This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Growing up in southern Minnesota during World War II, I spent many late-night summer hours under the streetlight with my buddies discussing where we were going when we grew up. It was Alaska or Oregon, New Zealand, the Amazon. Never in that circle of light along the curb did I dream it would be Rock Island, Illinois, where I would be sitting here writing "Rock Island Lines."

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Drive with me down the 2,500 miles of Great River Road along the Mississippi from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and let's watch the river grow.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When John Soule advised his Indiana readers in 1851 to "Go West, young man," a phrase Horace Greely later made famous, he was already writing after the fact. By then several hundred steamboats a month were streaming up the Mississippi past Rock Island and Davenport, loaded with young men—and women—with families from the East and the South, from Ireland and Norway, England and Germany heading west to the California gold fields or to the newly opened prairies of

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. On the ninth of March in 1837, the Reverend John Brich, an itinerant Presbyterian minister from England, froze to death after his horse fell through the ice of a creek near the Rock Island County border. Reverend Brich hung his saddle bags on a tree and wandered two miles into adjacent Henry County before succumbing to the cold. Had it been the other way around, the American Bible Society may have been five hundred dollars richer, and Rock Island County may

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Prisoners of war have more time to dream than most—and more need to. Defeated fighting for a cause they believed in, surrounded by enemies, cold and hungry, dreams are what they have left.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Benjamin W. Clark was an entrepreneur who planned ahead. Few speculators would have disagreed with his decision to establish a ferry service across the Mississippi just below the mouth of the Rock River. Clark reasoned that the flood of immigrants expected to head for newly opened Iowa farmland would cross the river at the most logical place. Lake Michigan, whose tip was almost due east, prevented those immigrants from going further north, while the multiple

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Some of the finest schools on the Upper Mississippi River in the 19 th century were the ten-acre rafts of Minnesota and Wisconsin white pine floating down to the sawmills of Rock Island, Davenport, and Moline. The twenty to thirty men who worked on these rafts and steered them down to the mills may not have diagrammed sentences or practiced their multiplication tables along the way, but they learned the habit of attention, and a philosophy of life likely more

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Visitors who come to the Rock Island Arsenal with preconceived notions of stark, purely functional military architecture are surprised to find a good deal of attention to aesthetics.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. When Brigadier General Thomas J. Rodman arrived on Rock Island in 1865 to complete the long-delayed Rock Island Arsenal building at the downstream tip of the island, he was already famous in military circles. He had invented the Rodman Gun, a cannon that lasted as much as twenty times longer than conventional cannon. It was the most formidable weapon of the Civil War.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Whenever I wake to one of those cold, blizzardy mornings tempting me to call in sick, a childhood song floats into my mind. "Over the hill to the poor house." I'm up, shaved, and off to work in ten minutes. The only place worse than hell in my Midwest Lutheran home was the county poor home.