The Welsh in Iowa is the history of the little known Welsh immigrant communities in the American Midwestern state of Iowa. Dr. Walley’s book identifies what made the Welsh unique as immigrants to North America, and as migrants and settlers in a land built on such groups. With research rooted in documentary evidence and supplemented with community and oral histories, The Welsh in Iowa preserves and examines Welsh culture as it was expressed in middle America by the farmers and coal miners who settled or passed through the prairie state as it grew to maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work seeks to not only document the Welsh immigrants who lived in Iowa, but to study the Welsh as a distinct ethnic group in a state known for its ethnic heritage.

Dr. Paul Caster Ottumwa's famed magnetic healer was a firm believer in the Deity. He also believed that his strange power was a divine gift and, unlike some later healers, he did not believe that it could be taught to another, but must come to each one from the same high source. Before his death he became firmly convinced that his son, Jacob, possessed the same power, and urged him upon his deathbed, to take up the work where he was compelled to lay it down, predicting that in so doing alone would lie his future success in life. His son in 1889, carried out his father's wishes by engaging in the work as a public healer and is carrying it forward at Burlington in a manner not only creditable to himself, but also to the reputation of his noted father.