This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
I have finally figured out why no one has remarked on my moral growth over the years. I blame the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Inadvertently, I adopted the same methods to improve myself that the Corps has used to improve the Upper Mississippi and make it safe for navigation.
Rather than marching straight up the river from St. Louis to St. Paul, improving the channel five miles or so at a time, the Corps plan has been to remove the worst obstacle to navigation in the whole river, then move on to the next worst, and so on, skipping around from Des Moines to St. Louis, to Minneapolis. The Corps' methods made a lot of sense. One small stretch completely improved would not have done much for a steamboat in the Rock Island-St, Paul trade. As is, the whole channel slowly opened to larger and larger boats, and the river became more and more safe all along its length.
The problem is, the improvements were not spectacular. Because the channel improvement was so gradual along the whole river as to be barely noticeable, rivermen accused the Corps of doing nothing. One completely cleared five-mile stretch would have been visible and dramatic.
Even the locks and dams of the nine-foot channel were done in this way. The first one completed was Number Fifteen at the most unnavigable spot in the river: the Rock Island Rapids; the last one done was Number 14 at LeClaire, where there was already a canal.
This is exactly what I have done, chipping away at a rocky trait here, cutting through a slothful sandbar there. The problem is, there's always some new obstacle popping up that didn't show so much while the sandbar was still around.
I would have been much better off to have adopted Ben Franklin's methods. He perfected one stretch at a time. Franklin made a list of twelve virtues. Each week he worked hard at just one until he had succeeded completely. A week devoted to temperance, another to cleanliness, chastity, and so on, until he was totally improved. A Quaker friend then convinced him to add "humility," and that took an extra week of work.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
