Part One: Hawkins Taylor Documents

Nobody knew more than Hawkins Taylor about the arrival of settlers from eastern states into the southeast corner of Iowa Territory. As his obituary in 1893 stated: “[Hawkins Taylor] probably knew more public men than any other American of his day. He never forgot anything he ever knew and has written more and more valuably about early Iowa history than any other man unless Rev. Dr. Salter of Burlington be excepted.”¹ He was a most accurate and prolific recorder of memories about crucial developments along this section of the big river between Iowa and Illinois, published significantly in the early 1870s.²

Taylor’s sense of duty, community, and justice made him one of the most congenial people in all of Lee County, Iowa. His bravery, honesty, and popularity guided him wisely through turbulent times. He was an early settler in Fort Madison, a frequent official presence in Keokuk, and an occasional visitor to Nauvoo. From 1834 to 1864, he was the county sheriff and a territorial legislator, was instrumental in diffusing a boundary war between Governors Boggs in Missouri and Lucas in Iowa, served as mayor of Keokuk, and became a friend of Abraham Lincoln. In his final thirty years he functioned as an unofficial ambassador of Iowa in Washington D.C.

Because many salient highlights in his biography are narrated best by Taylor himself in the documents now made available below, for the first time, in this publication, the following introductory sketch is brief. It will emphasize mostly the few years in the 1840s—a time when the competing economic, political, religious, and social interests of some people on the Iowa side of the Mississippi clashed sharply, and sometimes violently, with those of the Latter-day Saint immigrants landing in Nauvoo.

Hawkins Taylor was born on a remote farm in Barren County, Kentucky on November 15, 1811. His father had come from Ireland to America in 1781, evading the Potato Famine there. His mother had poor health for a decade after his birth, and she died in 1822. Hawkins attributed much of his success in life to his mother’s purity, prayers, and ministering spirit.

Like many young men on the frontier, he went west to Missouri in 1831 owning virtually nothing and hoping to find work. Typical of his innate independence and determination, he made the six-hundred-mile journey alone and in two weeks. Upon arrival in St. Louis, then a town of six thousand, Taylor stayed briefly with John K. Walker, his cousin. Rather than a warm welcome, Taylor received a suspicious look and hard questions from this man he had never met, and as Taylor recalled, that riled up “my foolish Scotch-Irish blood.”³ Soon tempers cooled. After three days, he pushed north to Hannibal, where after only a week, he grew homesick and returned to Kentucky. But soon, he “could not, after seeing the new country, bear to remain in the old.”⁴

After about a month, he again set out for Missouri. Crossing into Indiana, it rained every day. One night he took shelter in an abandoned cabin full of rats. The Grand Prairie, a thirty-mile stretch in Illinois, was an empty “terror of all travelers;” without timber or settlement; its green-headed flies had killed some horses attempting the crossing.⁵ Taylor pushed on to Marion County, Missouri, where he stayed with a distant cousin, William Patterson, near Quincy, Illinois, for whom he worked hard in a brickyard, over which he was soon put in charge.

In spring 1832, Taylor traveled upriver by boat to the Galena and Snake Hollow lead mines with Hayden Gilbert, who had previously made some money there. Taylor took up several mineral claims and built a log cabin. “It was a healthy, rugged, and happy life.”⁶ He experienced effects of the Black Hawk War; and when offered the chance to visit his family in Kentucky, Taylor declined. He wrote: “I was as homesick as anybody ever was, but had made nothing and I did not mean to go back until I did make something.”⁷

That winter, he determined to start farming. He went to Springfield, Illinois, and borrowed fifty dollars from a total stranger and acquired forty acres of timberland in the bottom of Salt Creek. Taylor made the acquaintance of a young clerk at a store in nearby New Salem and asked that young man to witness the signing of the deed for the farmland he purchase on June 4, 1833. The young man was Abraham Lincoln. Both Taylor and Lincoln were natives of Kentucky, and they remained friends until Lincoln’s assassination. Taylor felled trees and trimmed rails, and by winter’s end, he had split enough rails to fence two sides of his property.

In the fall and winter of 1833, Taylor built a log house at Irish Grove, eighteen feet square, with a puncheon (plank) floor and brick chimney, doing all the work himself. The house was almost destroyed by a prairie fire. Such fires were very common and dangerous at the time because of the height, thickness, and expanse of the prairie grass. Taylor and a neighbor quickly set a series of back fires that saved their homes.

In spring 1834, Taylor married Melinda Walker, a cousin. “She was very handsome and truly good in every sense of the term.”⁸ In addition to their new home and land, they owned a pony and two yoke of oxen. Taylor planted corn, needing a good crop to service his land loan. However, in the latter part of the year he became terribly sick and most of his friends had given him up for dead. He was able to salvage his finances by selling his farm, with improvements, and invested the remainder in a larger piece of land.

Their first child, Catherine Esther, was born in spring 1835. Taylor recalls that “nobody was really well; all were full of malarial fever.”⁹ Taylor started to look west of the Mississippi River, to what would soon become Iowa Territory.

On May 9, 1836, Taylor and three relatives crossed the river at Fort Madison to take a look. The group of four traveled on horseback, with saddlebags, in the “regular southern style.”¹⁰ There were then only one hundred people living in Fort Madison and less than three thousand in what is now the state of Iowa. By popularly agreed regulations, one settler was allowed 160 acres of prairie and the same of timber for each claim. In order to retain the claim, it was necessary to “break” five acres and build a cabin in short order. “The settlers were a law unto themselves,” as Taylor recalled.¹¹

Taylor cofounded the town of West Point, building a home from scratch, holding land sales, and getting to know a dozen candidates for the newly organized legislature for the Wisconsin Territory (of which Iowa was the southern part). It was well known that settlers in the area enjoyed their whiskey, but Taylor was a teetotaler and instead offered people a barbecue. The Taylors’ next three children were born in West Point: Mary Jane (January 1837), James (who died after a few months), and Anne Elizabeth (January 1840). Their fifth, Samuel David, was born in 1842, after they had moved to Fort Madison.

From age fourteen, Taylor took an active interest in politics. He was a Whig and, later, a Republican. In the fall of 1836 in West Point, he was elected clerk of the county court. He was appointed a justice of the peace by Governor Dodge in 1837. In October 1838, he distributed a one-page campaign circular expressing support for “common” (public) schools, extension of the boundary of Lee County northward, and the selection of West Point as the county seat. He and his cousin, William Patterson, won two of the twenty-six seats in the Iowa Territory’s first House of Representatives, and Taylor was effective in diffusing the border war between Missouri and Iowa.¹² He mentions, but only briefly, that abolitionists were a problem, even in Iowa Territory.¹³

After a “hot contest,” Taylor was elected sheriff of Lee County in 1840.¹⁴ By law, he was required to live in Fort Madison, and so he moved his family.¹⁵ He found this a difficult job, as many of the early settlers had independent streaks and a lack of respect for law enforcement. Keokuk, for example, had a reputation for being a rough town in its earliest days. Of the few hundred residents of Keokuk, almost all of them, and most notably Laban B. Fleak, were engaged in the lighting of freight over the rapids. Among their numbers, Taylor reported, were “the worst class of men that could be found, murderers and gamblers and thieves of every class.”¹⁶ Nauvoo, a much larger town at that time, was also “infected . . . with a great number of thieves, who would cross over to Iowa and commit depredations.” They would then return back to Nauvoo, across the state line, and were protected by the populace there. Taylor was successful in making friends in various towns who supplied him with information and assisted him in making arrests. On one occasion, he achieved temporary fame by arresting Hyrum Smith, brother of Joseph Smith. He also served as the sheriff in the Iowa case of Joseph Smith v. George Hinkle, which was held in Fort Madison in 1842.¹⁷

Taylor vividly recalled many details about life on the Mississippi as viewed from the Iowa side of the river. His time as sheriff gave him unique insight into issues such as land sales, politics, and, perhaps an issue that he discusses with the most detail and imagery, crime.

Regarding the Latter-day Saints who were arriving in that region, Taylor remembered his dealings with Bishop George Miller, and his serving an arrest warrant on George Hinkle, who fled.¹⁸ Taylor describes Nauvoo and the temple and its architect, to whom Joseph gave “every plan.”¹⁹ He admired the town layout and the Church’s teachings against the use of spirits, tea, coffee, tobacco, and in favor of everyone working and paying tithing and consecrating supplies for the workers on the temple. While noting that the whole country was shocked at the cruel manner Mormons had been driven from Missouri, Taylor also lamented that Nauvoo became a “refuge for thieves of all kinds” but that “in everything but their religion and moral practices was a model city.”²⁰

As sheriff, Taylor had several contacts in Nauvoo dealing with attempts to arrest suspected criminals. He describes the “whittling society” that whittled outside officers out of the city, brandishing Bowie knives and making noise to drown out all they said. Nevertheless, he was able to arrest some and take them to Iowa to stand trial, the trial of Hodge in West Point being the most notorious. On another occasion, a trial was held in the upper floor of the Masonic Hall in Nauvoo. As an observer, Taylor observed people performing baptisms for the dead in the Mississippi River, visited the museum that housed the Egyptian mummies, remarked often that Nauvoo was a beautiful sight.²¹

After noting the death of Joseph and Hyrum, Taylor describes the Battle of Nauvoo and the departure of the Mormons, having spent one hundred thousand dollars on the temple.²² Taylor mentioned Fleak, Kilbourne, and Sharp together as being known to Joseph Smith as his main antagonists. Eventually, the citizens of four Illinois counties determined to drive the Mormons from Nauvoo. Representatives met in convention and prepared lists of Mormon families living outside the town. One by one, the families were ordered to remove the contents of their homes, which were then set afire. Taylor claimed that some fifteen hundred homes were burned. The anti-Mormons then organized an army of several thousand and marched on Nauvoo. Said Taylor, “I most foolishly and wickedly, with a few others, had gone over to Keokuk and had joined the anti-Mormon army and was given a U.S. musket that had been captured with some hundred others from the Mormons at Keokuk.”²³ The “army” was commanded by General Brockman, a minister. About fifteen hundred had firearms of some kind, including six small cannon. The Mormons met them at the edge of the city, and the ensuing battle lasted several hours. The momentum flowed back and forth, and there were about a “half dozen killed and double as many wounded.”²⁴ Taylor later found a bullet hole through the leg of his pants. Under siege, the Mormons had no means of feeding the town and within a few days became demoralized. They entered into a compact to vacate the town by May 1846. That allowed the anti-Mormon army to disband and led to the famed westward trek of the Mormons.

After Taylor completed his term as sheriff, he moved back to West Point in 1846. However, after just two years there he was asked to relocate to Keokuk to manage the county court proceedings. By that time, Keokuk was one of the largest and most prosperous cities on the upper Mississippi. Taylor was later involved there in brick-making, construction, and real estate sales. He was elected mayor in 1857, and he and his wife became principal members of the town’s society. In 1859, their home was on the southeast corner of Exchange and 8th Streets. They owned a second home or summer cottage along the river north of town, and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was a guest there on at least one occasion. Clemens was known to be enchanted with Taylor’s daughter Annie. He corresponded with her while she attended Iowa Wesleyan College in Mt. Pleasant (to which Clemens referred as “Mt. Unpleasant).” In one of his letters, he hinted that his brother Henry Clemens was equally taken with Annie’s older sister, Mary Jane.

In his later years, Hawkins Taylor reminisced that, in his opinion, the town of Keokuk had a more interesting history than any other town he had ever visited. A significant number of people from Keokuk filled major leadership positions at the state and national levels in the second half of the nineteenth century. He campaigned in favor of Abraham Lincoln, exchanging at least a dozen letters between them in the 1850s and 1860s.

In 1862, Lincoln appointed Taylor chairman of a federal commission to evaluate payments claims from Missouri soldiers who remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. This commission’s actions had repercussions through the balance of the century. In 1864, Lincoln appointed Taylor federal mail agent for the State of Kansas, but he soon lost that job due to politics. Taylor moved to Washington D.C. in the 1860s and became prominent in political and social circles there. When asked his business, he replied, “I do anything which ought to be done, and for which I will be paid,” and he had many friends. Taylor came within a few votes of being elected Door Keeper of the House, a very influential position at the time. However, the incumbent prevailed.

Functioning as a lobbyist, Taylor was known to accept payments for recommending certain individuals for political appointments, which he could legally do. Taylor was called to testify during the congressional hearings in 1876. The New York Times said his wit provided the “entertainment” that day. The Times referred to him as “an old gray-headed man, with cunning face, quick movement, imperturbable manner, and shabby-genteel air.” In Taylor’s later life, he was a prolific writer about Iowa history. He had an uncanny memory and was known for his bravery and fairness. He wrote “with singular clearness and modesty.” Because “he was far too conscientious to be either partisan or vindictive, . . . he enjoyed the confidence of a wide circle of readers.”