Rock Island Lines: Recent Episodes
Roald Tweet
A series of award-winning stories about our region's traditions, institutions, and people, past and present. Rock Island Lines is written and read by Roald Tweet, Professor Emeritus of English at Augustana College, and sponsored by Quad City Bank and Trust.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The descendants of the Sauk and Meskwaki Indians who once lived around Rock Island have joined other Native American groups in protesting the University of Illinois's use of Chief Illini as the mascot for its football team. They say it perpetuates ugly stereotypes.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Any day now you may be approached and asked to sign a petition to designate the whole Rock Island area as The Joy Golisch Theater. The gentle bluffs sloping down to the river on both sides make it a natural stage. And the name fits.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Even as the Key City slid off the ways into the river in 1857, some intuition must have told Captain Jones Worden that the 230-foot, 560-ton side wheeler was a fast one. Worden challenged all boats on the river to race the Key City for the championship and whatever hard cash they chose to wager. Worden was not one for false modesty.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Twelve-year-old George Merrick and his family saw the Mississippi River for the first time at Rock Island in 1854. They were one of a flood of families heading for new territory in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Merrick went to work on steamboats, beginning as a pantry boy and moving on to apprentice engineer, second clerk, cub pilot, and finally a distinguished career as a river pilot.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. To the passengers resting in their staterooms, as well as to the children in towns along the river, the Mississippi steamboat seemed the very essence of romance. All was larger than life, from the gingerbread decks piled four high, to the great red paddle wheels pushing the boat up the channel, to the opulent meals in the grand salon.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Memo: To the two tourists who lost their way last Thursday on the way to one of the gambling boats and found themselves standing on the levee right by the real Mississippi River, holding their noses.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. No steamboat stop on the Upper Mississippi has ever been as filled with the glory of flags and songs as a small landing below a gentle rise on the east edge of Davenport, Iowa. There, in August of 1861, Union troops opened Camp McClellan as a collecting point for Iowa volunteers.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Had the good citizens of the United States known about Rock Island City in 1836, they might not have been so eager to elevate the public image of the great orator, Daniel Webster, from politician to '"statesman."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. I have finally figured out why no one has remarked on my moral growth over the years. I blame the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Inadvertently, I adopted the same methods to improve myself that the Corps has used to improve the Upper Mississippi and make it safe for navigation.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. They called it the miracle bridge as it slowly arched across the St. Louis waterfront toward Illinois from 1867 to 1874—a web of steel girders and trusses looking much like the largest erector set a boy could ever imagine. A miracle because of its size—a 520-foot central span—and because the massive granite piers supporting the arches had to go down seventy feet through quicksand to a safe foundation.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In Walden , Henry David Thoreau asked his readers who would know knives better, a boy who went to Harvard and took all the best courses on metallurgy, or a boy whose father had him dig, smelt and refine iron ore, and then forge, temper, and sharpen a knife himself.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Most springs along the Upper Mississippi Valley, the river awakens from hibernation like a snake, stretching gently to shed its skin of ice. But now and then, as we all do, the Mississippi gets up on the wrong side of the bed. You don't want to be around when that happens.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Father John Alleman could well have been a 19 th century Illinois Methodist circuit rider except for two things: he was not a Methodist, and he had no horse.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. That brave Dutch boy who stuck his finger in the dike to keep the water back must have seemed like small potatoes to Peter Cartwright, the 19th century Methodist circuit rider. Cartwright was responsible for a spiritual dike that ran through four hundred miles of Illinois counties bordering the Upper Mississippi River. It was a leaky dike at best.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. I’ve been talking about steamboat explosions, which were common on the Upper Mississippi throughout the 19 th century, but there is nothing to show you, no photograph of a single one: only the occasional shot of what had been a boat.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The universe may lay claim to the first and the biggest bang, but the Upper Mississippi has witnessed some pretty good echoes ever since the first steamboat exploded in 1837. That year, with Iowa and Northern Illinois newly opened to settlement, the steamer Dubuque bound upstream from St. Louis, blew one of its boilers, throwing a sheet of scalding steam and water over the deck passengers, killing twenty-two of them.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Nineteenth Century steamboat men were not more than ordinarily superstitious, but by the 1860s, there did seem to be a disturbing pattern among Mississippi steamboats whose names began with the letter M. They seemed to be cursed.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Captain Jones Worden became such an important Upper Mississippi riverman that he ended up in several biographical dictionaries. In each of these entries, however, several years of his life were erased, all because of a printer's error.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Mark Twain would have us believe that boys along the Mississippi in his day longed to become steamboat captains because of the romance of those floating wedding cakes and the mystery of the great Mississippi itself. A closer look might reveal a deeper and far more American reason to take up steam boating: money.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Growing up in southern Minnesota during World War II, I spent many late-night summer hours under the streetlight with my buddies discussing where we were going when we grew up. It was Alaska or Oregon, New Zealand, the Amazon. Never in that circle of light along the curb did I dream it would be Rock Island, Illinois, where I would be sitting here writing "Rock Island Lines."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Drive with me down the 2,500 miles of Great River Road along the Mississippi from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and let's watch the river grow.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When John Soule advised his Indiana readers in 1851 to "Go West, young man," a phrase Horace Greely later made famous, he was already writing after the fact. By then several hundred steamboats a month were streaming up the Mississippi past Rock Island and Davenport, loaded with young men—and women—with families from the East and the South, from Ireland and Norway, England and Germany heading west to the California gold fields or to the newly opened prairies of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. On the ninth of March in 1837, the Reverend John Brich, an itinerant Presbyterian minister from England, froze to death after his horse fell through the ice of a creek near the Rock Island County border. Reverend Brich hung his saddle bags on a tree and wandered two miles into adjacent Henry County before succumbing to the cold. Had it been the other way around, the American Bible Society may have been five hundred dollars richer, and Rock Island County may have had to settle for a wooden courthouse as was common in other frontier counties, rather than the ornate brick structure with imposing columns and a winding staircase to the second floor that graced Rock Island's courthouse square. Here's what happened.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Prisoners of war have more time to dream than most—and more need to. Defeated fighting for a cause they believed in, surrounded by enemies, cold and hungry, dreams are what they have left.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Benjamin W. Clark was an entrepreneur who planned ahead. Few speculators would have disagreed with his decision to establish a ferry service across the Mississippi just below the mouth of the Rock River. Clark reasoned that the flood of immigrants expected to head for newly opened Iowa farmland would cross the river at the most logical place. Lake Michigan, whose tip was almost due east, prevented those immigrants from going further north, while the multiple channels of the Rock River delta would make it difficult to get to the Davenport ferry upstream at Rock Island. To the south, Illinois was already settled, having become a state in 1818.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Some of the finest schools on the Upper Mississippi River in the 19 th century were the ten-acre rafts of Minnesota and Wisconsin white pine floating down to the sawmills of Rock Island, Davenport, and Moline. The twenty to thirty men who worked on these rafts and steered them down to the mills may not have diagrammed sentences or practiced their multiplication tables along the way, but they learned the habit of attention, and a philosophy of life likely more true than yours or mine.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Visitors who come to the Rock Island Arsenal with preconceived notions of stark, purely functional military architecture are surprised to find a good deal of attention to aesthetics.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When Brigadier General Thomas J. Rodman arrived on Rock Island in 1865 to complete the long-delayed Rock Island Arsenal building at the downstream tip of the island, he was already famous in military circles. He had invented the Rodman Gun, a cannon that lasted as much as twenty times longer than conventional cannon. It was the most formidable weapon of the Civil War.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Whenever I wake to one of those cold, blizzardy mornings tempting me to call in sick, a childhood song floats into my mind. "Over the hill to the poor house." I'm up, shaved, and off to work in ten minutes. The only place worse than hell in my Midwest Lutheran home was the county poor home.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Henry C. Kahl was born poor in a cottage in northwest Davenport, Iowa. He was never a Boy Scout, he was not in school long enough for the deportment side of the report card to instill in him the Protestant work ethic, and there's no indication that he ever read Ben Franklin. It's almost as if Henry knew instinctively that the American dream of "rags to riches" required something more than dreaming.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. "Chippiannock" is a Sauk Indian word meaning "city of the dead," a fit name for the city of Rock Island's first cemetery, ninety-five acres lying on a plateau not far from Saukenuk, where the war chief Black Hawk grew up. The place was originally called Manitou Ridge because of the Indians' belief that here the Great Spirit spread his wings among the hills to keep floods away.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1826 to study its new citizens, he was amazed at their restlessness—moving an average of once every five years—an average that still holds true today.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In the Western Cemetery in Orion, Illinois, just south of here, there is a tombstone with the names of Jessie Colton and Bert Richardson.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The Mississippi is one of those rivers that takes on all comers. Children are easy marks. Just standing them along the shore with a stick to wrinkle the water is all it takes. Fishermen are easy, too. All fishing poles have hooks at both ends, and who pulls in whom is an open question.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. My wife, Margaret, made me promise never ever to use her in these Lines. Of course, I took that to mean she was hoping I would. She's hard to figure out.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. It is hard in our cynical age to imagine the kind of patriotism which made George W. Kinkaid of rural Muscatine, Iowa, leave his wife and plow and march off to the Civil War in 1862.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Here's a short course on the history of work in America. In about 1884, John F. Boepple immigrated from Germany to Muscatine, Iowa. One day he stopped along the Mississippi to watch a dredge boat in operation. The clam shells in the dredged material excited him. He had been a button maker in Germany, and these Mississippi shells were perfect for pearl buttons.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In August of 1863, Union troops arrived on Rock Island to build a prison camp for Confederate prisoners. Beginning with 468 prisoners captured in the Battle of Lookout Mountain, who arrived in December of 1863, the Rock Island Barracks eventually housed more than twelve thousand Confederates. In Gone With the Wind , Margaret Mitchell called it "the Andersonville of the North."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Muscatine, Iowa, a few miles down the Mississippi from here, must have made an impact on George Grey Barnard. Barnard lived there briefly as a teenager from 1877 to 1885 before going on to become an internationally acclaimed sculptor. Late in life, with his work in many museums, Barnard claimed that his inspiration came from Muscatine.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Before you pick up the phone and call in, trust me on this one. No steamboat on the Upper Mississippi River ever had a calliope. On the river, it was always pronounced cally-ope. Steamboat men had minds of their own, and seldom took direction from people on land.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The Mississippi River and history have this in common: neither one always goes where you want it to go. That is why a young man who set out in 1848 to paint the most American painting in the world ended up instead with a book of lithographs of the Mississippi River printed in German.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The word for today is "epiphany"—that moment in the dark reaches of the mind when a light flicks on at two in the morning, and we understand the calculus problem we have been struggling with, or capture just the right image for the poem, or know that it is really love.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If you are at all inclined to superstition, avoid that whole bottom land below Black Hawk State Park where the Rock River meets the Mississippi. It may be haunted.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In 1839, the village of Bloomington just south of here was upgraded to the status of second-class town by the Iowa Legislature. Its city council met only once, and then only to permit grocery stores to sell whiskey. That same year, the Iowa Territorial Legislature officially defined "grocery store" as any establishment that sold whiskey in less than gallon lots.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Susanne Denkmann came from one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Rock Island. She was educated in the most exclusive schools on the East Coast. With her father's money, she could easily have followed the seasons around the world from theater in London to art auctions in Germany to sun on the Mediterranean. By the time she was born in 1872, her father and his partner, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, had already begun to amass a fortune in the logging and lumbering business. Their great log rafts coming down the Mississippi from Wisconsin and Minnesota outnumbered the steamboats. Susanne Denkmann could have become the poor little rich girl, straight out of 19 th century domestic novels. Instead, Susanne Denkmann chose to take seriously the obligation of the rich to help the poor. Government welfare was not yet even a dream. Following a formal education, she enrolled in the Chicago Kindergarten College, and then moved to New York to teach in a
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. With steamboats as with humans, there only are one or two ways of coming into this world, but an infinite number of ways of leaving it.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 sent shock waves around the world. Southern women wrote rebuttal novels showing how wonderful slavery was, Germans set up Uncle Tom shops selling soul food, and Lincoln suggested to Harriet Beecher Stowe that she had brought on the Civil War.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Do you cringe when you see the words "new and improved," because experience has shown you that it often means "costs more and works half as well as the way your grandmother did it"? This story of the Corps of Engineers versus one of the largest obstructions in the Rock Island Rapids is for you.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. To your list of fearless and feisty women—if you keep such a list—please add Kate Perry of Covington, Kentucky. During the Civil War, Miss Kate was the owner, operator, and conductor of her own highly illegal railroad.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. One of the oddest projects ever to reach the Mississippi River was the seventy-five-mile Illinois and Mississippi Canal connecting Rock Island via thirty-three locks with the Illinois River at Hennepin, and from there to Lake Michigan. Completed in 1907, it was too little and too late to save the dwindling steamboat traffic on the Mississippi. It was seldom used, reaching a peak of one six-hundredth of its capacity in 1929 and closing for good in 1951.
This is Roald Tweet in Rock Island. No community in America has arrived until it's had its bank robbery. Preferably, it should be by Jesse James, Dillinger, or Bonnie and Clyde, but in a pinch, just about any robbers will do.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. A local newspaper columnist, noticing the public's general indifference to the less fortunate, frequently asks, "Is anybody there; does anybody care?"
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Nearly all of us spend our lives working. Many of us are hired to fill jobs, some are offered positions; a very few are called.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. As romantic and as mythic as the Mississippi River is, the names of towns sprinkled along its banks are fairly prosaic.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Fortunately for Rock Island, there are some men who cannot bring themselves to tell each other they are sorry, in so many words. They have to do it roundabout.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Like most other idealistic young men and women, new ministers go out to their calls with visions of being good shepherds to their flocks. That was certainly true of the Reverend Michael Hummer who came to organize and pastor a Presbyterian church in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1840.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. There it is, on the first page of the scrapbook. It may be a Congregational church in Geneseo, or a Baptist church in Burlington, or the Presbyterians in Maquoketa, the small clapboard white rectangle of a building is almost identical.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. During the Golden Age of steam boating on the Upper Mississippi River, no job was more critical than that performed by the rapids pilots who were brought on board to take boats safely up or down the treacherous fourteen miles of Rock Island Rapids between LeClaire and Davenport, Iowa. The skill and knowledge of these forty to fifty men has become legendary.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Have you ever noticed how we always measure the speed of an animal against a horse? A horse can outrun a human, but a cheetah can outrun a horse, and so on. In 1836, a steamboat making a run from Rock Island upriver to Galena found out where it belonged on this scale.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Archeologists have shown us how often a prime piece of real estate is used over and over again by newer civilizations. South of here, where the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers meet, at least eight separate civilizations lie piled atop each other.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Those baseball players who momentarily confused Iowa with Heaven in the movie, A Field of Dreams, were not the first to do so. A hundred years earlier, the same thought helped George W. Van Horn of Muscatine rest easy on his death bed.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Do you suppose there is something in the American air that turns our visionaries bi-focal? While English gurus sell all that they have, dress their followers in white, and climb a hill to await the second coming, our Utopianists have always kept one hand on the plow, turning a dollar or two between prayers. The Shakers danced themselves into a celibate religious frenzy, but they weren't above inventing the idea of mail order and selling seed in packages.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Buffalo Bill Cody, the Wild West showman, was fond of saying to Eastern reporters, "I stood between savagery and civilization most my whole life." He should have stood near the joining of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers, the site of one of the largest Indian villages in North America. Here, he would have found a clear contrast between the savage and the civilized.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Now and then, great institutions have beginnings as humble as United States Presidents once needed to get elected. The City of Rock Island can boast at least one such humble beginning.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In real life, there sometimes is such a thing as a straw that breaks the camel's back. For downtown Rock Island, that straw would have to be McCabe's Department Store. In an age where there are few loyalties to place left, it is difficult to explain to newcomers the feelings we Rock Islanders had toward McCabe's.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If there is a rich heart of the heart of the Illinois prairie, it would be Henry County just south of here. In the first decade of its opening to settlement, the county's rich black soil attracted six separate colonizing groups. It's as if every potential Eastern Moses in the 1830s drew lines across the Appalachian wilderness, all of which converged on the same Promised Land—Henry County.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Are you one of those kids whose parents went off to Disney World and all you got was this lousy T-shirt that announced that very thing? Try not to be too jealous of Billy in the following story.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The august members of the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences who met in June of 1869 to vote on the membership of Joseph Duncan Putman must have had a reservation or two. They were only amateur scientists themselves—a penmanship teacher, a public-school teacher, a real estate agent, and a tobacconist who had formed the Academy to combine their personal collections of shells, minerals, bones, and rocks. But Joseph Putnam was only thirteen.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Are you a stressed-out parent who wonders how you are going to get son number one to play practice on time and still rush your daughter to volleyball in time to pick up son number two from Cub Scouts and get him over to Little League? Have I got a role model for you.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Did you ever wonder as a kid what you would do if the world came to an end as you sat in the fifth row of the Crown Theater some Friday, midway through a Gene Autry movie? I mean, would it be okay to finish your Black Crows and popcorn?
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Henry David Thoreau advised the readers of Walden to be tolerant of those who live outside the norm. "Perhaps they hear a different drummer," he said.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Take out a pencil and a piece of paper. A short quiz will do more than just my words to increase your respect for Tom Burns of Galena, Illinois.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Between St. Paul, Minnesota, and St. Louis, Missouri, the Upper Mississippi River once planted a hundred towns beneath the bluffs to do its bidding: to cut wood for steamboats, to assemble log rafts of white pine going downstream to mills, to receive immigrants the river sent up stream to the farmlands of Iowa and Minnesota, to build and repair boats.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. What follows is a word to the wise. Whenever I drive up Brady Street hill in Davenport, Iowa, to the top of the bluffs, and cross Duck Creek, I am remined of that Sunday school song about the wise man and the foolish man. I once knew it by heart. You remember that the foolish man built his house upon the sand, while the wise man built on rock. When the "rains came down and the floods came up," the foolish man's house went "smash."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In those quiet moments of reflection, sitting in your kitchen as the sun rises and the coffee finishes perking, what memories of a lifetime come back strong? Sam Van Sant's story gives us a clue.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. What follows is the story of how Christmas came to the Illinois prairie in 1869, courtesy of a war in Europe.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Among the many religious groups who arrived in our Mississippi River Valley after the Black Hawk War of 1832, each seeking to build its version of Eden, were the Quakers. By 1844, several small Quaker settlements were clustered around what is now West Branch, Iowa.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. By day, Lou Belby is a perfectly normal professor of Spanish and Latin American literature. Late each afternoon he leaves his office and returns to his home in Rock Island. Perhaps he reads the paper, talks over difficult students with his wife, Laura, and sits down to supper.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Are you as worried as I am about the disappearance of the mayflies? June is a poor thing along the Upper Mississippi River without the swarms of those three-inch insects who used to emerge from the river, live for a single night, and then decorate every front porch, store window, streetlight, and sidewalk inches thick with their bodies.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. After walking fifteen hundred miles through woods and forests, up hills and across streams, out over endless prairies, a man is entitled to take a rest under a tree and dream.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. St. Matthew may have known his lilies of the field when he advised us to be like them and "take no thought for the morrow," but he had almost certainly never tried out that wisdom in the pilot house of a Mississippi River steamboat. He would have been catfish bait. Even an apprentice cub knew enough to steer ahead—way, way ahead.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Gambling was present on most passenger boats on the Upper Mississippi River, but it never reached the Hollywood proportions of riverboat gambling on the Lower Mississippi, where plantations, horses, and women were won and lost on the turn of a card. Upper Mississippi gamblers were content if they made two or three hundred dollars a week.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The best of the steamboat captains on the Upper Mississippi River became legends in their own lifetimes for their daring and their skill. Above them all stood William F. Davidson, the only captain to be accorded the honorary rank of Commodore by fellow rivermen. The Commodore was head of the Davidson Line, the largest and most successful line of packet boats on the river. Proud and headstrong, the Commodore made sure both his boats and his crews were shipshape. The Davidson Line ran on time and went where it said it would go.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of those fancy cloth-napkin restaurants you go to for anniversaries? If you decided it's best not to ask, this story is not for you.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Even the most democratic of passengers who boarded a Mississippi steamboat during the golden age of river travel just before the Civil War stepped into a class society. The more affluent tourists—perhaps on a pleasure trip to the Falls of St. Anthony at the head of navigation—were directed to the staterooms of the upper decks. If the beds were too narrow and the rooms a bit too hot or cold, the elite traveler was assured privacy and three sumptuous meals a day on fine china, served by impeccable stewards. At their leisure, they could read or play cards, practice their manners, or even, as Mark Twain reported, occasionally look out at the passing scenery. Removed from the hissing boiler and great engines, they floated up the river.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Animals who kill people are often shot. Humans who do so are tried in court. But what does one do with an inanimate killer? Here's a possibility.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The following story about the Mississippi River is not worth telling. Unlike those river events that make the six o'clock news and bring Presidents and politicians running with promises of relief: floods that shut down River Drive or breached levees, swallowed farms and towns or washed away bridges.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. By the time the famous evangelist, Billy Sunday, came to the city of Rock Island for a six-week crusade in the fall of 1919, he was already experienced in taking on adversaries of all shapes and sizes, from the beer drinker to the devil himself.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. "Timing is everything," as Reverend James L. Delk could tell you after a summer of revival meetings in the city of Rock Island in 1919.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Before Billy Sunday moved into the big time as the evangelist to America's great urban centers, he practiced his techniques and his messages for ten years among the small Iowa and Illinois towns of the corn belt. One of the last of these small-town crusades came in 1905, in Aledo, Illinois, a few miles south of here.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Had a Rock Island County man not lost his temper back in 1895, the American cattle industry would have taken a different turn. Meet Herman H. Haaff, a farmer who took the bull by the horns.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. I see that the starving artists are back at the Holiday Inn again for their annual sale, room 211. What would those artists do without rivers? Any painting over $19.95 is bound to have a stream or a rivulet winding through it, perhaps even the sweet Afton flowing gently.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The communities clustered along the Mississippi around Rock Island have contributed their share of sports heroes to American folklore. There's Roger Craig in football, Gene Oliver in baseball, and Jack Fleck, the golfer who beat Ben Hogan in the U. S. Open.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Ed Lamp is 97 years old. He still lives by himself in one of a cluster of small homes and cottages along the Rock River, a mile or so from where the Rock empties into the Mississippi. The homes are hidden from busy Black Hawk Road by a row of industries. The only access is a nearly invisible gravel road. The owners prefer it that way.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The first few minutes of a war are exciting. Some madness seems to make men eager to leave home and family to hunt each other down.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. We Rock Island Lutherans don’t take much stock in the doctrine of predestination—except when it comes to church potlucks. Somewhere in the fine print of the Augsburg Confession, the early church fathers determined that Lutherans whose last names begin with A through K must always bring salads to church suppers.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If you come for a visit to our Mississippi Valley and want to bring a souvenir back to the relatives in Potosi, Wisconsin, here's some advice. Avoid those cute ashtrays made in Taiwan that say, "Greetings from the Quad Cities," or the bumper stickers that say, "Support mental health or I'll kill you." Instead, take a walk along some of the more out-of-the-way stretches of our Mississippi River, where the current has deposited a stash of old clam shells. With any luck, you'll soon find one that resembles a Swiss cheese—with half-inch holes over the whole shell.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If you have ever visited the Battlefield of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, you may have seen the statue of John Buford at the northwest entrance. An inscription reads: In memory of Major General John Buford, commanding the First Division Cavalry Corps, Army of the Potomac, who with the first inspiration of a cavalry officer selected this battlefield July 1, 1863.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The most famous steamboat race ever chronicled on the Upper Mississippi River was between a tortoise and a hare in 1856. And as you learned in the pages of your third-grade reader, such a race is not always a foregone conclusion.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Even the Mississippi River seems to know when it has crossed the Mason-Dixon line. The Upper Mississippi is a Yankee protestant-work-ethic river, always busy. The lower Mississippi below Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio comes in, is a grander, more leisurely affair—a world of colonels and judges and mint juleps. No wonder that Currier and Ives chose to immortalize the steamboat race between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee rather than between the small, plain packet boats north of St. Louis.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Galena, Illinois, a hundred miles upriver, must be one of the more unusual small towns along the Upper Mississippi River. When Galena found herself further and further behind in the frantic race toward the twenty-first century, with wider streets, brighter lights, more super stores and mega malls, she stopped for a breather, and then began running backwards toward the nineteenth century.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If you are old enough, you may remember the good old days when the 4 th of July was still called "The Glorious Fourth"—those days when it was still possible to set off rockets and cherry bombs and make some real noise. Sparklers and cones that give off six seconds of green smoke are hardly glorious.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. What follows is a tale of two cities: London, England, and Moline, Illinois. Each city has its own version of the tale. Only this last paragraph is the same: On a terrace in Moline's Riverside Cemetery, high in the bluffs above Moline, in Lot No. 1,235, under an epitaph that reads "take ye heed, watch and pray, for ye know not when the time is," lies Captain Francis Jeffrey Dickens, an officer in the Canadian Mounted Police and the third son of the English novelist, Charles Dickens.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. One of the most enduring of American characters is the tinkerer, that small-time amateur inventor who turns bits of junk into strange but often workable machines that fly or kill mice or slice bread. Most remain unknown except to very patient spouses, but a few, like the Wright brothers, tinker their way into history.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Between 1933 and 1939, the entire Upper Mississippi from St. Louis to St. Paul changed personalities, courtesy of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Until 1933, the Mississippi was a wild river, coming and going as it pleased, creating islands and washing them away, teasing steamboats. In that year a dam and two locks were completed between Davenport and Rock Island—a massive structure looking like it was fresh off a solidarity poster.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The City of Rock Island might well have become the chair capitol of the world, had it not been for an actress named Lilian Lewis.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If the following story is not true, it should be. It involves two Illinois folk heroes, Abraham Lincoln and the traveling evangelist, Peter Cartwright. Most counties in Illinois have Lincoln and Cartwright stories. We Rock Islanders deserve ours. The story began as unsubstantiated rumor, but by the time Carl Sandburg wrote his biography of Lincoln, it had become fact.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Circuses and other entertainments seldom live up to their billing, but the five thousand spectators who streamed into the City of Rock Island on October 29 th , 1845, to enjoy its first public hanging were more than satisfied, despite jangled nerves created by traffic jams of wagons on every road into town.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If you passed through fourth grade any time before 1947, you, too, memorized Eugene Field's poem, "Little Boy Blue." That was where you learned about "the little toy dog" covered with dust, "but sturdy and staunch he stands" in the old armchair alongside the toy soldier red with rust, whose musket molds in his hands—faithful even in death.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Safe in the Vatican, Pope Leo the Thirteenth was probably not aware in the spring of 1887 that a stack of lumber in front of the W. J. Young Lumber Company in Clinton, Iowa, was about to cause him some grief. That lumber was the first domino in a chain of bigotry that got out of hand.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. By 1850, fifteen years after their founding, the three small villages around Rock Island were on their way to becoming frontier Edens—if not spiritually in the Genesis sense, then certainly within the framework of the American Dream. For Davenport, Rock Island, and Moline, waterpower was plentiful to make goods, and the Mississippi was there to ship the goods via the Ohio to eastern markets. The supply of labor exactly matched the demand, due to the stream of families moving west toward the farmlands of Iowa and Minnesota. If there was work, some of the westward movers stayed; if there was none, they kept moving west.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Remember that Weekly Reader joke: "what does a fifteen-hundred-pound gorilla eat? Answer: "Anything it wants." Substitute a 2,500-mile river for the gorilla, and you'll have some idea of the awe in which we valley dwellers hold the Mississippi.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Of at least one Rock Islander, Benjamin Dann Walsh, it can truly be said that there was some good news and some bad news. The good news was that early on the morning of November 12, 1869, as he was collecting bugs along the Chicago and Rock Island railroad tracks near 34 th Street in Rock Island, a Chicago bound train ran over his left leg.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Less than a hundred miles north of this island lies a cornfield made popular by the movie Field of Dreams . It's not alone. Travel a hundred miles in any direction up or down the Mississippi Valley, and you will find the remains of dreams—of Edens and Utopias—wherever you go. As if the Mississippi itself were a magnet drawing dreamers to its banks.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Even today, Easterners view the Midwest as far better ground in which to plant corn than culture. They would almost certainly have held out little hope that Edward Spencer would make something of himself in this world. Edward was the first child born in Stephenson—the town that later became Rock Island.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Think of Chicago as our Philistine giant, Goliath, and all the small Illinois villages and towns as so many Davids, each hoping it might have a change to sling a stone in just the right place. That kind of thinking led the cities of Rock Island and Moline to one of their rare moments of cooperation. Two Davids, they reasoned, might have a chance.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In the early twentieth century, the towns of Davenport and Rock Island facing each other across the Mississippi seemed to be contending for the title of "Sin City."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Before you decide to become a celebrity, hear out the story of Daniel Smith Harris, a man who tried too hard to live up to his reputation.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Fourteen miles upstream from Rock Island, Highway 67 becomes the main street of LeClaire, Iowa, a river town founded by the Indian interpreter, Antoine LeClaire, in 1837.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In the 1930s, children growing up near 34 th Street and 10 th Avenue in the city of Rock Island had a distinct advantage over Greek children growing up in sight of Mt. Olympus. On 34 th Street, the gods were visible. Each weekday morning, they emerged from their houses and walked a block down the hill to their classrooms at Augustana College.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Until 1961, Rock Islanders could get a free education in one of two ways: they could spend their half hour a day reading the Harvard Classics, that five-foot shelf of books containing everything worth knowing, and be educated in seven years. The more restless could simply climb Brady Street Hill in Davenport to wander the campus of Palmer College of Chiropractic and read the graffiti.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When a person starts out by saying, "I ain't got no story to tell," you'll want to perk up your ears. You know what's coming is going to be good.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. She has grown old gracefully into her eighty-one years. For her, no face lifts, no tummy tucks. No owner has ever tried to cover up the great arched ceiling, or the 10,000 square foot hard maple floor that gave her the name Coliseum or that identified her birthday as early twentieth century.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Do you ever wish you could speak a second language? You already do: English. Let me explain. It will help you understand what Mark Twain and our other Mississippi Valley writers all are about.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Before you bemoan once more the decline of the American family from those good old days pictured in The Reader's Digest , re-read Huckleberry Finn . There, a hundred years ago, underneath the wild cast of characters and their comic adventures, Mark Twain portrayed a Mississippi Valley littered with troubled families who would be right at home on today's talk shows.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Take a letter: To Harold Ross, Editor, The New Yorker magazine, New York.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. We Rock Islanders like to think of ourselves as the heart of the heart of the country. How do you think we might have reacted way back in 1886 to an English citizen coming to lecture us on how to run our American government? And then suppose that the lecture is an attack on capitalism and a defense of socialism. And that the lecturer is a woman. And not just any woman, but the daughter of the already infamous Karl Marx.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Note 1876 on your calendar as the year Americans discovered childhood. That year Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer .
This is Roald Tweet in Rock Island. "Abracadabra," and "Open, Sesame," can't possibly match the three magic words which end this Rock Island story.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Landscape painters who sketch mountains and lakes have it easy. Their subjects fit so neatly into a well-proportioned frame of canvas.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Patriotism can sometimes be devoted to an idea as well as to a country. Take the German immigrants who settled in Davenport, Iowa, just across the river in 1848. That year, 250 of them arrived to build new lives after the failure of the revolution in Germany. They were the first of many others from Schleswig-Holstein who came to Davenport.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The Greek strongman, Hercules, performed his twelve labors satisfactorily, but had the gods really wanted to test his strength, they would have added a thirteenth task: taking a keelboat up the Mississippi River from New Orleans all the way to the Falls of St. Anthony.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Whenever we peaceful types are reminded that the pen is mightier than the sword, we feel better. We often forget that bad guys have pens, too.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. At five in the afternoon on Washington's Birthday in 1854, a small locomotive gaily decorated in streamers and bunting pulled six bright yellow coaches into the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad passenger house in Rock Island where it was met with cheers and celebrations. Newspaper accounts made it seem like early versions of the Little Engine that Could, or even Walt Disney World.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Every community seems to have one man so important he is known only by his first two initials. Talk about "F.W." or "J.J." and cartoon images spring to mind of a fat and somewhat sinister millionaire tycoon, a babe on each arm, lighting a “seegar” with a fifty-dollar bill.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Habits die hard. Men and boys once stood along the levees and landings near Rock Island to watch steamboats come and go. Today, we Rock Islanders still come out to the levees, parks, and blufftops to watch the seasons flow along the valley. As if pulled on invisible threads by migrating ducks and geese, spring and summer pass us heading north to St. Paul. At the other end of the year, fall and winter arrive from the north, destined for St. Louis and New Orleans.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Often it happens that Rock Islanders tell their own stories best. Here is one from Dr. Alex Stone, a retired veterinarian who has been writing stories and tales of the local Jewish community for the past seven years.
This is Roald Tweet, on Rock Island. One January morning, Rock Islanders woke to fourteen inches of snow. It fell fast, blowing into drifts on the downwind side of fences and bushes and in the corners of porches.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If you're on a tight budget and can't afford that nine-thousand-dollar cruise around the world in 80 days, drop over to Rock Island. We can show you how to make pretty much the same trip in three days for $142.50 including tips.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Earlier this summer, Father James Grubb celebrated the 40 th year of his ordination with a solemn High Mass at his church in Ottumwa, Iowa. Father Grubb is ultra- conservative. His church is one of few in Iowa offering masses in Latin. As music for his anniversary, he chose Gregorian chants.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In 1856, Rock Island became a battleground in the transportation wars. In May of that year, the tracks of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad spanned the river here on the first bridge ever to cross the Mississippi River. Steamboat men were unhappy; they did not relish the competition. We were here first, they said.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The Swedish immigrants who came to the Rock Island area by the hundreds in the 1880s and ‘90s to work for John Deere brought with them a rich folk literature which they have kept alive to this day.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. You may have heard of Huckleberry Finn who once lived a hundred miles or so downstream of Rock Island. Huck never told a lie, but he wasn't above telling what he called "stretchers" now and then.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Early each March, we Rock Islanders who plan to attend the spring concert begin taking our places in the amphitheater we call the Mississippi Valley. Spring on Rock Island is the overture to the grand symphony of summer.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Every few decades, the cities surrounding Rock Island come down with a severe case of togetherness. They shift into a mode of cooperation and love, much like brothers who have not spoken to each other for years, and suddenly make plans for a grand reunion.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. “There is no zeal like a convert's zeal,” goes an old truism. That is doubly true when it comes to the computer. Those over fifty who suddenly discover computers are soon long gone down the information highway.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. There is local geological evidence that the Great Deluge began at Rock Island. God practiced flooding the Mississippi River before sending Noah on his lonely voyage atop the world.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Forget the image of frontier schools you've seen in Westerns and on television: rough wooden benches and an incompetent school master teaching by switch. We Rock Islanders have always preferred something more refined. The first schools followed the first settlers to this area by less than three years. By 1850, Davenport could boast ten schools and Rock Island, five.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. What follows is a second-hand Rock Island story; I was not there. It may be one of those stories that are true rather than factual. It is a story about how people find their places in a community, how one person becomes the man who runs the 4 th of July parade and another becomes the lady who finally told off the banker.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The Mississippi River Valley in which Rock Island nestles is lovely, but there is a lonely beauty, too, above the bluffs. Where the tallgrass prairies once stretched out for more than two hundred miles in every direction, now lies a checkerboard of corn, soybeans, and pasture, with small towns scattered far apart on this flat board like checkers in a game almost over.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Imagine what the view from Rock Island must have been like just before the Civil War, when some 1,500 steamboats a month passed the island, carrying immigrants north to Midwest farms, and produce from those farms south to St. Louis markets. The Mississippi River steamers ranged from small, basket-ball-court sized packet boats with paddle wheels in the rear to 300-foot-long football field models with two side wheels, the most haunting and romantic mode of transportation ever devised.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Even in ancient Greece, professors were accused of having their heads in the clouds. Their places of work are still called "ivory towers." Before you agree, listen to this Rock Island story.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Of all the trees that inhabit the Mississippi River Valley, the most common are certainly the several species of willow that grow thick on the islands and bottomlands and along the sloughs of the main channel.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. I beg to differ with The New Yorker magazine. In their first issue in 1926, they announced that they were not writing for "the little old lady from Dubuque [Iowa]." Easterners passing through Rock Island still sometimes wonder if we have electric lights or indoor plumbing.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The designer of the stage on which we Rock Islanders act out our lives—our seven parts—does good work, but he's awfully slow.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Three years ago, a colleague of mine bought a house in a small town south of Rock Island. When she decided to get a leaking eavestrough fixed, she chose to use local labor rather than the professionals without realizing that she was also choosing a lifestyle.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. George Washington never slept here. You can't visit Rock Island and sleep in the same bed for an extra nine dollars a night the way you can up and down the east coast. You'll just have to settle for Robert E. Lee.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Folks around Rock Island don't take much stock in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. None of those wonders did any work. The pyramids in Egypt and the Colossus of Rhodes merely took up space.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Cindy Weretheman lived near Rock Island for almost twenty-four years. For the last four of those years, she taught me something about light.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Consider this an advanced warning should you decide to invite a Rock Islander into your home for dinner. Like most Midwesterners, we inhabitants of the Upper Mississippi Valley speak a dialect that may need translating.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Several months ago, I went to Anna V. Larson's funeral at St. John's Lutheran Church in Rock Island. It was one of those passings that people call "a blessing." Anna was well up in her eighties and for the last ten years or so had lived in excruciating pain from a pinched nerve. She needed a walker to shuffle even small distances. One or two Sundays a year, she actually skipped church.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Just as Adam named all the flora and fauna in the Garden of Eden, so we Rock Islanders give names to the landscape around us in order to show our control—our dominion. Valleys have names, as do the bluffs. Even the smallest ponds and creeks have names. And of course, every human construct has a name, too: 38 th St., the Kahl Building.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Newspaper editors are almost as apt as other folks to change their minds when a better idea comes along. Here's a local example.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. On May 10, 1823, at about noon, a small sternwheel steamboat drew within sight of Fort Armstrong at the western tip of Rock Island. She was greeted by a welcome salute cannon from the fort and musket fire from the Sauk and Meskwaki Indians along the shore.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. A while back I told you about a local professor whose grand imagination represents the pinnacle of professor-dom. I'm afraid I can't tell you his name. A major university would certainly snatch him away from our small local college.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Fourteen miles upstream from Rock Island at the head of the Rock Island Rapids, sits the small town of LeClaire, Iowa, home of several restaurants and gas stations. Its claim to fame is that Buffalo Bill lived here briefly as a child.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Few people around Rock Island had ever seen a downtown die. Since Midwest towns began to sprout up in the 19th century, downtowns big and small had been the heart of American culture. Here we gathered for our social moments. From benches in the park we watched the seasons pass and stood each 4th of July to hear the Gettysburg Address after the parade. Here we came on Friday nights when the stores stayed open to shop and discuss life in small groups around streetlights, while the kids watched the free movies in the vacant lot. Here we came after church four times a year to eat Sunday dinner at the hotel.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Recently I saw an announcement for one of those motivational workshops titled "Be the engine of your life, not the caboose." Here's a story about one woman who did not need that workshop.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In almost any city near Rock Island, residents can walk you through their neighborhoods and name the houses: there's the Potter House, the Mitchell house, the Cable home, the Looney mansion, and so on.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Rock Island sits almost in the center of a sea of grass that once covered much of the American heartland. The story of how this tallgrass prairie became the breadbasket of the United States is a lesson in how the past can deceive as well as teach.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. This past winter an unusually large number of crows have come to the downstream tip of Rock Island each morning to scavenge pieces of leftover fish from the bald eagles’ previous day's hunt. The ice is dotted with crows looking like black lumps of coal.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. It may have been the oldest hotel in North America. Unlike most hotels, it improved with age. For Upper Mississippi raftsmen and river pilots, the Green Tree Hotel at the head of the Rock Island Rapids in Le Claire, Iowa, was home away from home during the last half of the 19th century.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. It's a tired cliché to say that life is like a road, full of bends, hills, forks and potholes. Or that we are like ships on tempest-tossed seas, sailing toward safe harbors. Or that life, as Shakespeare says, is like a stage.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Tornados, earthquakes, and lightning have this in common: they come quick without warning, like cats pouncing on mice. Hurricanes, volcanos, and forest fires move more slowly, give warning, and even then, they often veer off, suspending their sentence of doom.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Thoreau was only one of many Americans who favored experience as the best teacher. "Who would know knives better," he asked in Walden, "a boy who went to Harvard and took classes in metallurgy, or a boy who mined and smelted his own iron ore, hammered out a knife blade on an anvil, tempered the blade and sharpened it?"
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Anyone who has raised chickens understands "pecking order." A hundred new baby chicks let loose in a farm yard will run around nervous and upset until each chicken knows exactly her place, content—except for the bottom three who have been pecked to death—content to know they are number ten, number 58, and so on.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. To cooperate or to compete is one of those dilemmas at the heart of the American experience. Is that classroom best which turns students into rugged individuals competing for the single A, or should students be put in groups to solve problems as a team?
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. For a nine-year-old cowboy—me in the 1940s—there was no badder bad guy than an Indian. Cap guns blazing, my buddies and I regularly put away dozens of Indians every summer evening, skillfully avoiding a massacre. Contrast this with a real massacre. It's August the 1 st , 1832. In Wisconsin, where the Bad Axe River flows into the Mississippi, several hundred Sauk Indians—men, women, and children—are trapped. They are the remnants of a thousand Sauk under their leader, Black Hawk, who have been fleeing from Federal troops, Rock Island Rangers, and Illinois militia since April, when they violated a treaty never to return to Illinois. They have been chased up the Rock River into southern Wisconsin, and then west to the Mississippi—an event that history would glorify as the Black Hawk War. They are exhausted, and so hungry they have taken to eating tree bark. As they attempt to cross the river, the Sauk are met by the Federal steamboat Warrior, whose
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In July of 1863, Union troops arrived on this island to build a prison. By December, some 5,600 Confederates—many captured during the Battle of Lookout Mountain—had arrived here to face one of the worst winters on record in Rock Island. By March, 679 prisoners had died.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Like all humans who put words on paper, I suffer from bouts of Writer's Block. I think, how many Rock Island Lines can there be; what stories are left to tell? I've done them all.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Henry County just south of Rock Island is a farm county of formerly rolling prairie, as if gentle ocean swells had solidified, crested now with corn and soybeans. In the shallow valleys between the swells, small streams feed stands of willow and cottonwood trees.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. You may know that professors before they go out to colleges and universities to teach take an oath to never ever have a practical thought. Don't want to tarnish the image of the Ivory Tower.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Remember that doll that sat forgotten in a corner of your room when you were a kid, until a visiting cousin found it and loved it. Suddenly, it became your favorite doll, too, and you wanted it back.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Remember the Phoenix, that Arabian bird that lived for five hundred years, then consumed itself on a funeral pyre, and was reborn from its own ashes?
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. What would a town look like with its clothes off? We Rock Islanders found out in the 1960s.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Ever wonder what it must have been like to live in Old Testament times and have one of those prophets next door watching your every move?
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When that anonymous philosopher claimed that women's place was in the home, communities around Rock Island were apparently not listening. By 1900, few other areas of the Mississippi Valley offered women as many clubs with which to improve their minds, hearts, spirits, or social status.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Some promotions take place only after death. For many years, a number of large oval photographs of 19th century Engineer boats lay scattered around the headquarters of the Rock Island District Engineers. They were cyanotypes—looking more like blue-prints than photos. Many had already been pitched during periodic house cleanings.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When you were little, do you remember your parents telling you to look both ways when crossing the street, and then do it twice more? Paying close attention is good advice as a number of old upper Mississippi steamboat pilots could tell you.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Most cities in the United States feel slightly un-American if they can't boast at least one outlaw or crook of some stature, a Capone or a Jesse James.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. It's there, everywhere. Our skyscrapers rest on it, it lies under the wheels of our cars from New York to San Francisco, but I don't suppose your average person thinks about concrete more than once a week or so.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Most of us first learn about Chicago from a poem in tenth grade. "Hog Butcher for the World," the poem shouts, "Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads...Stormy, husky, brawling..."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. One of the first things we learn about America in grade school is that we are a melting pot. "Here," a French observer of the new America wrote just after the Revolution, "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men." The pot in "melting pot" came from a 19th century play in which immigrants in their native costumes came on stage, passed behind a huge foundry cauldron for melting iron, and emerged on the other side dressed in blue coveralls carrying lunch buckets, and, of course, all speaking English.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Last January the seed catalogs arrived as usual amid the cold winds and snows. I was lost in a spectacular imaginary garden composed from the catalog illustrations until I came to "new this year" and discovered the "grow your own morel mushroom kit" for $19.95.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Americans have always been fond stories reminding us of "how the West was won." A young boy from LeClaire, Iowa, just upstream from Rock Island, could tell you, instead, how the west was lost. He played a role in that story.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. It is hard to believe that this November, after forty-nine years of teaching English literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, Dr. Dorothy Parkander will retire. She will be seventy-one. Generations of English majors have absorbed her lectures on Chaucer, Milton, Donne, and Austen, but the must-take course for business major and pre-med alike has been World Literature and its centerpiece, Homer's Odyssey. Twice a year, Dorothy has taken forty or fifty students from farms in Iowa, small Illinois towns or Chicago suburbs, and launched them from the second floor of Old Main out across the wine-dark seas in an adventure as awe-filled as any Odysseus took, and returned them safe again to Room 220 in time for the final examination. But never quite comfortable again. Many students marked this course as the start of their own restless wanderings in realms of knowledge and imagination they had never dreamed of back in Rockford or Peoria. They are
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Had the Illinois Department of Transportation been better historians, they never would have tangled with the women of Meredosia. In the past, women with a plan have stopped wars and brought down dictatorships, so the good old boys at the state capitol were easy pickings.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The cities around Rock Island have contributed their share of performers to the nation's media—to Hollywood, Broadway, to newspapers, radio and television. But none was more successful or colorful than Harry R. “Tim” Moore.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. "No prophet is without honor, save in his own country," says the Good Book. In the past ten years, Rock Islanders have learned just how true that is.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. You remember the opening number of Fiddler on the Roof ? "Tradition," Tevye cries, frightened by the changes the Russian revolution is bringing to his small Jewish community, "without tradition, we are all as shaky fiddlers on the roof."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Of the thousand or more island sprinkled on the Upper Mississippi River, only one is fit for that Biblical wise man: the solid limestone bed of Rock Island. Foolish men have their choice of any of the others, from St. Paul to St. Louis, all of them made of slippery silt or sand. As the Sunday School song says, "when the rains come down and the floods come up" . . . watch out foolish man.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. As with most rough river towns along the Upper Mississippi, Rock Islanders have had their share of sin. In 1903, Bishop Henry Cosgrove visited Davenport, Iowa, and declared it "the wickedest city for its size in America."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When it comes to saints, we Scandinavian Lutherans around Rock Island have a poor track record. We have only one—Saint Olaf—born in 995 A.D. For the last thousand years, it's been slim pickings—not a one. Your Lutheran saint is an endangered species.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The Rock Island Lines steam engine passenger trains have been silent for more than forty years now, but I can still shut my ears and hear the two-toned whistle (more if you listened carefully). No one could mistake that sound, even miles away, for anything but a train. Even today, its twin notes remind me of why the railroad still haunts our American dreams though it has all but disappeared from the landscape.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. We all know people who have grown up to fit their names. At least one town near Rock Island did just that.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Mark Twain held a very peculiar idea about literature. He thought that books ought to tell the truth. It’s a lesson he learned from the river itself.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The average Rock Islander wastes two hours, sixteen minutes, thirty-four seconds each day. Don't judge. If the truth be told, you are likely little better than average.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Are you one of those who feels the world is going by your window too fast, blurred like a video on fast-forward? Before stress gets the best of you, pay a visit to Rock Island, and let us put you on one of the Mississippi River's moving islands.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Rock Island Lines is permitted two commercials a year. This is one of them.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Once upon a time near Rock Island, there was a hardware store that did not take American Express. It didn’t take Visa or Mastercard, either. It took cash. And what it did with cash is an amazing story.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Everywhere along our valley, the front porch is an endangered species. The new suburban homes in the better developments rippling out across the countryside festoon themselves with postage stamp patios and multi-level decks, but never a front porch. In the older neighborhoods, one by one, the front porches are being remodeled into extra rooms or ripped off to be replaced by anemic front stoops.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In patches of virgin Illinois woods near Rock Island, one can still find remnants of the Sauk Indian Trail at least two hundred years old. This trail once ran from the nearby Indian village of Saukenuk, across Illinois to the tip of Lake Michigan, and from there north to the English fort at Malden, Canada.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The next time you turn on your IBM or Macintosh to e-mail a daughter or figure your income tax, take a moment as the screen warms to say "thank you" to a nameless, not-quite-respectable bar in Rock Island, Illinois, the birthplace of the modern digital computer.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Someone once remarked that there is no zeal like a convert's—an apt description of the Germans from Schleswig-Holstein who came to America following the failure of the 1848 Revolution in Europe.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. As the winds of change blew down the Mississippi River and through the halls of higher learning in the 1960s, more than a few classrooms around Rock Island began teaching students to be lemons.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. One of the great teachers of writing in the Rock Island area is no more. Now, would-be writers must sit in other classrooms on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and do their assignments.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Rock Island has its share of "tail-wags-dog" stories. In one of them, the tail became the dog.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. For twenty years, Marian Lardner taught kindergarten at Earl Hansen School in the city of Rock Island.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Most of us Rock Islanders go about our business efficiently. We dress, drink our coffee, put in our eight hours, eat, and turn on the television.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Very few heroes apply for the job. Most, like the Rock Islander whose story this is, change the course of history not by sword and shield, but simply by reaching a point where they must stand up and be counted.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Back in the 1850s, Chicago challenged St. Louis to a duel—a duel that was fought at Rock Island.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. For Rock Islanders, July 1915 is another date that should live in infamy.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Within a few miles of Rock Island lie several prehistoric mounds of the kind that dot much of the Mississippi River basin between Ohio and the Mississippi River.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. For several years in the 1980s, there was a night janitor at a local college library who was as interesting as any of the books. As with many school janitors, sweeping was only a cover job; his real purpose for working in a library was to corner patrons who came there eager for knowledge and set them straight before they reached the shelves of books and became contaminated.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. How could you and I have let America's railroads die?
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Two great rivers flow past Rock Island on their way to the Gulf of Mexico. One of these has a name, the Upper Mississippi. Storied, mythic, shining. Native Americans traveled this river ten thousand years ago, followed by explorers, trappers, missionaries, by Mark Twain, by steamboats and tourists, by barges of corn and soybeans.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Don't bother to ask anyone in Chicago for directions to Rock Island. They don't know. They don't care. Their answer for any location in Illinois outside that growth at the tip of Lake Michigan is, "It's downstate."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Within ten miles of Rock Island, four hundred and ninety-three restaurants lie in wait, menus at attention. Four hundred and seventy-nine of these serve pizza, spaghetti, salmon in dill sauce, hot beef sandwiches, Iowa pork chops, pancakes, along with potatoes that are hashed, mashed, baked, creamed, or French, cottage, or home fried. Customers sit, order, eat, tip and leave.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. As a child, you learned that it's possible for a kingdom to be lost for want of a nail. Long ago near Rock Island, it worked the other way: because of a small kindness a city was built.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Have you ever regretted a decision that seemed absolutely right at the time? Here's a local example.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. I know a story about three magic seeds, far more powerful than Jack and his beans that grew up to the clouds.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. No sooner had the dust of the Civil War settled than the fledgling cities around Rock Island decided to make something of themselves in this world. That meant not only business and industry, but culture.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Have you been on so many vacations that you've seen it all?
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Father Bonn was one of Rock Island's saints. He lived in a dark two-room basement apartment with a hot plate in a dying corner of Davenport, Iowa, across the river. He had retired from the priesthood, but often, from his small cupboard, he fed the hungry with rabbit stew, clothed the poor and uplifted the drowning in spirit.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Two years ago, January, I stood along the Straits of Magellan with a group of Rock Island college students traveling in South America.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In an age that is losing touch with its roots, Rock Islanders are fortunate. Immigrants to this area have preserved at least some of their language. From Swedish, Spanish, Greek and German, to Chippewa and Chinese, we are still a mosaic of American cultures.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Walk down to the river's edge anywhere near Rock Island and you’ll see them. Lone men and women standing or sitting along the shore facing the water.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. On April the first, in 1980, a federal judge ordered the liquidation of the great Rock Island Lines. Local citizens who had long since stopped traveling by rail flocked like vultures to bid on odds and ends of memorabilia for basement bars.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. No Rock Islander has ever searched for the Holy Grail, or climbed a beanstalk, or chased strange women with a glass slipper.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Very few heroes apply for the job. Most, like the Rock Islander whose story this is, change the course of history not by sword and shield, but simply by reaching a point where they must stand up and be counted.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1993 affected Rock Islanders in different ways. To me, it recalled a Minnesota childhood in a world still cleanly divided into good little children and bad children.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. It’s customary, they say, for the captain to go down with his ship. But for loyalty, here's a Rock Island story that could teach even captains a lesson.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Frequent visitors to Rock Island have noticed a peculiarity along the Upper Mississippi Valley: the towns on the west bank are grander than those across the river on the east.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If people took professors more seriously, this would be a better world.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Several times a day, airplanes descend over Rock Island, riding the wind down toward the airport, one or two hundred passengers at a time returning home from the world, from Bangkok and Buenos Aires, Fiji and Frankfort.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Before I moved to the Mississippi River, I used to worry about God. He never seemed to have much fun. Oh, no question but that he did good work. His zebra had just the right proportion of black and white stripes, his giraffe's neck and back were so angled as to make you want to slide down it like a bannister, and his elephant looked exactly the way an animal named elephant should look like.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. For the past ten years, Rock Island has suffered a plague of those silly signs now seen almost everywhere—signs with little red X's that say, "You are here."
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Like most Midwesterners, the folks who live around Rock Island are sturdy, but cautious. Seldom the first to try a new breakfast food. We like our bridges solid. Even here, however, there live occasional entrepreneurs who thrive on crossing creeks by leaping from stone to slippery stone.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. A few days ago, I stopped in at a New Age bookstore and coffee house near Rock Island to browse.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Folks around here once took their right to vote seriously. They cared about who won.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. We Rock Islanders who live along the Mississippi River don't hold much for lakes, those little puddles that dot the landscape up above the bluffs interrupting good corn or soybean acreage.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Looking for an idea to spice up your next garage sale? Have I got an idea for you, fresh from the first farmers who arrived in this area in the 1830s to begin making a breadbasket out of the Iowa and Illinois prairies.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. This story is on the sad side—one of the tribal tales we pass on to our children in hopes of sending them into the world with sturdier values.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island Several weeks ago, I was invited to a local elementary school to do a writing workshop. I did not need to be asked twice to spend a morning. Children are always a tonic against my sagging faith.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In the spring of 1816, troops of the Eighth United States Infantry landed on Rock Island and built a fort to protect Americans traders from British fur interests, and to facilitate trade with the peaceful Sauk and Mesquawki tribes.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. While the Sixties were ripping and rending the social fabric of America, on Rock Island it was still 1954. We forgot to wind our clocks.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Few Rock Islanders can so clearly see the results of the good they do in this world as Jimmy, the Lamp.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. On any summer day, barring tornados and floods, men and women line the Davenport levee wall across from Rock Island, stoic sentinels of their fishing poles.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Whoever made that silk purse out of a sow's ear has nothing on the citizens of Oquawka, Illinois, just downstream from Rock Island. Several years back, they made a summer festival out of a dead elephant.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Rock Island is a three-mile-long limestone kidney plunked down in the Upper Mississippi River, midway between St. Paul, Minnesota, and St. Louis, Missouri, the only stone island in the whole river.