This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Even as the Key City slid off the ways into the river in 1857, some intuition must have told Captain Jones Worden that the 230-foot, 560-ton side wheeler was a fast one. Worden challenged all boats on the river to race the Key City for the championship and whatever hard cash they chose to wager. Worden was not one for false modesty.
Steamboat captains being what they were (that is to say little boys not much changed from schoolyard dares), the Key City had to be put in its place. The Northern Belle tried and lost. So did the White Cloud and the Tishomingo, and one, by one, most of the other fast packets on the river.
A gentleman as well as a captain, Worden met each challenge in the spirit in which it was offered. The steamboat Messenger found that out the hard way. The Key City was loafing along through the wide stretch of Mississippi known as Lake Pepin one day, towing a heavily loaded barge, when the Messenger pulled even. As he passed the Key City, the captain of the Messenger tooted the whistle, raised the boat's colors, and increased speed, while passengers and crew cheered in derision. In response, Captain Worden let go the barge, added pine rosin to the fire to increase the heat, hung an extra weight on the boiler's safety valve to increase the pressure, and the race was on. By the time the Key City had caught the Messenger a few miles upstream, the smokestacks of both boats were red hot. Then, in a river version of thumbing noses, Captain Worden pulled far enough ahead of his rival to show who was boss, turned in front of her and returned for the barge.
The Messenger never recovered and lived with her tail between her paddles the rest of her life. The only notation next to the Messenger in the various lists of steamboats was "raced the Key City for the championship of the Upper Mississippi and lost."
Boys will be boys. Had my third-grade class published similar lists, the notation alongside Tweet, Roald, might have read: "challenged Pauly Wagner on the schoolyard in Jackson, Minnesota one March morning for all the marbles—and lost."
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
