Alison Kraus sings a haunting song on her new album A Hundred Miles from Home titled “Jacob’s Dream” It’s about two little boys who wander away from their cabin in 1856 and get lost. As I’m researching local history, I came across a similiar true story from Bowen’s Prairie Iowa.
“On the 24th of April following, the most melancholy event transpired on the prairie, filling the whole community with gloom, and the famly immediately interested with unspeakable anguish. The circumstances were these: We had finished our out door work and chores, glad to enter the house to sit down and enjoy the cheerful fire blazing upon the hearth, which the cold, bleak northeast wind and rain rendered peculiarly grateful to our chilled bodies. Darkness had set in, rendering the out door desolation doubly so. Suddenly we were aroused by a knock at the door, and the entrance of two of our neighbors, who informed us that a boy was lost. Alfred Denson, a amiable lad of six year and the light of the household, had wandered from the house and was lost, either on the cold, bleak prairie, or in the sill more dismal forest. The instant the information was communicated, we felt that the poor boys fate was sealed. If he had wandered into the thick woods, he might possibly survivie until morning, but if, as we feared, he had strayed out into the wide, unprotected prairie, we felt that his sleep that night would be “ the sleep from which there is no awakening.”
“Dark and dreary and uncomfortable as was the night, the citizens were aroused, and started out with the resolution to do what they could. But the night was intensely dark; we were destitute of lanterns, and were obliged to depend on torches to guide us in our travels, and these were comparatively useless on account of the strong wind and rain. We expected to get lost ourselves but this did not deter us. Our first design was to search the forest in the vicinity of the child’s home, and to build fires in different places, if possibly the child might discover some of them; they also might be guilding-stars to the searchers.
There was a timber road leading into the forest, which we thought possibly the boy might have taken, and examining it particularly with the light of our torches, we discovered his track leading into the forest. This encouraged us to proceed, thinking now we had ascertained the direction he had taken. We were also the more encouraged in regard to the safety of the boy, as, if we should not find him that night, he might obtain a shelter which would save him fro perishing. Soon, however, we found another track of his retracing steps, and leading back into the prairie….For two succeeding days, the whole community, including Cascade and Monticello, comprising some thirty persons, made a systematic search through the timber, north and south of the settlement, and the prairie between, but without success, and it was not until the fourth day afterward that the lifeless body of the boy was discovered nearly covered up with tall slough-grass, some eighty rods north of the present reesidence of T.W. Littl,e and nearly two miles distant from his home…..” From History Of Jones County Iowa 1879 pages 528,529
Today (August 5th 2007) my wife and I made another stop @ the Bowens Prairie Cemetary and took a photo of the marker for Alfred Denson. As I continue my research on Bowen’s Prairie, several names keep surfacing…Moses Collins,Barrett and Otis Whittemore, Steven Palmer to mention just a few. Today at the Cemetary, we found both Otis and Barrett Whittemore’s gravestone markers, as well as the memorial marker for Alfred Denson.
