As a reminder, gentle reader, I bought this book in Davenport, Iowa, in 2024, and the book shop owner asked me if I knew the author who used to call the bookshop when he was looking for source material. Last year when I went to the same bookshop, different people we behind the counter, so I don’t know if the book shop was still in the same family as it had been. I’ll have to be sure to look for the founder’s portrait behind the desk as an indicator. Not that it would indicate yea or nay, but if it’s not there, that might indicate nay.
The book is a history from the first white settlements in the Quad Cities area. The Sac/Sauk are already there, of course, so some of the earliest history deals with establishing trading posts, the Black Hawk War, and the advantage that a man named Davenport had because he was originally from England and had the accent, and the natives in the area had sided with the British in the wars against the Americans.
Settlements came, settlements expanded, and they formed into the communities that became the cities. Each had a certain amount of its own character determined by the people who settled in each–not only by nationalities, but also trades. Davenport became commercial because the traders founded it, and their impact carried on. Moline, from the French for mill, was (and is) heavily industrial, dominated today by John Deere. The actual Rock Island was taken pretty early by the federal government to be an armory, but the city of Rock Island is on the Illinois bank of the river. The book calls it variously the two cities and the Tri-Cities; the fourth of the Quad, Bettendorf, was founded in the 20th century, so one is forgiven for not remembering which is the fourth (Milan and East Moline were formed earlier, but I guess they’re disqualified because they’re not on the river).
You know, I’ve been to Davenport twice, but I did walk around the downtown area a couple of times, so some of the names are a little familiar to me, and I look forward to maybe sharing some of this knowledge with my beautiful wife should we attend a conference there again. And she will undoubtedly wonder how I know such things. Ah, gentle reader, we know: I do my homework on history for places I visit and places where I live for not only the trivia-sharing, but also because I like to know.
