Davenport emerged as a strategically placed Mississippi River town after William C. Redfield predicted in 1829 that it stood opposite the future terminus of a geographical trunk-line route between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, and in 1838 the Iowa Sun and Davenport and Rock Island News called it the Queen City of the Far West. Early travelers praised its rich soil, healthy climate, and location on the west bank of the Mississippi opposite Old Fort Armstrong. In 1836, George Davenport, Antoine LeClaire, and six associates acquired and laid out a 36-block townsite between Harrison and Warren streets for $2,000, and the town was incorporated in 1839. Redfield’s forecast was realized when the Rock Island railroad reached the Mississippi on February 22, 1854, becoming the first railroad to link the Atlantic with the river. The area around the later Interstate 80 crossing had a much older history: prehistoric Native people hunted, fished, fought, and died there; Black Hawk and Keokuk moved through the region; and Zebulon Pike, Jefferson Davis, Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, and Robert E. Lee also passed through it. Pike’s arrival in 1805, the battles of Campbell Island and Credit Island during the War of 1812, and the construction of Fort Armstrong in 1816 prepared the way for permanent white settlement. The Black Hawk Purchase was negotiated on the site of Davenport and signed at Fort Armstrong on Rock Island in 1832. William F. Cody was born on a nearby farm in 1846, the same year Iowa became a state. The first bridge across the Mississippi between Rock Island and Davenport was built in 1856, and five more bridges followed there before the Interstate 80 Bridge was completed in 1966 as the first Mississippi River bridge built under the direction of the Iowa State Highway Commission.