This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
A local Buffalo, Iowa historian once described his hometown is "a neat little town of happy homes beneath tall old trees." Perhaps, but domestic bliss was not how it began.
Shortly after the Black Hawk War, which ended with a Sauk and Meskwaki Indians ceding a 50-mile strip of Iowa land along the Mississippi to the Americans, speculators began crossing the river. Two of them, Allen Olmsted and John Cooper, claimed the land that would become Buffalo Township in Scott County. As they were building a cabin together, they agreed on a strange proposal: whichever one of them got married first, that one would get both the cabin and the land.
It was especially strange considering that Olmsted was already engaged. No sooner was the roof on the cabin that Olmsted went to claim his bride. At that point, there was a slight hitch. Olmsted had words with his fiancé’s sister. One thing led to another and soon, Olmsted proposed to the sister. She said "no" loud and clear. That left only one course of action, go back to his first choice. However, his original fiancé was now less than happy, and Allen Olmsted left wifeless.
Seeing his own opportunity to own a cozy cabin and a fine piece of land, John Cooper, then wooed and won Winnie Jane Pace. The couple moved into the cabin, presumably making it the first of Buffalo's happy homes.
There is no record of whether this arrangement remained happy or not, but three years later, in the spring of 1836, Captain Benjamin Clark and two fellow investors platted out the town of Buffalo on the site, set up a ferry service across the Mississippi, built a modest hotel and stocked supplies for the waves of immigrants they expected to cross the river here headed west.
Captain Clark should have succeeded, and Buffalo should have grown to quite a metropolis, but it never happened. Perhaps Olmsted and Cooper had taken wedded bliss too lightly, and angry domestic spirits still haunted the land. Or perhaps the problem was a new village named Davenport which had slipped in unnoticed just up the river and was already building happy homes at the rate of 100 a year.
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.
