All traces of Captain Caldwell's Potawatomi settlement and the Mormon safe haven of Kanesville were gone from the Indian Creek hollow by 1900, when Council Bluffs already seemed a 20th-century city of bright lights, steam, and smokestacks. The old western trails and steamboats disappeared as the city on the east bank of the Missouri River opposite Omaha became a major American railroad center and the industrial and commercial hub of southwest Iowa. Vineyards and orchards surrounded a growing city, with more acres under glass for greenhouses than anywhere else in the country and a daily stop...

During the 1830s, a path appeared where Indian Creek flowed out of the loess hills at Caldwell's Potawatomi village and led west across the Eight-Mile
Prairie. A decade later, that path became Broadway through Mormon Kanesville where California-bound 49ers found anything for sale. Kanesville became Council Bluffs after 1852 as Broadway spread from Mud Hollow and Old Town past the Fourth Street Angle across a "sea of prairie grass and sun-flowers" to the ferries on the Big Muddy, the Missouri River. More changes came with the Northwestern, Union Pacific, and Illinois Central Railroads as...