Downtown Des Moines felt like it was 3am – when it’s this cold, everyone, it seems, just bolts for home

It sat in almost insolent isolation against the greying skyline and the splendour of the Iowa state house: an authentic prairie land wooden cabin, flush against the Iowa river as the first snow flurries began and the date of the caucuses drew closer.

Its windows were latticed as though for winter and its slanting roof already white with snow; if you opened the door, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see the Ingalls family at prayer.

A sinking feeling that this was, in fact, the lodgings I’d hurriedly booked a few days earlier vanished at the sight of the modest sign above the door: Birthplace of Des Moines. Fort Des Moines No 2. 1843-1846.

This, then, was the strategic spot where James Allen, a US army officer, established Fort Des Moines in the years when the Sac and Fox Native American tribes were steadily and forcibly ushered elsewhere.

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From Trump to Ramaswamy to DeSantis to Haley, the vow was the same ... a promise to fix something broken

On a forlorn Monday, the sky weighted with snow, it felt like a miracle that the cabin had survived, weathering it out just feet away from where the juggernauts were slushing by and somehow haughty in its separateness to the big, suburban architecture around it.

Who knows the identity of the subsequent settlers who decided ‘right, this is the place to build a community, savage winters and cloying summers bedamned’. The American midwest evolved at lightning pace over the following century.

By the early 1950s, Des Moines was a thriving city and home to a privileged generation of children which included the writer Bill Bryson. It was a decade of uncomplicated prosperity: he describes the fare served at the family dinner table as “radiantly unsophisticated”.

That was then: like most cities with prosperous enclaves, Des Moines has cultivated a burgeoning foodie scene and Iowa has for years been an unlikely combination of artistic escape and farm state to the nation. And the Des Moines of Bryson’s childhood, as captured in his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, makes it plain that to be a child in Des Moines in that decade was to be among the blessed generation.

The city’s economy was thriving. Both of his parents worked for the Des Moines Register. Their house and neighbours enjoyed the best of consumer luxuries. The Register wielded immense influence in its day; its Sunday edition alone peaked at 500,000, more than the population of the state of Iowa.

The cityscape of his childhood memory is a paean to local paradises of independent retail: Dahl’s Foods (gone since 2005), Frankel’s grocery store and other felled gems. Bryson published his memoir in 2006 and while its unguarded affection may leave it open to the categorisation of mere nostalgia, who else is ever going to chronicle what it felt like to be alive in a major midwestern city in America’s most gilded decade?

Today, 41 per cent of Iowans are aged 45 or older. Ten per cent of its three million residents belong to Bryson’s decade. The number of over-60s will increase to 26 per cent by 2030. So, a significant number can easily identify with Bryson’s recollection of the city and the nagging sense that somewhere magical has slipped through their fingers.

And through a week when the natural hardships of the locality visited in earnest – the lung-bursting coldness, the tedious morning rituals of digging clear car-paths and scraping windscreens and the stunning coldness of the outdoors –this was the message that the presidential hopefuls were hammering, over and over. From Trump to Ramaswamy to DeSantis to Haley, the vow was the same. It was a promise to fix something broken – the numbers after the dollar signs in the shops and on the petrol pump signs, the debt, the underlying sense of fractiousness.

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There is something reassuringly wonderful and eccentric about the tradition of the Iowa caucuses, where those chasing the highest ambitions come courting a state where the general mood is laid-back in the extreme. Iowans take the obligation and prestige of hosting the would-be occupants of the White House seriously. They are courteous and staggeringly friendly but, in Des Moines at least, remain completely unfazed by the idea of political celebrities in their midst. And there’s a nice line in wry humour running through their observations.

But what a place in the grip of winter! On Thursday, the main grocery store on Court Street, whose mid-century decade left an indelible imprint on the childhood mind of Bryson, had a teatime rush as downtown workers and dwellers grabbed provisions and joked about the next band of freezing weather expected to arrive overnight. It was just six o’clock, but the nearby bars and restaurants were fascinatingly empty.

When it’s this cold, everyone, it seems, just bolts for home. So Des Moines downtown felt like it was 3am. Not a sinner and no sound. Except for some class of freight train that appeared through the gloom and moved slowly along the track that cuts through the heart of the city and sounded its dirge, the two slow, low-pitched horn notes and then a shorter farewell blast: a sound that is, in its own way, the sound of America.