Short Trip to the Iowa Border: DeSoto Preserve-080419
Last backtrack (I hope) of 2019 travels. I don’t remember the circumstances under which I made this trip, but I did try to get to know my adopted state of Iowa, and most parts of it were within a one-day round trip. In this case, I made the less than three hour each way drive in early August to the western border with Nebraska. The DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge is part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and is located along the Missouri River in both Iowa and Nebraska. In addition to the refuge, the site houses a museum with artifacts that survived the sinking of the steamship, Bertrand, in 1865. I will simply quote from the website: On April 1, 1865, the sternwheeler hit a submerged log, twenty-five miles north of Omaha, Nebraska. Bound for the newly discovered goldfields of Montana from St. Louis, Missouri, the Bertrand began…