Illustration by Britt Spencer
Bloody Island wasn’t an island; it was a sandbar. It first peeked from the Mississippi in 1798, then grew, threatening to cut St. Louis off from riverboat traffic. For that reason, the city fathers surely cussed at it (“That bloody island will ruin us!”) but that’s not where the name comes from. Rather, for 50 years, the island was where high-society men went to settle disputes at 20 paces.
“If you were a member of the upper crust of society, you owned a pair of dueling pistols,” says Mark A. Neels, author of the paper “The Barbarous Custom of Dueling: Death and Honor on Bloody Island.” Maybe you even got a nice mother of pearl–handled pair as a gift for your 18th birthday. If you felt that your reputation had been insulted, you challenged your insulter to a duel. The movies have misled us on this account; it wasn’t walk, walk, walk, turn, blam! “It’s essentially political theater,” Neels says. “Most often, when a duel was fought, the two individuals didn’t kill each other. That would have been too uncivilized.”
This isn’t to say that blood didn’t soak into the sand sometimes. St. Louis Globe-Democrat editor Benjamin Gratz Brown left Bloody Island with a bullet in his leg and a permanent limp. Senator Thomas Hart Benton got nailed in the knee, then killed dueling partner Charles Lucas when they returned for Round Two. One important—but bloodless—duel may have been held on Bloody Island. It’s not well known, Neels says, “because most Americans don’t want to think about Abraham Lincoln as someone who’s capable of a potential murder.” To be fair, Lincoln didn’t call the duel; Illinois politician James Shields did, after taking umbrage at a series of insulting pseudonymous letters sent to a Springfield newspaper by Mary Todd Lincoln under the name Rebecca. “Lincoln absolutely abhorred guns,” Neels says. “He had fired one in malice only once, at a turkey, when he was a lad. He did kill the turkey but felt so much remorse over it, he never fired a weapon again. Lincoln is smart and wily. He realizes he’s taller than Shields. He knew he had a long arm and a wide swath, and a broadsword would lengthen it even further. Long story short is that the duel never happens. They get there, and Lincoln starts to take swipes at a tree with the broadsword. Shields takes one look at this and says, ‘Ahhh, I’m out, I’m out—I forgive you, Abe. Everything’s good!’”
So does Bloody Island exist today? “The best way I can put it is that it does and it doesn’t,” Neels says. “The land mass is now part of the Illinois shore, but if you look across the river toward the eastern pylon of the Eads Bridge, what you’re actually seeing is the very southern tip of Bloody Island.”
It’s just no longer an island—or a blood-soaked field of honor.
