This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. They called it the miracle bridge as it slowly arched across the St. Louis waterfront toward Illinois from 1867 to 1874—a web of steel girders and trusses looking much like the largest erector set a boy could ever imagine. A miracle because of its size—a 520-foot central span—and because the massive granite piers supporting the arches had to go down seventy feet through quicksand to a safe foundation.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In Walden , Henry David Thoreau asked his readers who would know knives better, a boy who went to Harvard and took all the best courses on metallurgy, or a boy whose father had him dig, smelt and refine iron ore, and then forge, temper, and sharpen a knife himself.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Most springs along the Upper Mississippi Valley, the river awakens from hibernation like a snake, stretching gently to shed its skin of ice. But now and then, as we all do, the Mississippi gets up on the wrong side of the bed. You don't want to be around when that happens.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Father John Alleman could well have been a 19 th century Illinois Methodist circuit rider except for two things: he was not a Methodist, and he had no horse.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. That brave Dutch boy who stuck his finger in the dike to keep the water back must have seemed like small potatoes to Peter Cartwright, the 19th century Methodist circuit rider. Cartwright was responsible for a spiritual dike that ran through four hundred miles of Illinois counties bordering the Upper Mississippi River. It was a leaky dike at best.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. I’ve been talking about steamboat explosions, which were common on the Upper Mississippi throughout the 19 th century, but there is nothing to show you, no photograph of a single one: only the occasional shot of what had been a boat.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The universe may lay claim to the first and the biggest bang, but the Upper Mississippi has witnessed some pretty good echoes ever since the first steamboat exploded in 1837. That year, with Iowa and Northern Illinois newly opened to settlement, the steamer Dubuque bound upstream from St. Louis, blew one of its boilers, throwing a sheet of scalding steam and water over the deck passengers, killing twenty-two of them.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Nineteenth Century steamboat men were not more than ordinarily superstitious, but by the 1860s, there did seem to be a disturbing pattern among Mississippi steamboats whose names began with the letter M. They seemed to be cursed.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Captain Jones Worden became such an important Upper Mississippi riverman that he ended up in several biographical dictionaries. In each of these entries, however, several years of his life were erased, all because of a printer's error.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Mark Twain would have us believe that boys along the Mississippi in his day longed to become steamboat captains because of the romance of those floating wedding cakes and the mystery of the great Mississippi itself. A closer look might reveal a deeper and far more American reason to take up steam boating: money.