Antoine Le Claire The Fur Trader Who Became The Richest Man In Iowa

 

Antoine Le Claire started his life as an Indian trader and interpreter. After the Black Hawk War, Le Claire launched his second career as a town builder.

At first, he worked as a jack of all trades. Le Claire became the first justice of the peace in Iowa in 1833. The following year, he established a ferry service between Stephenson (present-day Rock Island) and Davenport. On April 19, 1836, Le Claire became the first postmaster of Davenport. Early accounts say he carried the mail in his coat pockets.

After the City of Davenport was laid out in 1836, a steamboat loaded with investors arrived at Davenport in time for the sale, but fewer lots were sold than expected. At best, fifty or sixty lots sold, and then, for lower prices than expected. The new city was off to a slow start and would continue at that pace for nearly a decade.

From all accounts, Le Claire cultivated his town much as a farmer would his fields, watering it and adding a touch of fertilizer when necessary. Everything written about Antoine Le Claire referred to his generous nature. “Mr. Le Claire is a wealthy man,” reported the Rock Island Weekly Argus, “and he knows what use to make of his wealth. Mr. Le Claire has always been the first on the list in every enterprise intended to benefit the town and state in which he lives.”

When the town was laid out, Le Claire set aside Lafayette Square for a courthouse. Several other lots were provided for parks and playgrounds. He donated land or money to build many churches in Davenport and gave an entire block on Main and West Fourth Streets for St. Anthony’s, the first church in Davenport.

James Young and Family Jackson County Iowa

James and Amanda Young and Family

James Young was born in Pennsylvania in 1841. Two years later his family headed west to Jackson County, Iowa. His father built a mill and a log house beside it, and James grew up working in the mill.

He stayed there until 1867, when he married Amanda Pierce. The next spring, he and his brother David bought land in Jones County. They worked it until they split the acres and went their own ways. James stayed and farmed his share.

In 1882 he moved to Madison Township, bought more land, and raised seven children. He served two terms as justice of the peace and backed the Prohibition Party, believing liquor was the country’s worst evil.

Jacon Eldridge Early Pioneer Scott County

Jacob Mullen Eldridge learned early that survival meant motion. His mother died when he was four, his grandfather when he was thirteen, and from then on he worked for everything he had—hauling freight, saving his pay, buying his own wagon team. By twenty-one, he’d heard enough about the new town of Davenport to risk it all on the promise of the frontier.

 He left Philadelphia in the fall of 1845 and rolled into Rock Island two months later, tired and broke. Davenport was just across the Mississippi then—a rough little settlement with muddy streets and big dreams. Eldridge bought land northeast of town for $1.25 an acre, planted an orchard, and built a house. Thirty years later, he sold the same land for $125 an acre and named the ridge after his home state—Jersey Ridge Road.

 

He was part dreamer, part salesman. One of the first land agents in eastern Iowa, he spent the 1850s advertising farmland in New York and Washington newspapers, urging readers to “Go West, young man.” That line would later be pinned to Horace Greeley, but people in Davenport knew who said it first.

James D. Bourne First Settler in Clinton County

No one’s sure who got there first. Maybe it was Elijah Buell, who built a cabin on the Mississippi and drifted south before the ink on his claim dried. Maybe it was James D. Bourne, who came up the Wapsipinicon River in 1836 and never left.

The land didn’t look like a place where anyone could stay. The river bent and twisted through low timber, its banks soft with mud and cattails. Bourne stepped onto the shore and decided it would do. He built his cabin where the bend caught the morning sun.

It was a trading post for the American Fur Company at first. Coffee and powder for pelts, tobacco for tallow. A dozen faces came and went each week—trappers with frost in their beards, Native families with venison to trade, river men drifting between towns that didn’t yet exist. Bourne kept a notebook of what each man owed, though sometimes the ledger wasn’t worth the paper. He stayed anyway.