Rock Island Lines Podcast

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.

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.