Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/240



among the earliest settlers in Iowa. John Whittaker with his family joined them early the following spring.

The first settler to cross the Mississippi River and open a farm in the vicinity of old Fort Armstrong was Captain Benjamin W. Clark, a native of Virginia. He had emigrated to western Illinois before the Black Hawk War and, in 1833, when the lands west of the Mississippi were opened to settlement, he took a claim. He soon discovered coal, which he mined; he planted an orchard and established a ferry across the river, the only one between Burlington and Dubuque. In 1835 he built a large public house and the next year laid out the town of Buffalo, and built a saw mill near the mouth of Duck Creek. His son, David H. Clark, was the first white child born in the Black Hawk Purchase in the country laying between Burlington and Dubuque, April 21, 1834.

For several years Buffalo did a large amount of business and had the prospect of becoming an important city in the future. But tow rivals soon sprang up in Rockingham and Davenport, the latter destined to become the large city of this region. Rockingham was laid out in 1836 by A. H. Davenport, Colonel John Sullivan and H. W. Higgins. It was several miles up the river from Buffalo, opposite the mouth of Rock River.

The original claim upon which Davenport was laid out was made in 1833 by R. H. Spencer and A. McCloud. Soon after Antoine Le Claire purchased it for one hundred dollars. In 1835 it became the property of a company of eight persons who proceeded to lay out a town named in honor of Colonel George Davenport. A long and bitter contest arose between Rockingham and Davenport as to which should be the county-seat. It was finally decided in favor of the latter. This proved a death blow to Rockingham, which eventually disappeared from the map.