My friend Larry Fruhling wrote one of the best newspaper corrections ever.

It was back in 1996, when he was compiling a 12-part series on the history of Iowa for the Des Moines Register. It said:

“A story last Sunday on Iowa history misrepresented the cost of a pound of sugar sold by Horace Hull, a pioneer Iowa County merchant. The incorrect passage said that Hull sold a pound of sugar for a raccoon skin, but omitted the fact that the purchaser received a rabbit skin in change.”

Larry had the ability to see humor in almost anything, including newspaper corrections, which are the bane of all reporters.

In recent years, he was even able to joke about his own pending demise, which finally occurred Aug. 6, following a long battle with ALS.

We buried Larry a week ago, but his history series and much of his other work lives on in digital heaven at Newspapers.com, a service that archives newspapers from across the country.

Larry was an incredibly gifted writer, which is why he was assigned the task of collecting and retelling the Iowa story for our state’s 150th anniversary in 1996.

He started one segment with a scene from 1835, writing:

“The 150 soldiers kept to the high ground between the Skunk and the Des Moines river valleys, their horses’ hooves crushing the prairie carpet of wild strawberries … [creating] a broad trail of red juice and mangled fruit, a crimson swath reaching back for miles.”

The land we call Iowa, Larry explained in another installment, was grudgingly ceded by Native Americans following a bloody struggle:

“Iowa, as it is now, began at a spot no one ever bothered to mark. It’s just as well. It was not a pretty episode that occurred on Aug. 2, 1832, at the head of a scenic little valley along the Upper Iowa River, the point where that stream flows into the Mississippi. …

“Here, the ‘Black Hawk War,’ led by an angry old Indian chief trying to keep his homeland, ended in slaughter.

“Slain were the remnants of Chief Black Hawk’s half starved band, driven into the hands of their old enemies, the Sioux, by federal troops and a ragged, hard-drinking Illinois militia that Black Hawk had led on a tragic-comic chase that lasted all summer. Two attempts by Black Hawk to surrender had been met with musket and cannon fire.”

Larry established that the earliest published mention of the name “Iowa” occurred in 1836, when a travel guide of sorts was printed in Philadelphia based on the notes of Lt. Albert Lea.

Lea had led one of the companies of dragoons, whose horses’ hooves had churned the prairie creating long red berry trails in 1835. Lea’s book was called “Notes on the Wisconsin Territory; Particularly With Reference to the Iowa District.”

Later, Larry described the night of Iowa’s great land rush in 1843 as follows:

“A little before midnight, stacks of wood were set ablaze, faintly illuminating a line across the prairie that for several years had kept white settlers at bay from the Indian lands they coveted.

“Just at 12 o’clock, soldiers fired their pistols and muskets … along the 150-mile line through the wilderness [and] a remarkable scene unfolded. …

“The land-seekers stumbled blindly through creek bottoms and thickets, slicing notches into tree trunks, stacking rocks, burning piles of brush and driving stakes into the ground to mark the land they were claiming as their own.

“The rising sun on May 1, 1843, revealed that the great land rush had ended in an epic muddle.”

Larry told history as it was meant to be told, with a wry sense of irony.