal distribution are naturally inter- 
ested in exact geographic designation, and they frequently suffer 
inconvenience from the inaccuracy or misconception of locality 
names. Confusion in our western records sometimes arises be- 
cause the earlier explorers worked in an unsettled wilderness 
in which accurate geographic designation was difficult or im- 
possible, and again from the fact that names were often at first 
applied to larger areas than those to which the name is at pres- 
ent restricted. 
Some such cases have come under the writer’s notice recently 
in his effort to secure full records of Iowa plants and mollusks. 
The locality which attracted special attention is that which is 
designated as '‘Cnuncil Bluff,” or '‘Council Bluffs,” in various 
reports on plants, mollusks, insects, etc. This is the locality 
made memorable by the visit of Thomas Say, who spent parts 
of tlio years 1819 and 1820 at the Engineer Cantonment near 
Council Bluff, and who reported and described many species of 
mollusks, insects and vertebrates from this locality. Later, in 
1839, the Nicollet Expedition visited the same locality and col- 
lected numerous plants which were submitted for determination 
to Dr. Torrey. 
Say’s “Council Bluff” is generally considered the same as 
the Council Bluffs, Iowa, of today, but this is clearly not cor- 
rect. The present city of Council Bluffs, Iowa, is located on 
the east side of the Missouri river, and about twenty-two miles 
above the mouth of the Platte river in'iS'ebraska. Naturally the 
references to Council Bluff or Council Bluffs would suggest the 
Iowa locality, but there can be no question that the locality to 
which Say and others refer is on the western, or Nebraska, side 
of the Missouri river, and more than twenty miles above the pres- 
ent city of Council Bluffs. 
The name “Council Bluff” was originally applied to a locality 
at which Lewis and Clark held a council .with the Ottoe and Mis- 
souri Indians, August 3, 1804.^ 
^See Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806. (In 
full and exactly as written.) Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites LL. D,, 1904. 
Vol. I, p. 98. Coues’ edition, Vol. I, p, 66, 1893. 
