Des Moines Iowa boasts a larger percentage of golfers than any city in the country.
March 1912 Reported in The American Golfer

The Grand View Golf Club 

Commemorative spoon of the Waveland Golf Club

The city of Des Moines, Iowa which boasts a larger percentage of golfers than any city in the country, has taken steps to further improve and beautify its public golf courses and parks. Money has been appropriated by the city council with this object in view and twenty additional acres of ground have been purchased adjoining Grand View Park and this will be used for the purpose of enlarging the links at that park to eighteen holes.

The city has adopted the policy of leasing small tracts of ground at a nominal sum to golf clubs that they may build club houses near to and use the course. This not only tends to increase the interest in golf in Des Moines, but the city finds that the members of the clubs do a great deal towards improving and keeping up the grounds, where this spirit of co-operation would be missing were it not that the building of clubhouses is permitted and encouraged.

The Grand View Golf Club has a beautiful clubhouse and, in addition to caring for its own members has erected public locker rooms to take care of those players who use the course occasionally but do not belong to any club. At Waveland Park (home of Waveland Golf course, built in 1901,  the oldest municipal golf course west of the Mississippi ) of that city is another course which is operated on the same lines and such is its condition that it has been used for tournaments of various kinds and pronounced one of the best courses in the West. The park contains 190 acres of land, although all is not, of course, devoted to the golf links. 

However, the course is amply large and is kept in excellent condition throughout the playing season. The Golf and Country Club of Des Moines and the Hyperion Club both have clubhouses here and each enjoys a large membership. The clubhouses which have thus been built on city land aggregate about $100,000 in value and it can readily be seen where the city is handsomely repaid for its policy of allowing the clubs such leeway as probably is not enjoyed in any other city in the country.