Northern Iowa was shaped by the action of three separate glacial ice sheets, which formed features such as Clear Lake and Pilot Knob, a hill west of here that became a landmark for early travelers. Much of the western two-thirds of Iowa was prairie when the first settlers arrived, and pioneers in this area traveled through grasses five to seven feet tall, calling it "a voyage through an ocean of grass." A remnant of this prairie survives at the Hayden Preserve near Lime Springs. Northern Iowa also produced notable figures including Norman Borlaug, born in Cresco in 1914, who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and other international awards for increasing world wheat production, and Hamlin Garland, born in 1860, acclaimed for novels of late nineteenth-century farm life and author of more than thirty novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Daughter of the Middle Border. Carrie Lane Chapman Catt began her leadership in the women's suffrage movement while serving as Superintendent of Schools and a newspaper editor in Mason City after attending school in Charles City and Iowa State College in Ames. In 1886 she organized a house-to-house survey showing that all but ten Mason City women favored enfranchisement, a statistic she often cited later. She became Secretary of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association, organized campaigns in several other states during the 1890s, helped win the vote for women in Colorado and Idaho, and lost in others, notably Iowa. In 1900 she was elected President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, serving until 1904 and again from 1915 to 1938. She also founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, lectured throughout the world, and after ratification of the nineteenth Amendment founded the League of Women Voters. She held offices in the women's rights movement for fifty-one years and received numerous foreign and domestic awards, including Woman of the Year in 1940.