The Davenport Writers Project

Mercy Hospital

From George Cram Cook’s The Spring: A Play:

“Doctor, I want to let you know something. I telephoned Judge Parsons. He agreed to go with Dr. Sheldon to the jail and bring my son back here for examination. You could not expect me to accept your hasty action last night--ignoring the County Commission, railroading Elijah through to the asylum”

Excerpt citation: Cook, George Cram. The Spring: A Play. Frank Shay, 1921, p. 102.

Photo citation: from Mercy Hospital. ca 1889. American Art Publishing Company. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.

Fejervary Park

From Susan Glaspell’s play Inheritors:

‘The best that has been thought and said in the world!’ [Slowly rising, and as if the dream of years is bringing him to his feet.] That’s what that hill is for! [Pointing.] Don’t you see it? End of our trail, we climb a hill and plant a college. Plant a college, so’s after we are gone that college says for us, says in people learning has made more: ‘This is why we took this land.’

Excerpt citation: Glaspell, Susan. Inheritors. Small, Maynard & Co., 1921, pp. 28-29.

Photo citation: Davenport Zoo Design Program: Fejervary Park. McFadzean, Everly and Associates, 1979.

Credit Island Park

From Floyd Dell’s Moon Calf, A Novel:

“As he walked, in the afternoons and evenings, making these queer, formless poems, he began to look about him and take note of what he saw. Port Royal [Davenport] was one of three river towns which lay close together -- Garth [Moline] and Stevenson [Rock Island] side by side on the eastern shore, opposite Port Royal, with Stone Island [Arsenal Island] and its government arsenal nosing in between. The three towns, so closely united, were almost one city; but yet they were as unlike each other as possible. Stevenson was commonplace and uninteresting. Garth was a nightmare -- the inconceivably hideous product of unrestricted commercial enterprise; its centre was occupied by the vast, bare, smoke-begrimed structures of the greatest plough-factory on earth; a little fringe of desultory shops, insulated and apparently pushed aside by incessantly switching trains of freight cars, gave way to a drab, monotonous area of cheap and hastily constructed workingmen’s dwellings, each house exactly like the next, street after street and mile after mile -- while afar, set almost inaccessibly upon the hills like the castles of robber barons, could be discerned the houses where the plough-magnates lived. The town of Port Royal neither of these towns.

It had a kindlier aspect. Its long tree-shaded streets, its great parks, its public buildings, even its shops and homes -- even, after his first jaundiced impressions had been forgotten, the very street on which Felix lived -- had a kind of dignity and serenity, as though in this town it was understood that life was meant to be enjoyed. Felix began to feel that he could be happy in Port Royal.”

Excerpt citation: Dell, Floyd. Moon-Calf, A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, pp. 156-157.

Photo citation: Playground at Credit Island Park. ca. 1920’s. Richardson-Sloane Special Collections Center, Davenport Public Library, Davenport, IA. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 25 Jan. 2019.

Blackhawk’s Watch Tower Park

From Marjorie Allen Seiffert’s poem “The Picnic”: 

“Two leave the park and the crowds--The stars shine out,

A river runs at their feet, behind them, a leafy copse,

Away on the other shore, the fields of grain

Lie sleeping peacefully in the starlight.

Tonight the world is theirs, a legacy

From those who lived familiar friends with river, field

and forest---

Their forebears

Through the night, the same earth-magic moves them

Which swayed those ancient ones, long dead--

And these, too, lean and drink,

Drink deeply from the river, the flowing river of life.”

Excerpt citation: Seiffert, Marjorie Allen. “The Picnic.” A Woman of Thirty and Poems of Elijah Hay. Alfred A Knopf, 1919. p. 61.

Photo citation: Hauberg, John H. Watch Tower. 1920. Augustana College, Rock Island, IL. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 4 Feb. 2019.

Nam-e-qua Creek

From George Cram Cook’s play The Spring:

“Set them as the prophet did around the spring, and look and see if any vision will make clear the dream. (Nam-e-qua smooths the sand around the spring as though smoothing the mind. She takes crystals and kernels, and with self-hypnotizing rhythm sets them in a magic pattern. Suddenly she stops, arrested by what forms in the spring.) Vision?”

Excerpt citation: Cook, George Cram. The Spring: A Play. Frank Shay, 1921, p. 11.

Photo citation: Black Hawk’s Autobiography. St Louis Press of Continental Printing Co. 1882.

Sauk Territory

From Black Hawk’s Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak:

“Our village was situated on the north side of the Rock river, at the foot of its raids and on the point of land between Rock river and the Mississippi. In its front, a prairie extended to the bank of the Mississippi; and in our rear, a continued bluff, gently ascending from the prairie. On the side of this bluff we had our corn-fields, extending about two miles up, running parallel with the Mississippi; where we joined those of the Foxes, whose village was on the bank of the Mississippi, opposite the lower end of Rock Island, and three miles distant from ours. We had about eight hundred acres in cultivation, including what we had on the islands of Rock River. The land around our village, uncultivated, was covered with blue-grass, which made excellent pasture for our horses. Several fine springs broke out of the bluff, near by, from which we were supplied with good water. The rapids of the Rock river furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish, and the land, being good, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squashes. We always had plenty—our children never cried with hunger, nor our people were never in want. Here our village had stood for more than a hundred years, during all which time we were the undisputed possessors of the valley of the Mississippi, from the Ouisonsin to the Portage des Sioux, near the mouth of the Missouri, being about seven hundred miles in length.”

Excerpt citation: Black Hawk.  Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak. 1882. Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 45-46.

Photo citation: Hauberg, John H. Black Hawk’s great grandson, Jesse KakaQue. Ca. 23 June 1916. Augustana College Special Collections, Rock Island, IL. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Archive. Web. 21 Jan 2019.

Moline, Illinois

From Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf, A Novel:

“As he walked, in the afternoons and evenings, making these queer, formless poems, he began to look about him and take note of what he saw. Port Royal [Davenport] was one of three river towns which lay close together -- Garth [Moline] and Stevenson [Rock Island] side by side on the eastern shore, opposite Port Royal, with Stone Island [Arsenal Island] and its government arsenal nosing in between. The three towns, so closely united, were almost one city; but yet they were as unlike each other as possible. Stevenson was commonplace and uninteresting. Garth was a nightmare -- the inconceivably hideous product of unrestricted commercial enterprise; its centre was occupied by the vast, bare, smoke-begrimed structures of the greatest plough-factory on earth; a little fringe of desultory shops, insulated and apparently pushed aside by incessantly switching trains of freight cars, gave way to a drab, monotonous area of cheap and hastily constructed workingmen’s dwellings, each house exactly like the next, street after street and mile after mile -- while afar, set almost inaccessibly upon the hills like the castles of robber barons, could be discerned the houses where the plough-magnates lived. The town of Port Royal neither of these towns.

It had a kindlier aspect. Its long tree-shaded streets, its great parks, its public buildings, even its shops and homes -- even, after his first jaundiced impressions had been forgotten, the very street on which Felix lived -- had a kind of dignity and serenity, as though in this town it was understood that life was meant to be enjoyed. Felix began to feel that he could be happy in Port Royal.”

Excerpt citation: Dell, Floyd. Moon-Calf, A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, p. 156-157.

Photo citation: Wood, Beder. Moline Water Works. ca. 1900. Rock Island County Historical Society, Moline, IL. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 25 Jan. 2019.

Marjorie Allen Seiffert’s Home: Allendale

From Marjorie Allen Seiffert’s poem “Night”:

I opened the door

And night stared at me like a fool,

Heavy dull night, clouded and safe--

I turned again toward the uncertainties

Of life withindoors.

Once night was a lion,

No, years ago, night was a python

Weaving designs against space

With undulations of his being--

Night was a siren once.

Oh sodden, middle-aged night!

Excerpt citation: Seiffert, Marjorie Allen. “Night.” A Woman of Thirty and Poems of Elijah Hay. Alfred A Knope, 1919, p. 122.

Photo citation: Jackson, Gregory. “Moline High School Through the Years.” Moline Memories, 8 Feb. 2010. Web. 26 Jan. 2019.

Duck Creek Park

From Susan Glaspell’s “Unveiling Brenda”:

“Then he started for the Duck Creek road. He had no business to be doing anything of the sort. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and he was going home to Des Champs. He ought to go and see Mrs. Shields, who wanted him to do something in town for her. This was playing off. For that—or some other reason—he was much keyed up by what he was doing. It was one of those bully days of late fall. He liked the day. He liked the world.”

Excerpt citation: Glaspell, Susan. “Unveiling Brenda.” Her America: “A Jury of Her Peers” and Other Stories by Susan Glaspell, edited by Patricia L. Bryan and Martha C. Carpentier, University of Iowa Press, 2010, p. 62.

Photo citation: Dissette, H.E. 24 January 1934. Davenport Public Library, Davenport. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 20 Jan 2019. French, George T., Illustrated Record of C.W.A. Projects, Scott County, Iowa, 1933-1934, Works Administration of Scott County, Iowa, pp. 55-56.

Susan Glaspell’s home

Photo citation: Iowa Center for the Book, Iowa Literary Heritage Trail: Illustrated Visit to Birthplaces, Residences or Burial Sites. Plain Talk Publishing, 1993.

Arthur Davison Ficke’s home

From Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan’s poem “Opus 80”:

“Oh my little house of glass!

How carefully

I have planted shrubbery

To plume before your transparency.

Light is too amorous of you,

Transfusing through and through

Your panes with an effulgence never new.

Sometimes

I am terribly tempted

To throw the stones myself”

Excerpt citation: Knish, Anne and Emanuel Morgan. “Opus 80.” Spectra: A Book of Poetic 

Experiments, Mitchell Kennerley, 1916, p.52

Photo citation: Iowa Center for the Book, Iowa Literary Heritage Trail: Illustrated Visit to Birthplaces, Residences or Burial Sites. Plain Talk Publishing, 1993.

Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church

From William L. Purcell’s memoir Them Was the Good Old Days, in Davenport, Scott County Iowa:

“We had some quaint cullud gents in the old days, sport—happy-go-lucky boys, who didn’t worry so long as they got a chance occasionally to iron out the wrinkles with pohkchops and gravy, or yallerlegs and crushed spuds….The Reverend Emmanuel Franklin was tall, stately, and dignified. He preached salvation and sang in the choir on Sundays in the Afro-American Methodist Church at Fourth and Gaines, slippin’ the brethren the correct dope for travelin’ the straight and narrow path. Reverend Emmanuel never passed the collection plate, as he did chambermaid service on week-days in a Commerical alley livery stable, curryin’ hosses, washin’ buggies, oilin’ harness, and other chores.”

Excerpt citation: Purcell, William L. Them Was the Good Old Days, in Davenport, Scott County Iowa. Purcell Print. Co., 1922, p. 147.

Photo citation: Svendsen, Marlys A., John Pfiffner, and Martha H. Bowers. Davenport, Where the Mississippi Runs West: A Survey of Davenport History & Architecture. Davenport, IA: City of Davenport, 1982, p. 1.11.

Alice French's home

Photo citation: Iowa Center for the Book, Iowa Literary Heritage Trail: Illustrated Visit to Birthplaces, Residences or Burial Sites. Plain Talk Publishing, 1993.

Alice French's childhood home

Photo citation: Davenport Public Library 2005-09 Box 4 of 4 RG42 Sec 3. Folder Acc #2005-09 Photographs.

Davenport High School

From Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf, A Novel:

“He had time to spare. Quite unwittingly and almost wholly undeservedly, Felix had gained at school the reputation of being “a shark” at most of his studies. A series of accidents had given that impression to teachers and pupils alike. He was clumsy at algebra; but on one occasion, when his teacher had been playing bridge very late the night before, she made a mistake in demonstrating the problem; and Felix, in his eagerness to set her right, took the chalk from her fingers and worked it out on the blackboard swiftly and correctly. His “nerve” served to dramatize a gift for mathematics which he did not in fact possess. His history teacher had been equally impressed. Felix’s mind did not easily retain dates and names, nor the events of history in the precise sequences in which they were recorded in the text-book; but he found that when he had forgotten to study his lesson he was able to acquit himself with credit by discussing the events they were dealing with, in the light of other historical works which he had been reading out of school hours. Similarly, in other classes, he had gained a reputation for cleverness, of which he was quite unaware.”

Excerpt citation: from Dell, Floyd. Moon-Calf: A Novel.. Alfred A Knopf, 1921, p. 169.

Photo citation: from Davenport High School 1889. Digital image. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. American Art Publishing Company, 1 Dec. 2009. Web.

Floyd Dell’s home

From Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf, A Novel:

“He saw himself, in a different glowing vision of the future, coming back to [his hometown] as a famous man, and being pointed out on the streets. ‘He was born here,’ they would say.

He began to take an interest in the question of his birth-place. He had had pointed out to him, as the house in which he was born, the great brown-painted frame building now known as Blair’s Boarding House, where some of the mill-hands lived, and which served perforce as a hotel for the infrequent drummers who came to [the town]. Felix was vaguely disappointed in it as a birthplace. He felt that he should have been born in a log-cabin, like Lincoln. [...] Gradually he came to yield it a certain deference. And one morning, on his eleventh birthday, perhaps unconsciously by way of acknowledging it, he wrote his name all along the side of the house in large letters with a piece of chalk.”

Excerpt Citation: Dell, Floyd.  Moon-Calf, A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, pp. 59.

Photo Citation: Iowa Center for the Book, Iowa Literary Heritage Trail: Illustrated Visit to Birthplaces, Residences or Burial Sites. Plain Talk Publishing, 1993.

Davenport Democrat Newspaper Building

From Harry Hanson’s memoir “A Davenport Boyhood”:

"The press held my fascinated attention, no less than its big brother of 25 units a day. It was a flat bed machine, printing from type, and it ground out papers methodically and slowly." 

Excerpt citation: Hanson, Harry. Palimpsest: Vol. XXXVII No. 4, April 1956; A Davenport Boyhood. XXXVII, State Historical Society of Iowa, 1956, p. 219.

Photo citation: Hostetler Studio. ca 1925. Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 13 Feb. 2019

Davenport Public Library

From Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf, A Novel:

“It was some time before his nervousness and sense of trespass wore off, as he came to observe that others were doing the same thing as himself; to forget his embarrassment, he immersed himself as quickly as possible in the stories and pictures he found in the magazines and books on the table . . . He experienced more than once, in those first few weeks, the imaginary joys of the treasure-trove he had pictured in the top of the band-stands, as he sprawled there at the table during the long afternoons, reading bound volumes of, “St. Nicholas.”

Excerpt Citation: Dell, Floyd. Moon-Calf, A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, pp. 43-44

Photo Citation: The Front Desk of the Davenport Public Library. History of Davenport and Scott County, Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 20 Jan. 2019

Downtown apartment buildings

From Octave Thanet’s short story “Mother Emeritus”:

“The Louders lived on the second floor, at the head of the stairs, in the Lossing building. There is a restaurant to the right; and a new doctor, every six months, who is every kind of a healer except “regular,” keeps the permanent boarders in gossip; the left, two or three dressmakers, a dentist, and a diamond merchant up-stairs, one flight; and half a dozen families and a dozen single tenants higher - so you see the Louders had plenty of neighbors. In fact, the multitude of neighbors is one cause of my story.”

Excerpt citation: Thanet, Octave. “Mother Emeritus”. Stories of a Western Town. New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904. p. 135.

Photo citation: 200 block of West Third Street. 19126. Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, IA. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 3 Feb. 2019.

Trolley Cars

From Octave Thanet’s short story “Mother Emeritus”:

“Tilly Louder came home from the Lossing factory (where she is a typewriter) one February afternoon. As she turned the corner, she was face to the river, which is not so full of shipping in winter that one cannot see the steel-blue glint of the water. Back of her the brick paved street climbed the hill, under a shapeless arch of trees. The remorseless pencil of a railway has drawn black lines at the foot of the hill; and, all day and all night, slender red bars rise and sink in their black sockets, to the accompaniment of the outcry of tortured steam. All day, if not all night, the crooked poll slips up and down the trolly wire, as the yellow cars rattle, and flash, and clang a spiteful little bell, that sounds like a soprano bark, over the crossings.

“It is customary in the Lossing building to say, “We are so handy to the cars.””

Excerpt citation: Thanet, Octave. “Mother Emeritus.” Stories of a Western Town. New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904. p. 135-136.

Photo citation: 2nd Street East from Harrison [Street] Davenport Iowa. ca. 1910. Palmer College of Chiropractic, Davenport, IA. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 3 Feb. 2019.

LeClaire Park

From Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf, A Novel:

“Then, as if by some medicinal instinct, he turned to poetry, the thing which had reawakened the sleeping hurt in his mind, for some cure of it; and he began to find consolation in the measured beauty of lines which expressed his own doubts and desires… He went about with a mind stored with splendid sonorities. Late at night he might be seen, a boy of sixteen, dressed in an ill-fitting blue serge suit, walking along the bridge that extended over the Mississippi River from Port Royal [Davenport] to Stone Island [Arsenal Island]. Policemen would pass at intervals, swinging their clubs, pairs of late lovers would emerge slowly from the darkness into the glare of an arc-light. He went past them, walking rapidly, his head bent. Where the bridge came to an end, a stone walk began that skirted the end of the Island toward Garth, where the darkness was burst open at sudden intervals by the scarlet flare of a blasting-furnace.”

Excerpt citation: Dell, Floyd. Moon-Calf, A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, pp. 155-156.

Photo citation: Peterson, Donald. Centennial [bridge]. 1942. Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, IA.  Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 19 Jan. 2019.

Lend-a-Hand Club

From Marjorie Allen Seiffert’s poem “A Womanly Woman”:

You sit, a snug, warm kitten

Blinking through the window

At a storm-haunted world--

Silent wind caterwauls

Through icy trees,

Which clack their hands at you

Tauntingly

Why should you leave

Radiator and rubber plant?

Do people stand at attention to mourn a hero

When they behold

A frozen kitten

In a gutter?

Excerpt citation: Seiffert, Marjorie Allen. “A Womanly Woman.” A Woman of Thirty and Poems of Elijah Hay. Alfred A Knope, 1919, p. 120.

Photo citation: Lend-A-Hand Club building. 1925, Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, Iowa.

Brick Munro’s Pavilion and Summer Garden

From Floyd Dell’s “Why People Go to Brick Munro’s”:

“THE WORST KNOWN PLACE IN DAVENPORT DESCRIBED AND ANALYZED” (1).

“Brick Munro’s is one of the best known — or worst known — places in Davenport. When a drummer from Des Moines, a farmer from Blue Grass, or a theological student from Kalamazoo comes into town, the first thing he asks after he has got a shave and a shine, is the whereabouts of Brick Munro’s. What then is Brick Munro’s, and in what consists its attractiveness?” (1).

“The girls are department store clerks, servant girls, stenographers, tobacco and candy factory workers, and many others, dressed for the most part attractively and quietly. Here is a girl in a striking suit of green, and there another dressed from head to heel in flaming red. But they are the exception, as are also the two girls from the red-light district, that venture within the entrance arrayed in cool kimonas. Over in the shade stands a special policeman, whose duty it is to see that the lads and lassies who have had too much and are getting loud leave before they have a chance to start a rough house” (1-2).

“Because modern society is built on the profit system, because it asks not how the multitudes, young and old, of the working class shall be made happy, we have Brick Munro’s. For observe, modern society does ask, how shall the few, young and old, of the exploiting class get their pleasure; and answers it with the wage-system, which gives to the exploiter ownership of all the product of the working class, minus a pittance to keep that working class alive to do more work. The profit system is very good to the exploiters, for they own the machines of production. The working class has not yet dared to answer the question, the most important question of the world today —- how shall the working class be made happy?” (4).

“Today, desiring happiness with every fibre of its being, it is content with Brick Munro’s. [Eventually] it will ask for…amusement that is rational, pleasure that is lasting, — happiness” (4).

Excerpt citation: Dell, Floyd. “Why People Go to Brick Munro’s.” The Tri-Cities Worker. Vol. 1.1 no. 11, pp. 1-4.

Photo citation: Turner, Jonathan. A Brief History of Bucktown: Davenport's Infamous District Transformed. Arcadia Publishing, 2016. Page 88.

Roddewig-Schmidt Candy Company

From Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf, A Novel:

“As Felix went from the office into the factory, his nostrils were at once assailed by the familiar odor of sweets which lay heavily over the whole place. On his way to the elevator he saw rows of aproned girls furiously and skillfully dipping chocolates. He had a glimpse of dozens of men and boys at work on the different floors, and was a little awed by the vastness of the place. It would not be like to cosy little factory in Vickley, where the girls sang at their work” (191).

“The pain of the molten candy on his unaccustomed hands seemed unbearable, and he cast a wild look about for help” (194).

“He was overcome with a deeper sense of…childhood helplessness” (194).

“Felix’s hands and arms were covered with unhealed scratches and raw burns, and in them the tartaric acid was hellfire and poison” (197).

“Before the week was over, the raw spots on Felix’s finger ends were replaced by callous skin, and pulling candy was no longer painful” (196).

Excerpt citation: Dell, Floyd. Moon-Calf, A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, pp. 191-197.

Photo citation: Roddewig-Schmidt Candy Company. 1917. Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, IA. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 19 Jan. 2019.

Rock Island, Illinois

From Floyd Dell’s Moon Calf, A Novel:

“As he walked, in the afternoons and evenings, making these queer, formless poems, he began to look about him and take note of what he saw. Port Royal [Davenport] was one of three river towns which lay close together -- Garth [Moline] and Stevenson [Rock Island] side by side on the eastern shore, opposite Port Royal, with Stone Island [Arsenal Island] and its government arsenal nosing in between. The three towns, so closely united, were almost one city; but yet they were as unlike each other as possible. Stevenson was commonplace and uninteresting. Garth was a nightmare -- the inconceivably hideous product of unrestricted commercial enterprise; its centre was occupied by the vast, bare, smoke-begrimed structures of the greatest plough-factory on earth; a little fringe of desultory shops, insulated and apparently pushed aside by incessantly switching trains of freight cars, gave way to a drab, monotonous area of cheap and hastily constructed workingmen’s dwellings, each house exactly like the next, street after street and mile after mile -- while afar, set almost inaccessibly upon the hills like the castles of robber barons, could be discerned the houses where the plough-magnates lived. The town of Port Royal neither of these towns.

It had a kindlier aspect. Its long tree-shaded streets, its great parks, its public buildings, even its shops and homes -- even, after his first jaundiced impressions had been forgotten, the very street on which Felix lived -- had a kind of dignity and serenity, as though in this town it was understood that life was meant to be enjoyed. Felix began to feel that he could be happy in Port Royal.”

Excerpt citation: Dell, Floyd. Moon-Calf, A Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, p. 156-157.

Photo citation: Irish, Charles. Buildings and Roadways. ca. 1900. Rock Island County Historical Society, Moline, IL. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 19 Jan. 2019.

First Government Bridge

From Charles Edward Russell’s A-Rafting on the Mississip’:

“There was such a crows gathered up on the water-front of Davenport the morning of May 6, 1856, to greet the Effie Afton… She was a typical packet of those times, long, graceful, immaculate, decorative, important. While yet in the middle of the stream she would whistle with pomp and circumstance two long melodious blasts and three short ones, that set the wild echoes flying along the bluffs.”

Excerpt citation: Russell, Charles Edward. A-Rafting on the Mississip'. New York : Century Co.,1928, p. 67.

Photo citation: Effie Afton steamboat plows into government bridge. Digital image. Southern Memories. Southern Memories and Updates. 19 July 2011. Accessed 13 Feb 2019.

Government Bridge

From Charles Edward Russell’’s A-Rafting on the Mississip':

“The St Louis merchants protested vehemently against the bridge, which was the first to cross the river, on the ground that it was an obstruction to navigation. They went to court on this and their case was thrown out. The building of the bridge proceeded—wooden. A point had been chosen between where the Le Claire Rapids cease, and about half a mile above the lower end of the island of Rock Island, a thing always to be distinguished from the city that bears the same name.”

Excerpt citation: Russell, Charles Edward. A-Rafting on the Mississip'. New York : Century Co., 1928, p. 65.

Photo citation: Illustration of First Government Bridge, 1856. Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, IA. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 13 Feb. 2019.

Fort Armstrong on Rock Island (now known as Arsenal Island)

From Black Hawk’s Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak:

“We were friendly treated by the white chiefs, and started back to our village on Rock River. Here we found that troops had arrived to build a fort at Rock Island. This, in our opinon, was a contradiction to what we had done—“to prepare for war in time of peace.” We did not, however, object to their building their fort on the island, but we were very sorry, as this was the best island on the Mississippi, and had long been the resort of our young people during the summer. It was our garden, (like the white people have near to their big villages) which supplied us with strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, plums, apples, and nuts of different kinds; and its waters supplied us with fine fish, being situated in the rapids of the river. In my early life, I spent many happy days on this island. A good spirit had care of it, who lived in a cave in the rocks immediately under the place where the fort now stands, and has often been seen by our people. he was white, with large wings like a swan’s, but ten times larger. We were particular not to make much noise in that part of the island which he inhabited, for fear of disturbing him. But the noise of the fort has since driven him away, and no doubt a bad spirit has taken his place!”

Excerpt citation: Black Hawk. Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak. 1882. Penguin Books, 2008, p. 45.

Photo citation: Hostetler, J.B. Rock Island Arsenal- Fort Armstrong. ca. 1920. Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, IA. Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Web. 21 Jan. 2019.