In that same letter Abraham wrote to is brother John in 1835 he said, “a man may be poor today and tomorrow be rich if he can be lucky.” Abraham had no idea what the life of a miner was like, or if he would be one of the lucky, but of all the opportunities for working men in the western territories, mining felt like the quickest possible way to bring his children back home with him.

In the fall of 1831, after saying goodbye to his son and three daughters who lodged at various homes around Palmyra, Missouri, Abraham traveled one hundred miles south to St. Louis where he boarded a steamboat for the three hundred and eighty mile trip upriver to where a new way of life awaited him.

Abraham toiled in the mines on the upper Mississippi town of Dubuque, which is now part of Iowa. But in 1831 it wasn’t even a U.S. territory. Success hadn’t come as easily as he had hoped. When Abraham wrote to his brother John on June 25, 1835, he said, “I concluded I would come and try my luck awhile but I have been unfortunate as yet.”

While he was concerned about bringing his children from Missouri, broader events would change Abraham’s course.

The Black Hawk War, 1832

In an attempt to expand its hold on North America, the US Government offered cheap land for anyone who would settle on it. In this growing push westward, Native Americans were driven from their homes and land. Treaties between the Native Americans and U.S. Government weren’t always honored, leading to friction, and sometimes battles.

Abraham had been in Wisconsin Territory around six months when all of this came to a head. In May of 1832, he was conscripted into military service as a private in Price’s Company of the Iowa Mounted Volunteers. Wisconsin Territory, not yet a state, was part of the Michigan Territory at the time.

Abraham’s stint as a soldier gave him a respite from the lead mines, and a potential opportunity for steady pay. The muster roll shows that “this company was stationed…at Fort Cass, at the town of Cassville [Wisconsin], on the Mississippi River.”

He hadn’t turned his luck with mining yet, but being in the Volunteer Army during the Black Hawk War gave Abraham six months of relative stability. If he thought a steady paycheck would give him a way to bring Elizabeth, Anna, John, and his baby daughter, who were ten, seven, three, and two-years-old up from Missouri, he may have thought twice when the brief Black Hawk War was over. The cost was high, and not just from battle.

Abraham wrote to his brother, “I have been here in the time of the Indian wars and was in several little battles. There was not many whites killed. As soon as the war was over the cholera commenced. It killed more than the Indian. As soon as the cholera was over the small pox came. It killed more.”

After the Black Hawk War, “the large tract known as the Black Hawk purchase, including one-third of the present area of Iowa, was ceded to the United States by the Sacs and Foxes. After the completion of the treaty negotiations the miners again crossed over into the much coveted region where they built cabins and commenced to take out considerable ore.”

But a second time they were forced to leave because the treaty had not been ratified. In June, 1833, the treaty went into effect, and the way was at length clear for settlers to take possession of the land. During the next few years “large numbers flocked in, prospecting was actively earned on and many mines were soon in operation. The most productive time for the Dubuque lead mines started in 1835.”

These were the mines that Abraham was working so it made sense that this was the time Abraham felt established enough to bring his oldest daughter, Elizabeth, to Wisconsin from Missouri. At thirteen years old, she was old enough to help keep house. 

When Elizabeth had last seen her father he had been a farmer who owned land and spent his days in the wide open spaces. Four years later she was pulled from that loving farm community in Missouri and thrust into the grimy existence of a miner’s daughter, living in a small cabin near the mines, who knew no one in this strange town.

Continue to Part 4 or see all of the posts in the series here: Blessing Sister Stories