This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Most springs along the Upper Mississippi Valley, the river awakens from hibernation like a snake, stretching gently to shed its skin of ice. But now and then, as we all do, the Mississippi gets up on the wrong side of the bed. You don't want to be around when that happens.
February 27th, 1856 was a wrong-side-of-the-bed day. The winter had been exceptionally cold so that the ice lay two to three feet thick. The water was lower than normal in the river. Along the St. Louis levee, fifty or more boats lay wintering over until the ice left, which it usually did piecemeal as the weather warmed.
This February day, however, the water under the ice rose suddenly, awakening the temperamental river too fast. The ice loosened in a single sheet which pushed against anything in its way. The first movements were slow. The steamboats at the upstream end of the levee were merely shoved ashore, with minor injuries. Then, the Mississippi showed its temper. One by one, steamboats were ripped from their moorings and taken out into the channel by the ice, where they were soon crushed to pieces singly and in groups stuck together like bumper cars at a midway. The steamer "Federal Arch" went first, followed by the "Australia," "Adriatic," Brunette," the "Paul Jones," "Altoona," and the "Challenge."
By five that afternoon, the ice had changed character. Huge cakes pushed onto the levee on top of each other, eventually some thirty feet deep, completely covering many of the steamboats that had escaped being crushed.
In a few hours, the Mississippi had put more than fifty steamboats out of commission—many reduced to kindling, others with their paddles torn off. Where boats had lined the waterfront that morning, now lay, a reporter wrote, a bulwark of ice "looking more like a scene in the polar regions than in the fertile and beautiful Mississippi Valley."
A word of warning. If you're walking along the river in late winter and hear the first signs of stirring, whisper, just in case the Mississippi has been partying upstream earlier in the fall and has a hangover.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
