Davenport's early boosters saw it as a strategic Mississippi River city, and in 1836 George Davenport and Antoine LeClaire with six associates acquired and laid out a 36-block townsite along the river between Harrison and Warren streets for $2,000; the town was incorporated in 1839. William C. Redfield had predicted in 1829 that Davenport stood opposite the future terminus of a geographical trunk-line route between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, and that forecast was fulfilled on February 22, 1854, when the Rock Island railroad became the first railroad to link the Atlantic with the Mississippi. The Mississippi crossing at this point also stood within a much older historical landscape, where prehistoric Native people lived and where Black Hawk, Keokuk, Zebulon Pike, Jefferson Davis, Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, and Robert E. Lee were associated with the region. Pike's arrival in 1805, the battles of Campbell Island and Credit Island during the War of 1812, and the establishment of Fort Armstrong in 1816 helped set the stage 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, Buffalo Bill Cody was born on a nearby farm in 1846, and the first bridge across the Mississippi between Rock Island and Davenport was built in 1856; five more bridges followed there before the Interstate 80 Bridge was completed in 1966.