This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
As a child, you learned that it's possible for a kingdom to be lost for want of a nail. Long ago near Rock Island, it worked the other way: because of a small kindness a city was built.
It was 1832. Tensions between the Sauk Indians who had lived at Saukenuk where the Rock River met the Mississippi, and the growing number of white settlers who wanted that land had erupted into war the previous April. On August second, that war had ended with the annihilation of almost half the Sauk Indians—men women and children—at the Battle of Bad Axe along the Mississippi in Wisconsin. The Indian leader, Blackhawk, was captured.
The United States government sent General Winfield Scott to negotiate a treaty. On September 21, the Sauk Indians ceded all their lands in Illinois to the United States.
Forced into these negotiations were two innocent parties. Along the Iowa shore across from Saukenuk were a tribe of Mesquawki Indians who had almost been annihilated earlier by the French and who had come to live under the protection of their Sauk relatives. Also on the Iowa side of the river lived a group of Sauk Indians under their chief, Keokuk, who had remained friendly to the Americans in 1812 while Black Hawk's band had sided with the British. Regardless, the Black Hawk Treaty took a fifty-mile-deep strip along the Mississippi, almost the whole length of Iowa, away from these non-combatants—six million acres.
The treaty gave Antoine LeClaire, an Indian interpreter living among the Mesquawkies, a section of land at the head of the Rock Island Rapids. Keokuk and his band were left only a small reservation along the Des Moines River. Yet Keokuk personally insisted that a square mile of land around the treaty site itself be reserved for Antoine LeClaire's wife, Marguerite, for her many kindnesses toward the Indians in hard times. She had never turned them away hungry.
The land the Indians gave to Marguerite LeClaire became Davenport, Iowa, a city that owes its beginnings to a few small acts of kindness flowering amid a weedy garden of betrayal and greed.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
