Stephen Sumner Phelps Oquawka Iowa Pioneer

Stephen Sumner Phelps

They came west one by one in those years—traders, drifters, gamblers, men who wanted more room to breathe or to disappear. Stephen Sumner Phelps was one of them. Born in 1805 in Palmyra, New York. He left with a rifle, a pack of trade goods, and a look that said he wasn’t coming back.

The river took him first. Illinois River, 1820s. He built his first post near Starved Rock, on the Illinois River in the 1820s—rough logs and river mud, smoke curling through the pines. The Potawatomi came down in canoes, loaded with furs. Phelps met them with powder, beads, and whiskey that burned all the way down. A frontier editor later wrote, “Trade here is a trembling peace—one wrong word and the hills will answer in fire.”

When the trade thinned, he went north to Galena. Lead country. Holes in the ground, money if you lived long enough to spend it. He and his brother Alexis dug deep, struck ore, then sickness. “He came close to death,” the family said. Lead in the lungs. Lead in the blood. He left the mines crawling and never went back.

He floated south to the Mississippi, following the brown current until the trees thinned and the banks sagged. Yellow Banks, they called it—Oquawka now. A spit of mud and driftwood. He built a store, bought canoes, and started over. The Sauk and Fox came to trade. They called him Wah-wash-e-ne-qua—Hawkeye. The man who sees far.

The Black Hawk War in 1832 brought panic to the settlements. Phelps rode between camps, trying to hold the line. “You can’t win this one,” he told Keokuk’s band. “Save your people.” They did. Black Hawk’s men fought north. Keokuk stayed south. When it ended, both sides still spoke his name.

Oquawka grew out of the mud. Phelps ran ferries, stores, and a bank. Helped build the courthouse. Served as mayor, justice of the peace, and sometimes referee when the whiskey got loud. He once said politics here was “mostly about who brings the whiskey.” He always did.

Abraham Lincoln came through in 1858, thin and road-worn. He handed Phelps a pocketknife and said, “I was told to keep this until I found a homelier man than myself.” Phelps laughed. “Well, boys,” he said later, “see what you missed by being so handsome.”

By the 1860s, he was running a bank. The Burlington Hawk-Eye printed one dry line: “The safe of S. Phelps, Banker at Oquawka, was robbed yesterday morning of above $11,000.” No follow-up. Just another day on the river.

Stephen Sumner Phelps died in 1880. No monument. No marble. Just the town he built and a state that took his name. The river kept rolling. The hills kept quiet. And the state, it may have been named after him. Or Black Hawk. Maybe both.