located at the State Fair Grounds at Des Moines, for the purpose of being organized into volunteer regiments to be mustered into the service of the United States. Colonel J. R. Lincoln was placed in command of the camp.
On the 30th of April Governor Shaw was notified that the quota of Iowa had been changed to four regiments of infantry and two batteries of light artillery. On the same date the Second, Third and Fourth Regiments of the Iowa National Guard were selected as a basis for the volunteer troops required from Iowa.
In May the Second Regiment was ordered to New Orleans, its number having been changed to the Fiftieth Iowa Volunteer Infantry, Colonel D. V. Jackson commanding. This regiment was sent from New Orleans to a camp that had been established at Jacksonville, Florida. The Iowa soldiers were exceedingly anxious to be ordered to the seat of war but so rapidly did events in the field and on the ocean follow one another that the conflict was ended before any of the Iowa troops were ordered to the front. The Fiftieth Regiment remained at Jacksonville until the 13th of September when, the war being ended, it was ordered home. It lost by death, mostly from typhoid fever, thirty-two men and was mustered out at Des Moines on the 30th of November.
The Fifty-second Regiment left Des Moines on the 28th of May, and went into camp at Chickamauga Park, in the State of Georgia, where it remained until the 28th of August when it returned to Des Moines where it was mustered out of the service on the 30th of October, 1898. The losses from sickness were thirty-six men, thirty-one of whom died of typhoid fever.
The Fifty-first Regiment left Des Moines on the 5th of June for San Francisco, where it remained in camp until July 29th, then embarked on the transport “Pennsylvania” for the Philippine Islands, by way of Honolulu. Reaching Manila Bay on December 7th it participated in the following engagements: Gaudalupe Church, March 5, 1899;
