I posted a full length article on the case I researched while in graduate school on my local history blog a while ago feel free to check it out at: http://thepioneerpast.blogspot.com/p/cross-currents.html

The Rock Island Bridge case was a very dramatic event in local and national history and is one of those dramatic events that took place in the years before the Civil War that have often been forgotten. The case demonstrates that the tensions between the North and South were not as simple as slavery and free-labor. Issues of development and change were also at play. For example, Jefferson Davis as Secretary of War under President Pierce attempted to block the construction of the bridge because he favored a southern route for the transcontinental railroad.

You are correct: our bridge was the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi, but the Minnesota pedestrian bridge (according to our histories) was the very first documented bridge of any type.

According to Hell Gate of the Mississippi: The Effie Afton Trial and Abraham Lincoln’s Role in it (Riney, 2006), The doomed steamboat was named after the pseudonym of Sarah E. Monmouth, a popular author of the time. Effie Afton’s Eventide: a Series of Tales and Poems was written in 1854.