The Quad Cities: Crossing the Mississippi

The Mississippi River crossing at the Quad Cities is not the Mississippi of the Southern Delta or the broad-shouldered river at St. Louis. Up here, in the Upper Midwest, it is narrower, faster, and locked: a system of dams and locks that the Army Corps of Engineers built in the nineteen thirties to maintain a nine-foot navigation channel for barge traffic.

The Upper Mississippi carries more tonnage of corn and soybeans downriver than most people realize, a quiet agricultural shipping lane running from Minneapolis to St. Louis. Davenport, Iowa and Rock Island, Illinois sit on opposite banks here, three other cities cluster around them to make the Quad Cities metropolitan area of about three hundred eighty thousand people.

Rock Island was the site of the Rock Island Arsenal, a Civil War-era military installation on the island in the river, still active as an Army manufacturing and logistics facility. The Black Hawk War of eighteen thirty-two, which was the last major armed conflict in the Upper Midwest between the United States Army and Native peoples, was fought in this region. Black Hawk, a Sauk leader, refused to acknowledge a treaty ceding Sauk land east of the Mississippi and led a group of followers back to plant corn on their old land near Rock Island.

The Army pursued them north and west across Wisconsin to the Bad Axe River, where the battle ended in what most historians now describe as a massacre of a group that was attempting to surrender. Black Hawk was captured, imprisoned briefly, and then taken on a tour of eastern cities, where he drew enormous crowds. He died in Iowa in eighteen thirty-eight.