This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
For the past one hundred and fifty years, Minnesota has been trying to decide whether George Catlin did a good thing or a bad thing. That's why there is still not a single statue of him anywhere in the state.
At first, Catlin seemed to have done a good thing. Already a famous painter, writer, and explorer of the American west, George Catlin was looking for material in 1835 when he took a steamboat from St. Louis up the Mississippi to see the Falls of St. Anthony and Fort Snelling.
Catlin was amazed. The scenery, the bluffs, the islands, the river itself, just got better and better. He was, he says, riveted to the deck of the steamer through sunshine, lightning, or rain.
Catlin proposed that a voyage on the Upper Mississippi become America's "Fashionable Tour," our version of the fashionable tour through Europe taken by wealthy English families. He outlined a steamboat trip that would take tourists to Rock Island, Galena, Dubuque, Prairie du Chien, and Lake Pepin, and then to St. Anthony Falls.
Catlin admitted that this was only a small part of the Great American West, but it had one advantage over the wild west. "It's the only part to which ladies can have access," he said.
George Catlin's idea of the fashionable tour caught on, and each year more and more sightseers came upriver to see what was soon to be the State of Minnesota. Elizabeth Hamilton, widow of Alexander Hamilton made the trip in 1837, and gave the tour her stamp of approval after reporting red carpet treatment.
And now for the bad news. Not all these tourists found Minnesota charming. They made fun of primitive St. Paul, then called Pig's Eye Island. The famous Capt. Marryat made the trip and described the Mississippi as nothing more than a great sewer. The historian Charles Francis Adams said that St. Paul “has a more ragged and uninviting look than even western towns commonly have.”
Minnesota was sorry these uncouth tourists had come, and blamed George Catlin for starting it all.
That is, until the Mall of America opened several years ago. The mall needs twenty million tourists a year to survive. It welcomes even nasty ones, as long as they spend an average of $132 per day in Minnesota.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
