For nearly 100 miles south of the Quad Cities, the GRR picks its way along a series of back roads through Illinois floodplain and prairie, most of which is under cultivation. Frequent small towns serve as reminders of the need for frequent stops by early stages, steamboats, and railroads. Most of the towns seem not to have changed much since the last steamboat or train whistle blew, although now there’s neon in the bars, vinyl and aluminum siding on the houses, and farmers with high-powered four-by-fours on the roads. All the big towns sit on the opposite side of the Mississippi, a product of the enormous 19th-century expansion of the American frontier. On the west bank were all the embarkation points for settlers heading across the great prairie and Plains trails—the Oregon, the Mormon, the Santa Fe—so it was around those places that supply towns grew. Illinois could only sit and watch.
Nearly 45 miles south of the Quad Cities beltway, the GRR passes tiny New Boston, at the mouth of the Iowa River. The town is a historical footnote these days, having been surveyed by the young Abraham Lincoln after his stint in the army—a tour of duty during which his only combat was against mosquitoes, he later recalled.
Along the river farther south, near Keithsburg, a sign welcomes travelers to Yellow Bank country, named for the deep layer of sand exposed in the river valley in this region. Because of this deposit, visitors can find sandburs and even cactus in the Big River State Forest south of town. Keithsburg used to be one of a number of button manufacturing centers located along the middle Mississippi: Freshwater clams were dredged from the river bottom and their shells were used for making pearl buttons. Clamming is still the commercial occupation of a few hardy divers, although now the shells are almost exclusively used for “pearl seed,” the sand-sized implant injected into commercial pearl oysters in the Pacific.
