This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. St. Matthew may have known his lilies of the field when he advised us to be like them and "take no thought for the morrow," but he had almost certainly never tried out that wisdom in the pilot house of a Mississippi River steamboat. He would have been catfish bait. Even an apprentice cub knew enough to steer ahead—way, way ahead.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Gambling was present on most passenger boats on the Upper Mississippi River, but it never reached the Hollywood proportions of riverboat gambling on the Lower Mississippi, where plantations, horses, and women were won and lost on the turn of a card. Upper Mississippi gamblers were content if they made two or three hundred dollars a week.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The best of the steamboat captains on the Upper Mississippi River became legends in their own lifetimes for their daring and their skill. Above them all stood William F. Davidson, the only captain to be accorded the honorary rank of Commodore by fellow rivermen. The Commodore was head of the Davidson Line, the largest and most successful line of packet boats on the river. Proud and headstrong, the Commodore made sure both his boats and his crews were shipshape

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of those fancy cloth-napkin restaurants you go to for anniversaries? If you decided it's best not to ask, this story is not for you.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Even the most democratic of passengers who boarded a Mississippi steamboat during the golden age of river travel just before the Civil War stepped into a class society. The more affluent tourists—perhaps on a pleasure trip to the Falls of St. Anthony at the head of navigation—were directed to the staterooms of the upper decks. If the beds were too narrow and the rooms a bit too hot or cold, the elite traveler was assured privacy and three sumptuous meals a day

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Animals who kill people are often shot. Humans who do so are tried in court. But what does one do with an inanimate killer? Here's a possibility.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. The following story about the Mississippi River is not worth telling. Unlike those river events that make the six o'clock news and bring Presidents and politicians running with promises of relief: floods that shut down River Drive or breached levees, swallowed farms and towns or washed away bridges.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. By the time the famous evangelist, Billy Sunday, came to the city of Rock Island for a six-week crusade in the fall of 1919, he was already experienced in taking on adversaries of all shapes and sizes, from the beer drinker to the devil himself.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. "Timing is everything," as Reverend James L. Delk could tell you after a summer of revival meetings in the city of Rock Island in 1919.

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Before Billy Sunday moved into the big time as the evangelist to America's great urban centers, he practiced his techniques and his messages for ten years among the small Iowa and Illinois towns of the corn belt. One of the last of these small-town crusades came in 1905, in Aledo, Illinois, a few miles south of here.