This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
It was Mark Twain who first noticed that the Mississippi was constantly shortening itself, cutting off loops and bends, and that in a hundred years or so, St. Paul and New Orleans would be less than ten miles apart. He was worried about what it would do to steamboating.
Less obvious is what is happening to the width of the river between LeClaire, Iowa, and Port Byron, Illinois. These small communities lie at the head of the old Rock Island Rapids that caused steamboats so much grief. This stretch has always been the narrowest part of the entire Mississippi. Since 1987, it's been getting even narrower. That was the year LeClaire and Port Byron challenged each other to a tug of war across the channel.
Since then, the Great River Tug of War Across the Mississippi has become an annual event each August.
Each town lines up ten teams of twenty tuggers each, and a women's exhibition match at the end. Teams line up at each end of a 2,400-foot rope, an inch in diameter, weighing 640 pounds. Each tug is three minutes long, after which judges measure which team has given up the most territory. In 1996, it took nine tugs for Port Byron to win by eight inches. They currently lead the series by eight to six.
Not until 1993 did an astute Corps of Engineers observer notice that all that heavy pulling from both sides was slowly drawing the two riverbanks closer—an average of some 3.4 inches each year. If neither side gives up and the contests continue, Engineers estimate that in less than a century, LeClaire and Port Byron will merge, with a creek between them.
Already, city officials from both communities are wrangling over what to call the new town. Port Claire or LeByron are two possibilities.
I don't think it will come to that. At the rate that bully to the east is gobbling up territory, corn field by corn field, as it heads west, in a hundred years both LeClaire and Port Byron will already have become mere neighborhoods of Chicago.
Rock Island Lines is supported by grants from the Illinois Humanities Council, the Illinois Arts Council—a state agency—and by Augustana College, Rock Island.
