This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Fishermen are generally an easy-tempered lot, content to let the rest of the world go by as long as they can sit quietly and imagine what's happening to their line under the water. That is, until you begin messing with their favorite fishing hole.
That's what finally set Will Dilg off on a cold January day in 1922. Dig was a Chicago businessman who loved to fish for bass in the backwaters of the Mississippi near the Iowa-Minnesota boarder. That January he learned that his favorite spot, the 13,000-acre Winneshiek Bottoms above McGregor, were going to be drained and turned into farmland. Dilg had watched similar wetlands disappear. He had watched the Mississippi become ever more polluted as industry encroached on the floodplain, but enough was enough. Dilg gathered 53 of his Chicago sportsmen friends together for an emergency meeting. Before they broke up, these 54 had formed a conservation organization they named The Izaac Walton League, after the 17th Century English fishermen-conservationist who had written a literary classic, The Complete Angler.
Within two years, the Izaac Walton League had become one of the largest groups of sportsmen dedicated to sustainable use of the country's natural resources. Its first major project was to ensure Congressional passage of a 1924 act creating the Upper Mississippi River National Fish and Wildlife Refuge—194,000 acres of protected land running from Lake Pepin all the way along the Mississippi down to Rock Island
Today, the Izaac Walton League compromises 50,000 members in 350 chapters across the United States.
The bass in Winneshiek Bottoms who began the whole movement benefited from the Izaac Walton League in more ways than one. Not only was their habitat saved, Dilg himself became so involved in his new organization that he quit his job in Chicago and moved to Washington, D. C., in order to coordinate conservation efforts around the country; leaving him little time to bait a hook in the Mississippi River.
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.
