This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
In the summer of 1843, toward the end of her travels on the Great Lakes, Margaret Fuller sent a plaintif letter from Chicago to the Reverend William Ellery Channing back east. "My friend, I am deeply homesick," she wrote, "yet where is that home?"
It was a question she had been asking her whole life. Even though she was brought up in an elite Boston family who educated her well, and even though she had become a member of the inner circle of Emerson's New England Transcendentalists, she had always felt like an outsider. As a child, she fantasized that she was really a princess who had been stolen away at birth.
She had come on her tour west partly to search for home, a place and people where she belonged. Chicago had disappointed her by being all muscle and no mind. In this restless discontent, she decided to join a party of travelers on a horse-drawn lumber wagon heading for a look at the small villages of Dixon and Oregon in the Rock River Valley.
And here, she discovered home, perhaps even that kingdom in which she had once been a princess. Traveling along the Rock River toward the Mississippi, she imagined that kingdom. "The villas and castles seem to have been burnt, the enclosures taken down," she wrote, "but the velvet lawns, the flower-gardens, the stately parks scattered at graceful intervals, the frequent deer," have remained. Even thunderstorms added to the mood. One morning, sitting high on Eagle's Nest Bluff above Oregon, she composed a long heroic poem, "Ganymede to his Eagle."
And there was something else. Fuller's visit came just ten years after the Black Hawk War. Evidence of the Sauk Indians was still everywhere, in hatchet marks on trees, in storage pits, and she was saddened by what Americans had done to the Indian. "I understand why Black Hawk came back to this beautiful land," she wrote. She was troubled by the settlers who were cutting down every tree in sight with no apparent feeling for the land.
Margaret Fuller went on to complete her restless life in Europe, but at least for two weeks, she did find home in the Rock River Valley, and at least her spiritual ancestors in Black Hawk and his tribe. "My eyes and my heart are full," she wrote.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
