This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Rock Island is a three-mile-long limestone kidney plunked down in the Upper Mississippi River, midway between St. Paul, Minnesota, and St. Louis, Missouri, the only stone island in the whole river.
Here at Rock Island, the channel is younger by several hundreds of thousands of years than the rest of the Mississippi. The last ice age twenty-five thousand years ago dammed the original channel in central Illinois and sent the Mississippi straight west across a limestone outcropping, the skeletal remains of sea creatures from an inland sea.
Along the island, and for fourteen miles upstream, fingers of limestone reach out from each shore to form the Rock Island Rapids. Today, the rapids lie safely under locks and dams, but in the nineteenth century, they made steamboat traffic on the Upper Mississippi dangerous in high water and impossible when the water was low.
It was these rapids that drew humans to this magic region of ancient land and new river. Prehistoric Indians followed the retreating glaciers to settle into communities along the river and build the mounds that still dot the landscape. Sauk and Mesquawki tribes arrived in the l8th century, driven west from their ancestral homelands by the Iroquois. Americans arrived after the Black Hawk War in 1832. Some were on their way to seek fortunes in the west, but many found the building blocks of the American Dream along the banks of the Mississippi. A collage of towns sprang up: river ports, milling centers, trading posts, company towns, coal mining operations. Today, some twenty-seven cities, towns, and villages form a mosaic around Rock Island, itself home to the world's largest military arsenal.
The stories of the men and women who built these towns and villages are the stories of visionaries and speculators, of con artists, farmers, factory workers, dreamers--stories of hope and hardship that are worth retelling because they are our collective stories as Americans. They may awaken your own stories.
