This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
You may remember that explanation of hierarchy that goes something like this: the wife shouts at her husband; he grounds his daughter; the daughter picks a fight with her young brother, who pinches the toddler who then kicks the dog. On the Mississippi River, the role of dog was held by the ferry boat. The ferry boat, the least expensive, safest, and hardest working of all, gets no respect. There are no legendary ferryboatmen, except for Acheron who took the dead across the river Styx to Hades.
For many rivermen, the ferry was hardly even a boat. The early ferries were little more than floating platforms, crude vessels propelled back and forth across the river by oars, sometimes by horses on a treadmill, or pulled along a rope strung across the channel. They hardly deserved names. Keelboat men and steamboat captains pretended not to notice them.
Yet from the end of the Black Hawk War in 1832, which opened up Iowa to settlement, until 1856, when the first bridge crossed the Mississippi River, the ferryboat was the only way to cross the river for hundreds of thousands of European immigrants and restless Easterners to reach the West.
And cross they did. From the gold rush on, ferries worked around the clock at crossing points like St. Louis, Hannibal, Alton, Quincy, Keokuk, Fort Madison, Burlington, Davenport, Dubuque and LaCrosse. The few statistics that exist are impressive. During the first two weeks of October 1846, 582 immigrant wagons were ferried across the river at Burlington. In a single month in 1854, 1,743 wagons crossed Illinois at Peoria alone, headed for Iowa. The following year a Rock Island paper reported hundreds of muslin-covered Conestoga wagons crossing from Rock Island to Davenport each week, "a tide which knows no ebb, flowing toward the setting sun." On the Davenport side, these wagons made a constant parade all the way up Brady Street hill.
Having done their work, all but a few ferries have turned over their work to railroads and interstates without so much as a thank you notice from history books and river festivals.
I think the time is ripe for a ferryboat revival. What kid, whether six or sixty, has ever stood along a river without wanting to get to the other side?
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.
