This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Why is it that, in the Rock Island area, trouble always seems to begin in Chicago, and then spread out toward our peaceful valley like ripples from a stone tossed in a pond? In 1832, soldiers passing through Chicago brought a typhoid epidemic to Fort Armstrong. Since then, disease, organized crime, and all the several forms of sin have floated in from that wicked city to the east.
But nothing Chicago has sent us can rival the effects of the kissing bug invasion. On July 15th, 1899, The Davenport Democrat began warning its readers of the coming epidemic. "The kissing bug is no joke," warned the paper, "we are not safe here. They have it plenty in Chicago. It is coming our way. There'll be trouble when it does come."
No one had heard of the kissing bug before, which went after victims' lips, but its symptoms were obvious. The Democrat reported that a farmhand' lips swelled to four pounds after being bitten while milking a cow.
In spite of precautions—people ready to clap a hand over their mouths at the first buzz—the kissing bug reached the Mississippi and claimed its victims. The first attack came in Moline, where a young girl woke in the morning with her lip swollen. Her doctor expressed doubts about the cause, but admitted the bug was a possibility.
Then the bug crossed the river, where five cases were reported in Davenport. The newspaper reported one especially vicious attack in detail. A father heard his daughter screaming from a nearby room and rushed in to help. He found the daughter's boyfriend valiantly trying to keep the bug from landing on the daughter's lips. The father joined in the fight. The enraged kissing bug gnashed its fangs while foam dripped from its red lips. The father fell out the window into a geranium bed, and finally had to take a shotgun after the bug. The kissing bug escaped, but the father was fined for discharging a firearm in the city limits.
Chicago had done its worst, but the invasion of kissing bugs soon died down, and have not reappeared for almost a hundred years. Chalk it up to modern pesticides, or perhaps, to exceptionally clean living.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
