This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Ever since Noah gave floods a bad name way back, real estate developers have been reluctant to use the word. Houses built like arks still arouse suspicion.
That's why early settlers along the Mississippi Valley, hoping to attract immigrants to their small villages, never mentioned floods in the promotional literature they set back east, or to Europe. They might allow as how La Crosse or Clinton or Rock Island were subject to occasional high water, but they called them "freshets" rather than floods. No mention of the fact that every three years or so, steamboats could travel up to 5th Avenue right through Rock Island, and unload cargo at warehouse doors.
Some of the freshets did come close to being floods. In 1844, a Davenport-based steamboat, the Lynx, disappeared completely on a run from Galena to St. Paul. It turned out that the steamer had taken a short cut on a freshet and had been grounded far out on the prairie when the water receded—left "out of her element," as the Davenport Gazette said.
The freshet of 1844 all along the Mississippi rose so high it was hard to tell it from a flood, but even then, papers in Davenport put the best light on it. On April 25th, the editor of the Davenport Gazette, noting that the normal half-mile channel between Rock Island and Davenport was now a mile and a half wide, wrote about how beautiful a sight the river was. “Truly, at, last,” he wrote, “the Father of Waters.” He even admitted that there was an actual flood downstream from Davenport, where miles of farmland revealed only peaks of farmhouse across the surfaces, but not in Davenport, where only the cellars along Front Street filled with water.
By 1851, apparently, the town fathers along the Mississippi felt they had attracted a large enough population, and the word freshet was replaced by the word flood. The weary editor of the Davenport Daily Democrat and News even admitted that there had been earlier floods, though he still could not use that taboo word. "The Father of Waters is on his annual bender," is how he put it.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Humanities Council and Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, with additional funding from Humanities Iowa, the Iowa Arts Council, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
