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Brooms and Antlers

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

Even the Mississippi River seems to know when it has crossed the Mason-Dixon line. The Upper Mississippi is a Yankee protestant-work-ethic river, always busy. The lower Mississippi below Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio comes in, is a grander, more leisurely affair—a world of colonels and judges and mint juleps. No wonder that Currier and Ives chose to immortalize the steamboat race between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee rather than between the small, plain packet boats north of St. Louis.

In that 1870 race, the Robert E. Lee won, and was awarded a pair of deer antlers to display atop the pilot house as the sign of victory, long a custom on the Lower Mississippi, where steamboat racing was an affair of gentlemen with time on their hands, a sport the same as deer hunting or horse racing. Races were announced several weeks in advance, and the boats gotten ready, the engines tuned, cargo cleared, and the crew trained. The race was a betting affair, a spectator sport, covered by the press.

On the Upper Mississippi, steamboat races were even more frequent, but they were all impromptu affairs engaged in by boats at work hauling cargo or passengers, who happened to meet on their way. Much as boys who are rivals for the same girl will do when they want to show off. "Beat you to the corner," the rival says.  "Beat you to Dubuque," or "See you in St. Paul," the Captain of the challenging boat would cry—and the race would be on, putting in peril crew, passenger, and cargo. Boys, after all, will be boys.

And what did the winner get to wear on the roof of the pilot house or suspended between the smokestacks? No rack of antlers fresh from some gentleman's hunt graced the working packet boat. That was the South. Rather, it was a fit symbol for all those stereotypes we have of the North.

You may already have seen that victory symbol if you have looked closely at photographs of packet boats and remarked to yourself that the top of a pilot house was a very odd place to hang a push broom.

That broom tells you the winner has made a clean sweep.

Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.

Community
Beginning 1995, historian and folklorist Dr. Roald Tweet spun his stories of the Mississippi Valley to a devoted audience on WVIK. Dr. Tweet published three books as well as numerous literary articles and recorded segments of "Rock Island Lines." His inspiration was that "kidney-shaped limestone island plunked down in the middle of the Mississippi River," a logical site for a storyteller like Dr. Tweet.