This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
If you enjoy solving puzzles or tracking down obscure clues, here's one that could put you in the history books.
Was the famous general, Robert E. Lee, once mayor of a town in Iowa? The only clue is a journal written by an eighty-year-old man, Suel Foster in about 1890. In that journal, Foster remembers taking a trip down the Mississippi River in 1836 as a young man. Iowa was still Michigan Territory then but would soon be a separate state. Speculators, sure that the capitol of the new state would front the Mississippi River, had lined the banks with prospective town sites for fifty miles below the Rock Island Rapids at Davenport.
Foster stopped at one of these sites six miles downstream from Davenport. Here, he wrote, Captain Robert E. Lee and William Gordon had laid out the town of Iowa. This was, Foster remarked, the same man who later became the great Rebel general. According to Foster, Lee had appointed himself mayor of his town. At the time of Foster's visit, Lee was away surveying the Rock Island Rapids for the Corps of Engineers, so the two never met.
Could it be? Lee was here a year after the 1836 date, sent by the Corps to improve navigation on the rapids, and he was promoted to Captain. Lee's family in Virginia certainly had the money for such an investment. So those details fit. But should we trust the memory of an old man? Robert E. Lee wrote numerous letters and reports back east, and never mentions his town. But then, he likely wouldn't have. He was supposed to be working for the Army, and such moonlighting would have been frowned on. And Lee's biographers are silent as well—but those easterners all considered his whole two-year stay in the Midwest as insignificant.
There must be other clues. Where are the land sale records and registrations? In Michigan? Galena? Des Moines? Who was Lee's partner, William Gordon?
Solving this puzzle will not change the course of history, or bring you fame and riches, and General Lee does not need one more title added to his record. But it would soothe that little itch of curiosity you are already trying hard not to scratch.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
