This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Before you pick up the phone and call in, trust me on this one. No steamboat on the Upper Mississippi River ever had a calliope. On the river, it was always pronounced cally-ope. Steamboat men had minds of their own, and seldom took direction from people on land.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The Mississippi River and history have this in common: neither one always goes where you want it to go. That is why a young man who set out in 1848 to paint the most American painting in the world ended up instead with a book of lithographs of the Mississippi River printed in German.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The word for today is "epiphany"—that moment in the dark reaches of the mind when a light flicks on at two in the morning, and we understand the calculus problem we have been struggling with, or capture just the right image for the poem, or know that it is really love.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. If you are at all inclined to superstition, avoid that whole bottom land below Black Hawk State Park where the Rock River meets the Mississippi. It may be haunted.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. In 1839, the village of Bloomington just south of here was upgraded to the status of second-class town by the Iowa Legislature. Its city council met only once, and then only to permit grocery stores to sell whiskey. That same year, the Iowa Territorial Legislature officially defined "grocery store" as any establishment that sold whiskey in less than gallon lots.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Susanne Denkmann came from one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Rock Island. She was educated in the most exclusive schools on the East Coast. With her father's money, she could easily have followed the seasons around the world from theater in London to art auctions in Germany to sun on the Mediterranean. By the time she was born in 1872, her father and his partner, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, had already begun to amass a fortune in the logging and

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. With steamboats as with humans, there only are one or two ways of coming into this world, but an infinite number of ways of leaving it.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 sent shock waves around the world. Southern women wrote rebuttal novels showing how wonderful slavery was, Germans set up Uncle Tom shops selling soul food, and Lincoln suggested to Harriet Beecher Stowe that she had brought on the Civil War.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Do you cringe when you see the words "new and improved," because experience has shown you that it often means "costs more and works half as well as the way your grandmother did it"? This story of the Corps of Engineers versus one of the largest obstructions in the Rock Island Rapids is for you.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. To your list of fearless and feisty women—if you keep such a list—please add Kate Perry of Covington, Kentucky. During the Civil War, Miss Kate was the owner, operator, and conductor of her own highly illegal railroad.