This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Back in the 1850s, Chicago challenged St. Louis to a duel—a duel that was fought at Rock Island.
Chicago was an upstart kid—a swamp with a fort and a few houses, while St. Louis was a gracious matronly city.
St. Louis and Chicago realized that only one of them had a chance of becoming the fabled Queen City of the West, the great American inland metropolis.
As a weapon, St. Louis chose the steamboat. Her riverfront controlled all the traffic to and from the Upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. By 1850, the waterfront was often choked with steamboats carrying passengers upriver to farm the Midwest and produce down to New Orleans.
Chicago chose the new-fangled iron horse, a noisy, brash machine that could go on rails wherever it darn well pleased.
In 1854, the tracks of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad reached the Mississippi River at Rock Island, giving shippers and passengers an alternative route to the east, bypassing St. Louis.
But the train tracks kept going. On April 22, 1856, the first locomotive ever to cross the Mississippi chugged across a new bridge between the island and Davenport.
The duel was on. Steamboatmen claimed that the bridge was deliberately located at a place where side currents made it hard for boats to pass the swing span. On May 6, the steamboat Effie Afton left Rock Island for St. Paul. Just after passing the bridge, her paddles stopped, and the boat was carried back against a pier. The boat caught fire and so did the bridge.
Was it an accident, or a plot to destroy the bridge? Steamboats within sight of the wreck blew their whistles.
The subsequent lawsuit dragged on for six years. The steamboatmen argued that they were there first and asked that the railroad bridge be removed. The railroads argued that the rivers belonged to everyone.
When the United States Supreme Court decided for the railroad in 1862, and bridges began to spring all along the Mississippi, St. Louis knew she had lost, destined to live in the shadow of that toddling railroad town, Chicago.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
