In those early days life was free, easy, simple, and buoyant. The population of Fort Des Moines was made up of people from both Southern and Northern States. They lived in log huts or simple frame buildings. Pork and "corn-dodgers," coffee, sometimes made of parched corn, and tea, often made from native plants, constituted in the main their diet. They had to go many miles to get their flour ground. Oxen were generally used in drawing wagons and ploughs. Stage coaches were the common carriers until the railroads entered the city in 1866. Prior to 1858 the State constitution prohibited the establishment of banks of note issue and the money of the citizens was chiefly "wildcat" and "red dog" currency. In 1857-58 the City Council so far trenched on the powers of Congress as to issue "City Scrip," with the twofold object of paying the city's debt and affording the citizens a circulating medium. As the scrip did not become popular, in a short time the city called in its paper and redeemed it. Like most frontier towns a certain reckless disregard of the sober customs of the Eastern cities characterized the social life. Sunday was a sort of gala day, when horse and foot races between whites and Indians, accompanied by more or less gambling and carousal, were not infrequent. But the garish and reckless life soon gave place to the staid habits of well-ordered communities, and since the Civil War Des Moines has justly sustained the reputation of a "conservative" Western city. [Illustration IOWA SOLDIERS AND SAILORS MONUMENT.] The navigation of the Des Moines River was a great factor in the first years of the city's growth. Steamboats came up the river from Keokuk in the spring and summer months and brought most of the city's supplies. The people living along its course soon perceived that the river could be made a great waterway for commerce. Those were the days of "internal improvements." Congress was induced in 1846 to give to the new State every alternate section of unsold land in a strip five miles wide on either bank of the river to be used for the improvement of the channel. A River Improvement Company was formed. River traffic increased rapidly and the people went wild over the project. As usual the matter soon drifted into politics and decided the fate of political parties. Demagogism ran riot. A story is told of two candidates for Congress in 1850, campaigning together, who rushed across a field to greet a farmer. The first one to reach him, extending his hand, cried: "Hurrah for river improvement!" The farmer so eagerly sought proved to be a scarecrow.