Margaret "Peggy" Dudgeon Phillips

From the book, Bill Sublette: Mountain Man:

Justice Joseph Bleadsoe of Lincoln County completed an entry in his register, smiled, and extended his congratulations to a newly married young couple. His brief civil ceremony united as husband and wife Phillip Allen Sublette and Isabella Whitley. Phillip, age twenty-three or twenty-four, recently had arrived at the county seat of Sanford, Kentucky, near the earlier site of St. Asaph's or Logan's Fort, there to select a livelihood and a wife. Isabella, a few months younger than her adventurous husband, had spent most of her life in Kentucky near Stanford, living at Walnut Flat and on Cedar Creek by the Wilderness Road. Since her older sister Elizabeth had married four years before, to Isabella this November 21, 1797, was not only a happy but a traditionally proper occasion.

The year's harvest was gathered and there was a late autumn crispness in the air, brilliant color in the last leaves, and wisps of smoke rising from scores of homes in and around Stanford. The population of the settlement grew steadily, and throughout the county new families built homes and brought land under cultivation. After General Anthony Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers and close upon the even more recent Pinckney Treaty with Spain, it was evident that the West of the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee was to be a new Zion for the land-hungry men and women of New England, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Although Spain controlled Louisiana and England only slowly evacuated the Old Northwest, the spirit of immigrants reaching Kentucky and Tennessee, the youngest children of the federal union, was such as to overcome all those temporary difficulties.

Kentucky, between the Green and Cumberland rives, was rich and well watered. Its soil, said to be the "uncommonly favorable to hemp," tobacco, and all fruits, supported fields of wheat, corn, oats and rye. An enterprising settler could gather wild "pecanes"; hunt quail, grouse, teal, and "summer duck"; and a lucky man might kill an elk in the hilly sections or find a buffalo on the headwaters of Green River or Licking Creek. Perch, trout, and soft shelled turtles were proof that nature was as ample in its streams as in its forests.

The land would also support commercial enterprises. Maple sap, brought to perfection by frosty mornings and bright sunshine, could be gathered during a six weeks' period beginning each February. Its marketable by-products, molasses, vinegar, and spirits, provided extra income. Limestone, found everywhere, was calcined easily into excellent lime, and many of the settlers manufactured gunpowder from natural sulphur and nitre deposits. There also was sufficient clay for commercial brick making, and enough stone for millstones, grindstones, and building purposes.

Phillip A. Sublette, groom of the wedding party, had given up the tidewater security of Chesterfield County, Virginia, for the promise of life beyond the Cumberland Gap. In the Kentucky census of 1810, Phillip was listed as being between twenty-six and fourty-five years of age. In the census records for St. Charles County, Missouri, for 1817 and 1819, he was listed as being between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Isabella Whitley, his wife, was born in 1774. Since her sister stated to Lyman C. Draper that Phillip was older than Isabella, it is almost certain that he was born in 1773 or 1774, and must have been only a few months older than his wife. (See also Genealogy and History, February 15, 1947, for Phillip's approximate place of birth.)

Some of his French Huguenot relatives had settled in Woodford County north of Stanford, and others considered migrating to Kentucky. A few of them had military land grants in the state. Phillip had no such grant, but was reasonably well educated, shrewd, and energetic and did not intend to sustain his family solely from the soil. Instead of going to Stanford, he could have gone to Bardstown, a prominent center of settlement; to Danville, the old political marketplace; to Louisville, which gave "indications of the importance it was ultimately to attain"; or perhaps even to Lexington, the "metropolis of the pioneers." Lexington claimed sixteen hundred inhabitants and outranked all western communities including Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.

Stanford was not equal to Lexington or Bardstown, but it was centrally located. Lincoln County held inviting agricultural possibilities even a part-time farmer could scarcely overlook. It was located on the dividing line between the bluegrass and moutain areas, and its sol benefited from plentiful rainfall. Prevailing southerly winds blew across the "towering hiss and valleys" in the south down upon the lower hills and rolling countryside to the north. Hundreds of those acres belonged to Isabella Whitley's family, a family that together with the Logans and Shelbys formed the more conservative natural aristocracy of the region.

Phillip's marriage to Isabella placed him in close contact with one of Kentucky's most influential men: Colnel William Whitley, his wife's father and his new father-in-law. Colonel Whitley approved of his daughter's marriage to the stranger from Virginia and may have provided the newlyweds a home for their first years of married life, since Phillip neither bought any of the acreage available in Lincoln County at that tie nor built a new home for his bride. If he did move into the Whitley home, he found himself in one of the social and political centers of the Transylvania region. Guests, arriving and departing at frequent intervals, imparted a cosmopolitan atmosphere to the inviting family fireside.

The tall, two-story, brick Whitley home, one of the most impressive structures in all Kentucky, stood two miles south of Stanford well back from the Wilderness Road atop a low hill. The simple, brick exterior walls contained small windows set high above the grand for better defense against marauding Indians. Over the front entrance were the light-rick initials of colonel Whitley; over the rear door those of his wife, Esther Fullen Whitley. In this house, Phillip courted and won Isabella, and to it following their wedding we may presume they were conducted for a celebration in the large third-floor ballroom frequently used for dances and quilting bees.

The Whitely home was built on the left (west) fork of the Wilderness Road, also called "Logan's Trace" (Trail), as it wound its way northward from the Crab Orchard, located eleven and one-half miles south of Stanford.

The interior of the house contained fascinating architectural and decorative effects. Each of the twenty-three steps on the main stairway was "ornamented with the head of an (hand-carved) eagle, bearing an olive branch in its mouth." On the third floor was a secret hiding place for women and children, originally built as protection against Indians, and a portion of the basement was called the "dungeon." Window glass for the house had been brought in by pack animals from Virginia, and there was said to be a long, narrow escape tunnel from the interior to a small nearby spring.

Colonel and Mrs. Whitely built the house in the late 1780's or early 1790's on their Cedar Creek land grant, after giving up an earlier residence at Walnut Flat, and on an adjoining hill marked off one of the first racetracks in Kentucky. Neighbors referred to their estate as "Sportsman's Hill" and flocked to the races whenever they were schedule. Barbecues were held on the law on the house, one in 1794, in honor of the colonel's success in an Indian campaign. As a major in the Sixth Militia Regiment he played a prominent role in the Indian actions of his day and won an enviable reputation as a fighter. (Lewis Collins, History of Kentucky, I, 512; Charles G. Talbert, "William Whitley, 1749-1813," Filson Club History Quarterly, Vol. XXV (April, 1951).

During the frequent absences of the elder Whitely, his wife Esther, a woman reputedly "fully worthy" of him, was in charge of the vast household, slaves, stock and farmlands. her greatest responsibility, however, either with or with out Colonel Whitley's presence, was the brood of younger Whitleys, of which Isabella was the last one born in Virginia before her parents moved to Kentucky at the time of the Lexington and Concord. Eight more brothers and sisters were born before Isabella's marriage: Levisa, Solomon, William, Jr., Andrew, Esther, Mary (Polly), Nancy and Sally, and one, Ann, in 1802. Such a large family filled the Whitley household with more than its share of activity and provided Phillip prospects of an ever growing group of "in-laws." (Family Bible of William Whitley, Jr., Filson Club Library, Louisville, Kentucky; Draper MSS.

Phillip and Isabella resided in Lincoln County nearly three years before they decided to move southward to the territory along the Cumberland River. By that time Isabella's first child was born. (Field Diary, Entry of September 21, 1843, Stella M. Drumm, "Whiliam Lewis Sublette," in Dictionary of American Biography, XVII, 189. Miss Drumm gives 1799 as William's date of birth with a question mark. After examination of the Lincoln County census of 1810, the census records of 1817, and 1819, for St. Charles, Missouri, the Benjamin Emmons MSS in the Missouri Historical society, and the records of the Department of State of the United States, it seems that Miss Drumm's original contention is accurate and should be accepted until more conclusive proof is available.

As one of the first of the Whitley grandchildren and a boy at that, he was called William Lewis Sublett in honor of his grandfather Whitley and granduncle Lewis Sublette. Exact poof of the place of his birth on September 21, 1799, probably would reveal one of the two large bedchambers on the second floor of the aristocratic Whitley home, a comfortable beginning for a future frontiersman.

The news of William's birth may not have reached his father's family for some time. Phillip's parents, Littleberry and Sarah Burton Sublette, and his brothers had reached Woodford County by 1796. They remained there a short time with Littleberry's brother Lewis before moving south to the Green River. There, on the Green, Littleberry entered a land certificate for two hundred acres on the "South side of Green River," on "Greasy Creek waters of Little Barren," and on the north side of "Jone's Military Survey."

Green River, which flowed through the center of Green County, was noted for the beauty, color, and depth of its water. Geologists believe the stream was once a subterranean one whose ceiling wore away and caved in, brining the water to the surface. The narrow, peaceful valley was overhung with willows and sycamores and bordered by "low corn bottoms" which beckoned new settlers. Yet the sol of the bottoms was depleted easily, so much so that it was common, in the nineteenth center to speak of an angular woman as "bony as the hips of a Green River cow."

Littleberry Sublette died in 1800, shortly after bringing most of his family to Green County. His widow Sarah, the mother of Phillip and paternal grandmother of William Lewis Sublette, remarried in 1803 to Jonathan Smith also of Green County. Her children, Phillip's brothers and at least one sister, remained in Green county with their mother and new stepfather until after the War of 1812, when some of them joined the westward migration to Missouri. Two of the boys, Littleberry Sublette, Jr., and Joseph Burton, were apprenticed by their mother as saddlemaker and tanner-currier. Three other children were known to have been of the family: Hill (Hilly), Samuel, and Lenious Bolin. There also may have been two more: Edith and Maston. Not only Isabella, but Phillip Sublette as well, could claim a large family of brothers and sisters.

when young William was scarcely a year old, his parents left the Whitley's and started south to the tiny settlement of somerset in the new county of Pulaski. Wealth in Pulaski county was based on land, the products of the land, and the services which could be rendered those who lived on or exploited the land. Population boomed in the area, and speculation along the fertile Cumberland River, as well as the usual business and political positions to be acquired in a new region, called Phillip with a powerful voice.

The Sublette family made the journey of under fifty miles from Stanford to Somerset before the late spring of 1801, when William was not yet two years old. The road to Somerset passed through high, wooded hills where deer, fox, squirrel, and turkey abounded and where herds of medium-sized, semi-wild pigs rooted for food. Isabella, with William in her arms, rode in the wagon. Phillip, assisted by a slave, guided the horses along the bumpy road. A dependable slave and good horses were assets to one's community standing in early nineteenth-century Kentucky. A fine saddle horse was worth over one hundred dollars, and Kentuckians had bred and trained them for years. In early winter it was not unusual to see herds of twenty to thirty being driven from Lexington to Charleston.

Upon reaching Somerset, the family found only a few houses standing on the townsite, but the families living in those already erected were busy at the loom and in the fields. Suffice to say, the Sublette's either moved in with another family or built a temporary shelter of their own until they could construct a house. When the tax assessor made his rounds in May, 1802, they were still without land, although they had added another horse to their possessions. By the following spring of 1802, however, they had purchased "town lotts" upon which they built a home. Meanwhile, the family expanded at a steady pace. A second son, Milton Green, later known as the "thunderbot of the Rockies," was born in 1802, during the family's transition period, followed by Sophronia Fullen in 1805, another daughter, Mary (Polly), in 1806 or 1807, and Andrew Whitley in 1808 or 1809.

Isabella was busy with toddling William and babe-in-arms Milton in April, 1802, when Phillip, to support his family, opened an "ordinary" at "his dwelling house int he town of Somerset." (To "keep ordinary" included providing food and drink, but seldom lodging. Lodging was secured at a "tavern".) The location of his house on the main square of the county seat aided his business prospects, since he could draw upon the traveling trade and the flow of courthouse business. A hard-working frontier lot, the people of Kentucky loved "gaming and liquors," and their taverns of logs and stone were an important part of the community, centers for the exchange of gossip and news and the gathering place of impromptu assemblies and entertainers. Public houses were crowded, especially at court time, when lawsuits might momentarily replace horses, crops, and the weather as topics of conversation.

Phillip's family background recommended him to traveling irginians: he was son-in-law to one of the most noted men of Kentucky, he soon knew the leaders of Pulaski County, and he was to hold several public offices. Isabella, keeping house at the same location, devoted her spare moments to her husband's business. She provided the pleasant atmosphere neighbors and travelers liked to find in a gracious hostess, and her son William spent long hours underfoot, "taking in" the stories of tavern guests and western travelers.

Governmental functions in Kentucky were concentrated largely in the hands of the county court, which in many ways was a limited corporation admitting but few interested, prominent citizens. As a prospective officeholder Phillip was not one to shirk public duty and served on the second committee appointed to plan the town and locate, let out, and superintend public buildings. The same year, 1801, he served as an election clerk and the next year, on the basis of his dependability and evident ambition, was appointed a deputy sheriff and keeper of the county jail. He remained as jailor for two years and, incidentally, was in charge of stray stock, a profitable side line if the owners failed to appear.

Phillip, scarcely thirty, moved up in the ranks. In 1803 he served for a short time as clerk of the Circuit Court of Pulaski and Wayne counties and in the summer took the oath as a Pulaski County justice of the peace. Two years later he was designated a deputy surveyor and on April 1, 1807, crowned his career as a good Jeffersonian Republican: he was appointed federal postmaster at Somerset, which position he held until New Year's Day, 1810, a three-year assignment. Postmaster and tavern keeper was not an unusual combination in that day, and his rapid rise within the county hierarchy was ample proof of the "social institution" that was the county courthouse.

To add to his income and position, Phillip, within a year after he reached Somerset, began to buy lands along the Cumberland in his own name and the names of his close friends and wife's relatives. In Kentucky, as in Pennsylvania and Virginia, the land was divided, on the basis of tree-coverage, into three classes for tax assessment. Lists of lands to be sold at auction were carried regularly in local newspapers, and anyone with a little reserve capital could purchase hundreds of acres. Low land taxes and his appointment as deputy surveyor helped him secure control of large tracts along most of the important waterways near Somerset. On only one occasion was he taken to court in a land dispute, but his tavern business and salve holdings brought him into court in twenty-five additional cases. Most of the litigation he won, but the amount of time spent in court was somewhat staggering.

He had good reason to foresee a general rise in land prices. corn harvests were plentiful, and farmers were converting corn into meal to be sold in New Orleans at four to five dollars per ninety-six-pound barrel. There was a growing market for tobacco, hemp, and flax, and grazing lands were needed for milch cows and for the great herds of horned cattle driven in lots of two or three hundred eastward to markets in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Land fit for orchards provided a source of peach brandy, of which "there was a great consumption," and land containing salt licks was suited to exploitation by the pork-packing industry.

William, as the oldest child and "big brother" to the other children, doubtless knew something of his father's land speculation, although there wer emany other more interesting projects for inquisitive young minds and busy hands. Public education had to wait until the bare necessities of life were first on. William received little formal schooling, his poor spelling provides ample proof that he was given little training. He did learn basic mathematics, however, and wrote legibly. Perhaps his parents taught him the fundamentals. On the other hand, in his many free hours, he and the other children could explore the countryside and discover farm animals or the small denizens of the forest who, then as now, offered unlimited interest for small children, or they might daub themselves with the red clay of Pulaski for a rollicking game of "Indians."

In the colder months when activities were confined indoors, there might be candy pullings. Winter was the season for dances and whatever games could be improvised for snowy or rainy weather. At Chrismas time there might be visits from the Whitley's or perhaps from a Sublette traveling in the locality. In the evenings about the fire Phillip could tell them fascinating stories of land-grabbers and speculators, of surveying trips, of escaped slaves, of the first days in Somerset, and of how he served the county years before most of them could remember.

Early in the Spring of 1810, in April at the very latest, the Sublette's packed their belongings and set out to return to Lincoln county. The reason for the move is unknown, but Phillip's legal difficulties and the incorporation of Somerset as a town that year may have played up on his wandering spirit. There is also the possibility that his land speculation was not as profitable as expected or that Isabella was anxious to return to her family. What ever the reason, they rented or leased their lots, home, and tavern in Somerset and after farewells to the nieghbors took a last look at the log houses along Spring Street, at the tannery and wagonmakers, and slowly started northward over the branches of Pitman and Busk creeks. It was "green-up time" in Kentucky when the redbud, dogwood, bloodroot, mountain violets, and spring-flowering anemones turn the countryside into a patch quilt of color. It was also a memorable experience, the season notwithstanding, for the Sublette children, who after the short journey found themselves close to the branches of Cedar Creek in the land of their grandparents.

Lincoln County, generally speaking, offered more of the traditional comforts of life than did Pulaski. There were better educational opportunities, there was a local newspaper, the Lamp, begun in 1808, and there was also more extensive religious activity for those so inclined. Colonel Whitley was a Presbyterian as was his wife, but it was said by some that she was really a Baptist, "as were several of her children." Tradition had it that Presbyterian meetings had been held in the Whitley home before a church was built either at Walnut Flat or in Stanford. Later, in 1812, the south District Association of Baptists met in Lincoln, showing the religious importance of the county.

Phillip took up fifty acres of second- or third-rate land along the narrow, winding Dix River, noted locally for its large boulders and flat limestone slabs protruding above the surface of its waters. By 1812, he was settled with his family in a house at the Crab Orchard. The little community then comprised a few scattered buildings, not yet as known as a town, approximately two miles southeast of the Whitley house. The Crab Orchard, so called for the immense forest of wild apple trees in its vicinity, had been until quite recently a meeting plae for travelers planning to journey east along the Wilderness Road to the Holston River Settlements. Between 1788 and 1796, 115 organized groups gathered there for mutual protection against the Indians in their eastward trek. Colonel Whitley, at his Walnut Flat-Cedar Creek location, at times provided supplies to travelers and was active in improving the road.

the Sublette children, now settled in the Crab Orchard, were close enough to make daily visits to their grand parnets. young aunts, and uncles. They could participate in holiday festivities at the Whitleys', such as that held on the Fourth of Jly, 1812, when upwards of one thousand persons gathered about a tall liberty pole erected on the Whitley grounds. they could see the races at Sportsman's Hill, where some of the best horse flesh ran at dawn while the owners and onlookers ate, drank and wagered. In addition to the public celebrations where were also more intimates affairs of family interest: the marriage of William Whitley, Jr., in 1811, and the birth of at least five Whitley grandchildren, including three, Sally, Pinckney, and Solomon Perry, in the Sublett household.

Shortly after the return of the Sublettes to Lincoln County, the aging Colonel dictated his memoirs to Phillip, who acted as his scribe and hence preserved for future generations details of the elder Whitley's life. "Tall, his featurs strongly marked, hair sandy, light eyes, prominent aquiline nose, somewhat vain," the Colonel "carried in his gun a big charge, and put in 2 bullet." His memoirs complete, he marched off to the War of 1812 as a volunteer in Colonel Richard Johnson's Mounted Regiment and was killed, October 5, 1813, in the Battle of the Thames near where Tecumseh fell.

His will was probated that winter, and Isabella's share of his estate was a tract of thirty acres. Those acres, added to her husband's Dix River parcel and holdings in slaves and stock, gave the Sublettes a fair nucleus for farming. Two of the boys, William and Milton, were old enough to be quite useful farm hands. The brunt of labor, however, was never placed upon their shoulders, since Phillip, although a member of "Company & Ridgment" of the local militia during the war, had not trudged away to active service.

A few weeks before the outbreak of hostilities, in March, 1812, he opened his second tavern. This one was at his house at the Crab Orchard, where he was to provide "good, wholesome lodging and diet for travellers, and stablage or pasturage for horses," and was forbidden, incidentally, to "permit any unlawful gaming in his house, nor suffer any person to drink more than is necessary, or at any time suffer any scandalous behavior to be practiced..." Prices on basic commodities were high at that time, and he was enjoined to post a current list.

Travelers told their friends of the new inn at the Crab Orchard, and at least one patron left a "Red Morocco Pocket Book" there, for whose owner Phillip advertised in the Lexington Reporter. The editor of the paper was a friend of his, and the two men corresponded on subjects as varying as apprenticeship and "copias rock." As might be expected on the basis of previous events in Somerset, Phillip soon found himself a party to cases in the Lincoln County Court, most of them involving the tavern and his land.

Meanwhile, the children grew into adolescence, and their years spent at the Crab Orchard were enjoyable ones. There was a swimming hole in the spring-fed Crab Orchard Lake, fish to be caught in the streams, enough horses to ride, and the usual rural pastimes: corn shuckings and hunting for the boys; apple-peelings and rag0tackings for the girls. The younger children could chase gray squirrels out of the garden patch, and for young and old alike there were always endless household chores and services for travelers at the tavern.

The postwar migration to the Trans-Mississippi West caught the Sublette's in its current scarcely five years after Phillip opened his Crab Orchard business. Late in 1816 or early in 1817, he decided to pull up stakes for a third time and join the trek to Missouri Territory. Eight million acres of bounty lands then were under survey in Missouri and Illinois; the distribution of the Missouri military grans was expected momentarily; and published accounts of the new West, available in newspapers and at bookstores in Kentucky, offered glittering inducements for migration. To a man with an eye for enterprise and profit, and Philip had just that, Missouri would be hard to overlook.

One of the Whitley's a cousin Thomas, had settled at Portage des Sioux, St. Charles County, Missouri. He held seventy one fertile acres in the town's common field and may have written his Kentucky relatives of his good fortune. In contrast, forces then affecting Kentucky's economic life were not uniformly bright. The opening of the Ohio and Mississippi rovers to steam boat traffic was an important factor. When one steamer, the "Enterprise," came up from New Orleans to Louisville in 1816, its twenty-five-day journey fired public imagination. There was soon "lively interest" in new river trade "and...prospects of unparalleled...prosperity."

The bluegrass area, centered at Lexington, which was the old distribution hub for the region of the state drained by the Kentucky and Licking rivers, began to deline in economic power as Louisville gained. As commercial artery of the bluegrass section, the Wilderness Road experienced an eclipse, and business located near the trail suffered accordingly. Actually, the regional business collapse began in 1818, moved forward quickly, and joined the economic forces precipitating the Panic of 1819 and its subsequent national depression.

Never had there been a greater influx into Missouri than the pre-depression years of 1816-1818. Like a "mountain torrent" settlers poured across the Mississippi "faster than it was possible to provide corn for bread stuff." Nor was this flood all the flotsam of the Republic; many were respectable people drawn by the magnet of opportunity. Ensnared as he was in the avalanche of favorable reports from the west, in an economic period of trouble descending upon the bluegrass, in the band-wagon psychology of migration, and in his own gypsy-like, opportunistic nature, Phillip prepared to move his family.

He settled some of his pending court cases in Lincoln and Pulaski counties, and Isabella sold her land to her brother Andrew. The sale was on August 4, 1817, and by November 19, the family reached St. Charles, Missouri, after a late summer or early autumn journey. Solomon Whitley, Isabella's oldest brother, seems to have accompanied them westward. He had the same urge to settle beyond the Mississippi. Although he held land in Kentucky, he considered it second in importance to prospects in Missouri and went west to prepare the way for his wife and children.

Phillip, Isabella, Solomon, and the children left the Crab Orchard and its familiar landmarks: the Whitely home and the houses and stores, courthouse and post office of Stanford. They passed Bright's Inn on the trail north of town and headed overland to the northwest. The smaller children rode in the wagon with their mother, but William and Milton were old enough to assist their father with the stock. Time has destroyed whatever record they m ay have left of their journey, but all families moving westward from central Kentucky at the time had the choice of two principal routes: by land all the way through Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois; or by land to the Ohio River, then by water down its alternating strong and sluggish current to the Mississippi. The land route to Louisville passed through Danville, southwest of the rapid Dix River. Danville contained two hundred homes, six stores, several small factories, and a printing office and was a community rich in memories for Isabella, since the town had sheltered the legislature of 1797 in which her father served.

Beyond Danville were Harrodsburg, Bardstown, and the "village" of Louisville, located on a narrow plain rising above the Ohio River. The broad Ohio was one place to transfer your belongings to a flatboat if you intended to go west by water, or if you preferred, there were ferry crossings to southern Indiana where the road continued north and west. Land travel the entire distance relieved a family of the "sad monotony" of mosquito-ridden swamps along the lower Ohio and of the currents of the Mississippi, "extremely difficult and dangerous" in places.

The wagon road in Indiana, from Louisville to Vincennes, was corwded with emigrants in 1817, as "aravan after caravan" passed over the high, rolling hills towards the flatter lands of Illinois. There were a few inns along the way, but many of the local settlers looked upon travelers as intruders who could best avoid trouble by keeping on the move. The settlement at Vincennes was scattered over the flood plain of the Wabash in "badly laid out" manner. Half-drunk Indians frequently encamped near the town, adding public disorder to its other problems: swamp fever and growing pains.

To the west were recently settled areas of Illinois and sections of the trail considered too dangerous for individual travel. Through swamps and rich bottoms the trails cut their way via wagon ruts and notches on the trees. Yet, all important trails and roads, whether from Kaskaskia to Illinoistown or Edwardsville, from Shawneetown to Alton, or from vincennes and points east to Edwardsville and Alton, eventually deposited their tired travelers at the Mississippi River ferry landings.

Before mid-November, 1817, the Sublettes reached the St. Louis-St. Charles area. it was not unusual then for thirty or forty families a day to arrive in that country. some of them planned to winter in western Illinois; others were determined to move immediately into Missouri. Whether by land or water, the Sublette family's journey of several hundred miles was drawing to a close. They must have been anxious to reach their destination. Eighteen year old William may well have been the most anxious, since he was entering manhood and all of the eight children would be the first one most likely to strike out on his own beyond the Father of Waters.

Missouri Territory in 1817 included nine counties. Six of them, the most heavily populated, bordered the right bank of the Mississippi north of Lousiana. One branch of scattered Missouri settlements pointed directly westward up the Missouri Valley into the Boon's Lick country, and another budding branch reached northwest to Salt River. St. Louis, the administrative center of the territory, stood astride the main route of east-west immigration. The city's thirty-five hundred to six thousand people congregated in a two-mile area along the river, parallel to which ran the streets, all "very narrow and not very straight." The old Creole life of St. Louis was changing to assimilate incoming American stock. A rapid cultural evolution was underway, noticeable in religion in a new Presbyterian congregation, in architecture in the substitution of American-style brick buildings for the older garden-enclosed homes of wood and stone, and especially in enlivened commercial enterprise. Beyond the streets on the high ground behind the town were stone forts dating from the Spanish period: remains of an earlier Mississippi Valley empire.

A few miles north of St. Louis near the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers was St. Charles County. Its county seat, St. Charles, was a town nearly as old as St. Louis. Between the two settlements flourished farms and lesser communities. There were old French homesteads, a church, and a convent in the Florissant Valley, a valley of extremely fertile blacklands, richly covered with hazel bushes, prairie plum, and crab apple trees. There was an American settlement at Bonhomme, west-northwest of St. Louis, and of course, there was the military post, Fort Belefontaine, on the right-hand side of the Missouri River to the east of St. Charles.

Whenever an overland immigrant party arrived opposite St. Louis or opposite the northeastern tip of St. Charles Conty, it could select any one of several crowded ferries operating into Missouri, all commanded by men anxious to profit from the "very catchin" Missouri-settlement fever. If an immigrant family crossed directly to St. Charels County, it landed on rich, flat, bottom lands extending inland to the "Mamelles" or river bluffs, on the edge of which was located the town of St. Charles. If, however, an immigrant family crossed to St. Louis and intended to proceed to St. Charles, it was necessary to traverse St. Louis County to a ferry on the Missouri River opposite St. Charles. At that place the river was not as turbulent as it was a short distance downstream. The ferry consisted of two canoes bound together by a two-inch plank, but it served its purpose despite dangers of adverse wind and wave.

Phillip, Isabella, and their brood reached St. Charles in 1817, before the colder days of late autumn and early winter. If they journeyed by land, they may have been part of one of the many large companies described by Timothy Flint:

From the Mamelles I have looked over the subjacent plain quite to the ferry, where the immigrants crossed the Upper Mississippi. I have seen in this extent nine wagons harnessed with from four to six horses. We may allow a hundred cattle, besides hogs, horses, and sheep, to each wagon; and from three or four to twenty slaves...the wagons often carrying two or three tons, so loaded that the mistress and children are strolling carelessly along...the whole group occupies three quarters of a mile.