Rock Island: The Town - Paperback

by Steve Urie (Author)

Many U.S. cities claim to be the most all-American city, but indisputably Rock Island is the nation's most all-American town. From its rough and tumble beginnings during the first half of the 19th century when it was the jumping off point into unexplored Indian territory until vigilante businessmen cleaned out the cabal of gangsters and crooked cops that ran the Town during the Roaring Twenties, Rock Island was a rowdy, fun-loving river town that boasted a number of historical firsts: the site of the westernmost battle during the Revolutionary War; the home of the Indians who made the last stand to retain historical lands east of the Mississippi; the first railroad bridge to span the mighty river; the site of the "Andersonville of the North" during the Civil War; America's 19th century timber capital and crossroads of the nation; the site of the first NFL game; the home to Prohibition's most ruthless gangsters west of Chicago; and the home to what evangelist Billy Sunday described as "some of the finest people in the country - and one or two of the meanest." When Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet left St. Ignace in the summer of 1673 and canoed across Lake Michigan, and down the Wisconsin River in search of a water route to the China Sea, they were the first white men to see the stunning Upper Mississippi River Valley. After floating 150 miles down the "Father of Waters," the explorers passed through a treacherous 14-mile chain of rapids lined with villages of peaceful Indians. They didn't find a passage to the sea or the rumored gold mines that the natives were said to possess, but their glowing descriptions of lush forests teeming with wild game opened the western frontier to a rugged group of men who traded tools and whiskey to the Indians for valuable animal furs. It would be 130 years after Marquette and Jolliet's exploration until President Thomas Jefferson sent Lt. Zebulon Pike up the Mississippi from Fort St. Louis to locate a strategic site to build a fort that plans were made for a permanent settlement north of the Missouri River. Lt. Pike selected a 3-mile-long island near the foot of the 14-mile rapids where Indians built villages on a peninsula at the confluence of the Rock River and the Mississippi. The U.S. Army named the island "Rock Island." Thus began the most dynamic 200 years of history of any U.S. town.

Author Biography

I grew up in Rock Island, and except for The Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field, I thought it was the grandest place in the world. My hometown can no longer boast of being a rowdy river town or is home to "the most interesting madam in the annals of prostitution" or the World's Longest Bar or the nation's most crooked cops and ruthless mobsters. From the time the first settlers arrived after the War of 1812 through World War II, no town* was livelier, more diverse, more prosperous, or could claim more firsts and greater achievements than Rock Island. Those born during "The Great War" like to think of ourselves as leading-edge Baby Boomers. We were advantaged by having parents who came of age during the Roaring Twenties, looked for their first jobs during the Great Depression, served during World War II, and didn't want their children to experience the deprivations they had. My father told me stories of his boyhood when he swam and fished in clear, deep river pools and ice skated in the winter across the Mississippi to Iowa and miles up the river to the head of the Rock Island Rapids. Those stories abruptly ended for all during the Great Depression when a work project erected 19 dams that turned the Upper Mississippi into a series of stagnant, brackish reservoirs. Dad also told me of the year that the great Jim Thorpe played for the NFL's Rock Island Independents and Thorpe and his teammate, Joe Little Twig, lived with him in his uncle's cabin. My grandfather was a stoic German immigrant, but occasionally as he drove me home from my job as a stock boy in his drugstore, as we passed along the river he would tell me about the sawmills that lined the riverbanks when he was a boy and where tractor factories then stood, and about how when he came to Rock Island, wooden kegs of beer were delivered to the taverns by colorful wagons pulled by Clydesdales, and about when a magnificent amusement park was where Black Hawk's village once stood. After college in Milwaukee, a ski strip fortuitously took me to Lake Tahoe. I still live there with my Iowa-born wife, as do my daughter and grandson. And I often remind them that as much as they love living where they do, growing up in Rock Island, I had it better. * It's important to distinguish between a "town" and a "city." In 1950 when this history winds down, Rock Island's population was 48,710; today it is part of a metropolitan community that is ten times larger and closely resembles a stretch of Chicago suburbs.