This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Twelve-year-old George Merrick and his family saw the Mississippi River for the first time at Rock Island in 1854. They were one of a flood of families heading for new territory in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Merrick went to work on steamboats, beginning as a pantry boy and moving on to apprentice engineer, second clerk, cub pilot, and finally a distinguished career as a river pilot.
But his first lesson took place that morning on the Rock Island levee. Just off the levee, Merrick saw a strange craft with a large paddle wheel at the stern, slowly turning in the river's current. The young boy had seen steamboats on the St. Joe River back in Ohio, but they were sidewheelers with enclosed wheels on each side of the boat. This craft, the "Louella," was different.
Merrick asked a nearby Rock Islander what the strange boat was. The friendly stranger immediately turned mentor, more than eager to explain that the craft was a floating sawmill. He told the boy how the current was used to turn the wheel which supplied power to saw machinery housed inside the boat.
The Rock Islander explained that the floating sawmill was a useful craft on the Upper Mississippi where steamboats were often endangered by snags caught in the river bottom or by free floating logs that had escaped a raft. The mills could make a very good living by capturing these loose logs and sawing them up into lumber on the spot. A Mississippi version of the whale boats that roamed the oceans for whales. The sawed lumber was then sold wherever the sawmill happened to tie up.
The next day, aboard the "Mississippi Belle" headed for a new home in Prescott, Wisconsin, George Merrick was in the middle of explaining the floating sawmill to his family when the "Louella," moving twice as fast, passed the "Mississippi Belle” with a full load of passengers and disappeared upstream. George realized he had seen not a floating sawmill but his first stern-wheel steamboat. He also realized that he had received his first lesson in the course that would lead him to become a pilot.
Rock Islanders, while very friendly, were not always to be trusted—your present company excepted, of course.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
