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War Eagle vs. Itasca

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

The most famous steamboat race ever chronicled on the Upper Mississippi River was between a tortoise and a hare in 1856. And as you learned in the pages of your third-grade reader, such a race is not always a foregone conclusion.

The hare in this race was the famous War Eagle, owned and captained by Daniel Smith Harris. Its record speed of sixteen and a half miles per hour from Galena to St. Paul has never been broken.

The tortoise was the Itasca, already living in the shadow of an identical twin steamboat, the Key City. The Key City had turned out to be three miles an hour faster than her sister.

As with most races on the Upper Mississippi, this encounter was impromptu. The War Eagle was taking on cargo at Dunleith, headed for St. Paul, when the news arrived of Queen Victoria's greeting to President Buchanan, the first message via the new Atlantic Cable. In 1856, the telegraph had not yet reached St. Paul, and Smith Harris decided to get there first with the news. He was aware that the Itasca, taking on cargo at Prairie du Chien, sixty-one miles upriver, had also received the news, but for a hare, a sixty-one-mile handicap was nothing.

Both boats pulled out at six in the evening. The War Eagle passed its regular stops, added resin to its fires to increase steam pressure. The Itasca, meanwhile, not even aware that it was racing, dawdled along, stopping at every landing for sociable visits.

Not until both boats were in sight of St. Paul did the Itasca realize the race was on. It fired up, eased into the dock ahead of the War Eagle by mere inches. The Itasca had averaged just over twelve miles an hour, the War Eagle more than sixteen.

What your third-grade reader did not tell you, however, was that real life sometimes gets complicated, and winners are often hard to decide.

As the Itasca was easing in for the landing, Smith Harris tied the paper with Queen Victoria's message on it to a large piece of coal, and threw it from the roof of the pilot house over the Itasca to a man on the dock, winning the race to be the first with the news of the Atlantic cable.

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

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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.