I'm actually writing a biography at this point. A relative grows up in the Iowa Territory. He walks a lot and finds a fossil that they name after him. He walks from Ames to Madison to get a job.
His big thing is Pleistocene geology. He knows what happened 20,000 years ago, based on what he sees. This is a rare skill but he just picked it up, so to speak. After thousands of miles, he knows what he's looking for.
When it's all over he knows that what was Iowa to him, was at one time east of the river. The rich riverbottom soil he grew up with was just a temporary thing. Temporary in the sense of three or four times the span of human occupation, but still nowhere near 20,000.
He gets old and dies in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
