VOL. 4; THE PLATTE PURCHASE, THE SIMPSON AND COOPER FAMILIES, 1836 – 1846

THE PLATTE PURCHASE

THE SIMPSON AND COOPER FAMILIES, 1836-1846

Kirke Wilson

San Francisco

August 1999

INTRODUCTION

The Platte Purchase is the eighth and :final chapter of an incomplete manuscript recounting the experiences of the Cooper and Simpson families in Missouri from 1800 to 1846. The earlier sections followed the Benjamin Cooper family of Kentucky in the settlement of the Boonslick region of Missouri and the opening of the Santa Fe Trail. The earlier parts of the narrative also traced the Thomas Simpson family of North Carolina and Tennessee through Howard County and Johnson County, Missouri before moving west. The eighth chapter covers the decade between 1836 when the Congress approved the annexation of the Platte region to Missouri and 1846 when several members of the Cooper and Simpson families abandoned their Platte County homes and farms to begin the transcontinental emigration to Oregon and California.

In the context of western expansion, the Platte Purchase was a small but familiar example of eager settlers acquiring valuable lands despite treaty commitments to Indians occupying the lands. From the perspective of the participating families, many of whom were moving but a few day’s wagon ride from their Missouri homes, the Platte Purchase was an opportunity to obtain unspoiled land and begin anew. These families were accustomed to the process. They had grown up with it. They were the children and grandchildren of the pioneers of Kentucky, Tennessee and other parts of Missouri.

The settlement of the Platte Purchase was rapid and peaceful. The Indians living in the area did not resist but cooperated in an orderly relocation as they had promised. Missouri families rushed into the Little Platte to claim land and begin the hard work of clearing, planting and building. The area was promptly surveyed and residents were soon able to obtain title to the land they had improved. The Platte settlement occured during a period of national economic depression and also coincided with a nearby religious war in which Missouri brutally expelled 12,000 Mormons. Within a decade, many Platte settlers were ready to leave Missouri and risk the 2000 mile trek across the continent to the Pacific Coast. For the pioneers, whose experience had been the incremental progress from county to county in Missouri, the transcontinental move marked a profound shift in thinking and a calculation that the possible benefits exceeded the expected hardships. The Platte residents knew about the duration and dangers of the trail. They had learned from the experiences of earlier travelers, including several of their Little Platte neighbors, and prepared for the risks of several months on poorly-defined trails with little opportunity for resupply.

My focus, as it has been in earlier parts of this narrative, is on the lives of the people involved. I remain interested in their experiences and the choices they made. I am particularly interested in how they raised families and built communities while repeatedly moving. I am searching for explanations for their restlessness and their willingness to embrace the unknown. As they move west, these families emerge somewhat from the background but we continue to depend on what we can know about the time and the place to understand their experience and motivation.

Beyond the obvious desire for new land, the pioneers left little direct evidence of their motivation for moving to the Little Platte or the reasons why so many became so dissatisfied so quickly. The best explanation for their behavior seems to be that the process of uprooting and resettling had become part of their nature. Many of the Platte pioneers had moved twice or more during the previous twenty years and would continue to move, with increasing :frequency, until they reached the edge of the continent. What becomes evident in the Little Platte is the clan nature of the migration and settlement process. Extended families, like the Simpsons and Kimseys or the Brown and Coopers, had intermarried over several generations and moved together from one :frontier to the next. In the Little Platte, the members of these clans settled near each other and assisted each other to clear land and establish farms. Rather than the self-reliant :frontier individualist who traveled alone through the wilderness, many of the pioneers of the Little Platte were members of clans who worked and traveled together to reduce the risks of the frontier and to share the hard work of resettlement. Within a decade, some of the settlers in the Little Platte would rely on their experience and clan relationships to cross the plains.

I am grateful for the assistance I have received from the collections and staff at the Library of Congress, the Library of the State Historical Society in Columbia, Missouri, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Mid-Continent Public Library in Platte City, Missouri, the Missouri Historical Society Library in St. Louis, the National Archives of the United States, the Platte County Historical Society and the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. I am particularly grateful for the genealogical and other research of Shirley Kimsey and Betty Runner Murray of Platte City as well as the extraordinary family record compiled and published by Faye Lightbum of Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

Kirke Wilson

San Francisco, California

August 1999

It is desirable that the …boundary of

the state be extended.

Governor John Miller, 1832¹

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE PLATTE PURCHASE

The western boundary of Missouri was an inconsequential part of the stormy and protracted Congressional debate about slavery which accompanied Missouri statehood. The 1820 compromise which resulted in the admission of Maine and Missouri as states included an understanding that there would be no subsequent expansion of slavery north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes latitude, the line between Missouri and Arkansas Territory. Missouri would be admitted as a slave state but the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase would forever remain free of slavery. With the focus on slavery and the southern border of Missouri, legislators had overlooked the western boundary. Instead of using an easily identified natural barrier like the Missouri River, the Missouri Enabling Act of March 6, 1820 assured future disputes by drawing a simple north-south line on the map at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers. The line was artificial, difficult to locate with any certainty and an inevitable source of conflict between Indians who had treaty rights to the land and settlers who wanted the land.

THE CAMPAIGN FOR ANNEXATION

Although the 1820 boundary may have appeared tidy to mapmakers in Washington unfamiliar with the area, it excluded nearly two million acres of fertile and well-watered land between the western Missouri line and the Missouri River. Known as the Little Platte, this region rapidly became a focus of conflict and the subject of political agitation. Within a decade, the boundary accepted in 1820 would be challenged by the land-hungry Missouri settlers and their elected representatives. As the Missouri Legislature explained in an 1831 petition to the United States Congress, the 1820 boundary had been adopted when the area ”was one continued wilderness…the geography was unwritten”.²

Now the six counties of northwestern Missouri, the area that came to be the Platte Purchase was an inverted triangle 60 miles wide on the north, 104 miles

on the east along the old border and 150 miles on the west along the Missouri River. The Platte Purchase comprises the 1,981,540 acres in the six present-day Missouri counties of Andrew, Atchison, Buchanan, Holt, Nodaway and Platte. Through treaties and use, the Platte region was Indian territory. The Great and Little Osage had relinquished their lands north of the Missouri River in 1808 but other tribes continued to have claims in the Platte region. The Kansas Indians had signed a treaty June 3, 1825 which included a specific claim to land outside Missouri in the Platte area.³ By 1830, the United States was attempting to move all Indians to areas west of the Mississippi River. In the Treaty of Prairie du Chien of July 15, 1830, Sac and Fox, Iowa, bands of Sioux, Omaha, Oto and Missouri Indians agreed to cede land in Minnesota, Iowa and the Little Platte area to the United States with the understanding that the lands would be allocated “to the tribes now living thereon…’,4 Four years later, a Committee of the United States Senate concluded that the 1830 treaty precluded use of the Platte region by anyone other than the Indians to whom it had been dedicated but optimistically observed that “moderate additional compensation will induce them [the Indians] to yield any remaining interest they may seem to have in this small tract.”⁵

The Indian tribes which had been large and powerful in the areas east of the Mississippi were often fragmented and scattered by relocation. They were unable to sustain themselves through hunting or farming and became dependent on the food, supplies and cash distributed by government Indian agents. Along with bands of Potawatomi, Chippewa, Ottawa, and Iowa, the Sac and Fox had found themselves pushed into the Platte region and pushed out again by encroaching settlers. With Indians blocking white settlement in the Platte region, Missourians began agitation to persuade the government to extinguish Indian title to the land and rectify the mapmakers’ omission of 1820.

By the 1830s, it was becoming increasingly evident that Indians and non Indians could not, whatever the treaty agreements, live in proximity without conflict. Whites could not or would not enforce treaty obligations on their own people and Indians failed to become the self-sufficient small farmers that well intentioned reformers had envisioned. As early as 1824, the Missouri General Assembly complained to the United States Congress about the interaction of Indians and settlers. The legislators found the remnants oflndian tribes in the state and concluded that the situation was “…pregnant with evil both to the Indians themselves, and to the people of the state ofMissouri.”6 While the evil of the pregnancy may have been reciprocal, the consequences were most severe for the Indians who, according to the General Assembly, would suffer the “…degradation

of their character…[and] diminuation of their numbers” as a result of “collisions” with settlers.

While Missouri legislators were unselfconscious about the idea that the Indians had to be moved for their own good, others recognized the inherent injustice of the prevailing Indian policy. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun observed in 1825:

…one of the greatest evils to which [the Indians] are subject is that incessant pressure of our population which forces them from seat to seat…there ought to be the strongest and most solemn assurance that the country given them should be theirs, as a permanent home for themselves and their posterity, without being disturbed by the encroachment of our citizens.⁷

Calhoun was entirely correct about the evils of white encroachment but underestimated the inability of the United States to enforce the “solemn assurance” in the face of land-greedy settlers.

Since federal and local authorities were unreliable in protecting Indian land interests, the only practical solution was racial separation. To make Calhoun’s solemn assurances real, national Indian policy would require that Indians be relocated to reserves far beyond populated areas where there would be no collisions with settlers. The initial plan had been to move all Indians to federal lands west of the Mississippi River. Before the initial relocation could be completed, Missouri had been settled and the Indians had to be moved farther west.

The Platte region was a logical part of Missouri and should never have been left outside the state boundary. Within the first decade of statehood, it had become a matter of state policy to annex the area. The proposed annexation was logical and obvious but it also raised sensitive political issues. It would entail the elimination oflndian land claims in the Little Platte, many of them products of recent treaties, and it would eventually require the physical relocation oflndians from the area. Because it would violate the 1820 prohibition on the expansion of slavery, the proposed annexation could potentially reopen the slavery debate that continued to divide the nation.

Annexation of the Little Platte had been discussed in the Congress in 1829 as part of deliberations related to a Missouri boundary survey. The residents of Missouri who advocated annexation ignored the potential political problems and based their arguments on the need to separate the Indians and the settlers as well as the desirablility of the region and the logic of its incorporation into the state. In February 1831, the Missouri legislature sent a memorial to the Congress asking that the Little Platte be added to the state. The 1831 memorial understated the size of the Platte region and mistakenly asserted that it was free of Indian claims. The memorial emphasized “the necessity of interposing, wherever it is possible, some visible boundary and natural barrier between the Indians and the whites” and explained that the annexation would make the Missouri River that barrier.⁸ The Missouri Congressional delegation introduced the Platte legislation in late February 1832. The annexation was approved by the Senate but was not considered in the House of Representatives where anti-slavery interests were in the majority.

Missouri Governor John Miller had opposed the 1831 memorial for technical reasons. The following year, he was a leading proponent of annexation. As he explained in an 1832 message to the Missouri General Assembly:

It is desirable that the …boundary of the state be extended…so as to include the territory lying between our western limit and the Missouri above the mouth of the Kansas river…By annexing it to the state, the Missouri river would become our boundary which would greatly protect the frontier from the invasion of hostile Indians and prevent those questions of right to jurisdiction, which so often disturb the quiet of the country, and afford not only an excuse for, but a temptation to the commission of crime.⁹

Governor Miller also pointed out that the annexation would improve farmers’ access to the river and, as a consequence, increase the value of their products and their land.

The arguments for annexation were based on an unstated but broadly accepted assumption that the settlers were entitled to the land. For it was the settlers, not the Indians, who were disturbing the quiet of the country. And it was the Indians, not the settlers, who had title to the land and who were quietly in possession. It was the settlers who coveted the land who were creating the disturbance and were tempted to crime.

Despite the strong support in Missouri, the Platte annexation remained inactive in Congress until May 1834 when the Senate declined to ratify an Indian

treaty because of provisions related to the Platte region. The Treaty of Chicago had been negotiated with the Potawatomi, Chippewa and Ottawa tribes September 26, 1833. The treaty would have relocated the three tribes from the Great Lakes region to an area in the West that included the Little Platte. Without consulting the Indians, the Senate amended the 1833 treaty by excluding the Platte region from the areas where the Great Lakes tribes would be resettled.

AGITATION FOR ANNEXATION

By 1835, Missouri residents were growing impatient with the unresponsiveness of the Congress to their desire for the Little Platte. United States Senator Lewis F. Linn of Missouri (1796-1843) summarized the opinion prevalent among his constituents in a January 1835 letter:

…It has long been desired by the people of Missouri to have annexed to the State that portion of territory lying between her western boundary and the great river, Missouri, for the purpose of preventing the location of an annoying Indian population, and for the purpose of having points on the river to receive their supplies and ship their productions, within a moderate distance from the homes of those inhabitants residing along that line of the frontier. The location of the Potawatomi, by the treaty of Chicago, on this territory, interposes a barrier to the attainment of these objects so important to the welfare and tranquility of the inhabitants of the northeastern and western counties.¹⁰

Demand for annexation heated up during the summer of 1835. A Clay County militia muster at the Weakly Dale farm three miles north of Liberty provided the occasion for a mass meeting with impassioned oratory and belligerent threats about local residents taking the land themselves. A committee oflocal leaders was formed to assure that the Platte region was promptly acquired for Missouri. Judge William T. Wood was directed to prepare a resolution to the Congress conveying the sentiment of the Clay County residents.¹¹

Eager to claim the Indian land of the Little Platte, residents of Clay County had been sneaking into the area for many years. Senator Linn, an apologist for expansion, estimated that there may have been as many as 300 premature settlers in the Little Platte in 1835. Federal troops were dispatched from Fort Leavenworth across the river to evict the squatters. Writing sixty years later, a local historian described the gentle removal of the trespassing settlers: “An officer

and posse were sent from the fort and with kindness [the settlers] were asked to leave.”¹² Among the intruders of 1835, Sarshel Brown and Thomas Johnson of Clay County, planted a corn crop in the Platte which they sold to the army at Fort Leavenworth before being evicted.¹³ The army burned squatters’ cabins but allowed a small number of families to remain to provide necessary services to the Indians and travelers. Two families stayed at the Issue House built that summer to supply beef, flour and bacon to the two Potawatomi bands which had been moved to the Little Platte. Another family remained to operate a ferry boat on the Missouri River. One of the settlers expelled from the Platte area was able to save his cabin from destruction by installing Indian tenants.¹⁴

In 1836, the bill to annex the Little Platte was reintroduced in the Congress and moved quickly. Although the 1836 bill was a technical violation of the Missouri compromise and expanded “slave soil” by two million acres, it did not change the balance of power between the anti-slavery and pro-slavery interests in the Congress and it did not compromise the principle that no new slave states would be created north of Arkansas. The Senate approved the Platte legislation May 14 and the House ofReprentatives followed June 3. Four days later, President Andrew Jackson signed the bill. Commonly called the Platte Purchase, the 1836 legislation authorized no land purchase but defined the sequence of events necessary for Missouri to extend its western border to the Missouri River. These included requirements that the Little Platte be cleared of all Indian claims, that the State of Missouri accept the boundary change and that the President of the United States declare, by proclamation, that all Indian land claims in the area had been extinguished.¹⁵

ACQUIRING INDIAN LAND CLAIMS IN THE LITTLE PLATTE

Delayed for five years by Congress, the annexation of the Little Platte proceeded quickly once it was approved in June 1836. The Senate sent a resolution to President Jackson urging him to order Indian agents to contact the bands and tribes involved in the 1830 Treaty of Prairie du Chien and obtain their land rights in the Little Platte.¹⁶ Within a three month period during the fall of 1836, Indian agents at five locations successfully negotiated treaties in which Indians exchanged their land rights in the Little Platte for cash, goods and land across the Missouri River.

On September 10, Zachary Taylor negotiated a treaty in which Wa-ha shaw’s band of Sioux relinquished all claims in the Little Platte for $400 in

presents.¹⁷ Meanwhile Superintendent oflndian Affairs William Clark, making his :first visit up the Missouri River since his 1804-1806 expedition with Meriwether Lewis, met at Fort Leavenworth with the Iowas, and the Missouri band of Sac and Fox. In a treaty signed September 17, the tribes agreed to give up all claims to the land on which many of them had lived in the Platte Region. In exchange, the tribes received $7500 and a 256,000 acre reservation (400 sections ofland) in what is now Kansas to be divided between the two tribes. The United States also agreed to build eight comfortable houses, fence and cultivate 400 acres and erect two mills as well as provide two ferry boats, 200 cows, ten bulls, 200 hogs, agricultural implements, rations for one year and $900 in relocation expenses. The United States also agreed to provide each tribe a farmer, a blacksmith, a teacher and an interpreter for five years. Twelve members of the Iowa and fifteen members of the Sac and Fox signed the treaty along with William Clark who immediately returned by steamboat to his home in St. Louis.¹⁸

In late September 1836, Henry Dodge, Governor of Wisconsin Territory and Superintendent oflndian Affairs for the area, negotiated with another band of Sac and Fox opposite Rock Island on the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. The Treaty of September 27 acknowledged that the 1830 Treaty of Prairie du Chien had assigned Platte lands to the Sac and Fox but concluded that the lands would be impractical for Indian use:

…they can never be made available for Indian purposes…an attempt to place an Indian population on them must inevitably lead to collisons with the citizens of the United States…¹⁹

As a demonstration of lndian “friendship”, the treaty of September 27 expressed support for the incorporation of the Platte region into the state of Missouri. In the treaty, the Sac and Fox agreed to:

…forever cede, relinquish, and quit claim to the United States, all our right, title and interest of whatsoever nature in, and to, the lands lying between the State of Missouri and the Missouri River.²⁰

The September 27 treaty was signed by Governor Dodge and 23 Indians.

Indian agents John Dougherty and Joshua Pilcher convened members of the Otoe, Missouri and Omaha tribes and the Yankton and Santee bands of the Sioux at Bellevue in what is now Nebraska. On October 15, 1836, the assembled Indians

agreed to give up the land rights in the Little Platte they had received as part of the 1830 Treaty of Prairie du Chien. In exchange for what Pilcher described as a “beautiful…valuable” piece ofland, the tribes received merchandise valued at $4520 and five hundred bushels of com the following year as well as agricultural assistance for the Omaha tribe.²¹ On November 30, the Medawah-Kanton, Wahapakoota and Sisitong Tnbes gave up all their claims in the Little Platte for $550.²²

On December 16, the Missouri General Assembly accepted the provisions of the federal law. The following March 28, newly-inaugurated President Martin Van Buren issued a proclamation that:

…Indian title to all the said lands lying between the State of Missouri and the Missouri River, has been extinguished, and that the said Act of Congress of the 7th of June 1836, take effect…²³

With the presidential proclamation, Missouri had successfully obtained the land it had been denied in 1820. The Little Platte was now part of Missouri and could be settled as soon as Indians living in the area could be relocated.

Several bands of lndians continued to live in the Little Platte through the winter of 1836-1837. The Iowas and Sac and Fox were located in the northern part of the Platte Purchase and two bands of Potawatomi from Illinois had been temporarily living in the southern part approximately 15 miles north of the present location of Platte City. During the spring and summer of 1837, the Iowa and the Sac and Fox began moving their families to reserves in what is now Doniphan County, Kansas as they had agreed in the treaty of the previous September. A group of lowa relocated in early May with the assistance of Subagent Andrew S. Hughes, one of the members of the Clay County committee that had agitated for annexation two years earlier.

By the end of July 1837, most of the Indians had moved except those who remained briefly in the Platte to harvest com they had planted. Subagent Hughes reported in late August that 992 Iowa and 510 Sac and Fox had been resettled in Kansas. At their new reservation, the Indians planted corn, pumpkins, beans and other vegetables while also builiding 41 bark houses.²⁴ By November 1837, the Presbyterian mission for the Iowa Indians had also relocated from the Platte area to the reserve near Council Bluffs in Iowa where missionaries established a training school for Indians.²⁵

The Potawatomi, Chippewa and Ottawa who had been relocated to the Little Platte in 1835 were moved to land in Southwestern Iowa during the summer of 1837. Two groups of women, children and invalids, totalling 175 people, were transported to the new reservation by steamboat during July and August while a larger group traveled overland. By the end of the year, 2500 Potawatomi had reached the Council Bluffs Subagency in Iowa.²⁶

SETTLEMENT OF THE PLATTE PURCHASE

During the spring and summer of 1837, as the Indians were being moved out and land became available, settlers rushed into the Little Platte. Many of the pioneers were claiming lands they had selected in previous years. In some cases, these were lands they had farmed illegally when the land was Indian territory. Writing many years later, William Paxton remembered the clearing of timbered land with small trees felled and cut into ten foot lengths for fence rails while larger trees were girdled and allowed to die. Paxton described the settlement process but expressed surprise at the settlers preference for wooded and hilly land rather than the fertile prairie meadows.

Choice claims were selected, cabins erected, clearings opened, fences built, and com planted. The roads were crowded with emigrants. They dashed north until stopped by the Iowa line. They sought the lands densely covered with timber of the most superior quality, and at once commenced to destroy it. The lovely prairies, ready for the plow, were neglected.²⁷

Using available materials along with the designs and techniques their parents and grandparents had developed on earlier frontiers, the new residents of the Platte Purchase immediately erected temporary shelters. Paxton, who had been a boy at the time, recalled the simple cabins of 1837:

…rude huts constructed of round logs, daubed with mud, floored with puncheons, and covered with clapboards held down by weight poles. The chimney was oflogs to the arch, and then oflaths filled in with mud. The door was of clapboards, and the latch-string, night and day, hung outward; for the pioneer is both fearless and hospitable. But as soon as lumber could be procured, these cabins were succeeded by warm hewed-log houses, with plank floors and stone chimneys.²⁸

According to Paxton, fish were plentiful in the streams of Platte County during the early years of settlement but game, except for prairie fowl, was scarce. The buffalo, antelope, bear and deer, once abundant in the area, had been exhausted.

On December 31, 1838, the General Assembly of Missouri voted to create Platte County in the southern part of the Platte Purchase immediately north of present-day Kansas City. Platte County had fewer than a dozen white residents in December 1836 and more than 4500 two years later. By the time of the federal census in June 1840, the county population had grown to 8913 including 858 slaves. The County Court held its first session March 11, 1839 in a tavern at the Falls of the Platte, an area which later became Platte City. The court granted licenses to a ferry operator, a merchant and a dram-shop. Two weeks later, a circuit court judge convened a Grand Jury in the same log tavern to indict several fun-loving local residents for gambling.²⁹ The Court convened in rented buildings or outdoors until the fall of 1840 when the county was sufficiently prosperous to build a proper court house at an estimated cost of$15,000. The court house served the county until it was destroyed by fire in December 1861 during the civil war. 30

Zadock Martin was among the premature settlers who found reason to be in the Little Platte while it was still Indian country. Martin had visited the area as early as 1829 and in later years operated a ferry across the Missouri River. When the Platte was opened for settlement in 1837, Martin quickly laid out a town he named Martinsville. Within months, the new town had 35 houses and a population of 200. Two years later, Martinsville residents included several merchants, lawyers, saddlers, a carpenter, a physician, a hotel-keeper, a saloon-keeper and a deputy sheriff. With his sons, Martin built a grain mill in 1837 near the Falls of the Platte. The following year, he built a sawmill and imported French millstones to expand and improve his grain mill.³¹

By May 1839, Platte County was incurring expenses. The county had approved payment of $102 for a preliminary land survey and had committed $100 toward the $280 construction cost of a bridge over Bee Creek. County officials were counting on the federal government to provide the remaining $180 for the bridge project.³² That spring, the county engaged Martin to prepare a list of Platte County property owners which could be used to assess taxes. The original record of the 1839 tax assessments has been lost but the names of property owners living in Platte County was published by local historians and has survived.³³ The 1839 tax rolls list 873 families including several members of the Simpson-Kimsey family

of North Carolina, Tennessee and Johnson County, Missouri as well as several members of the extended Cooper clan of Kentucky and the Boonslick area of Missouri.³⁴

THE SIMPSON FAMILY IN THE PLATTE PURCHASE

William Simpson (1793-1858) was listed on the 1839 tax roll for Platte County and in the 1840 census where his family of nine included his wife, an adult daughter and six children.³⁵ He had been born in Rockingham County, North Carolina and moved with his parents to Middle Tennessee about 1804 where in 1813 he married Mary “Polly” Kimsey (1797-1858) ofVirginia.³⁶ William and Mary Simpson established a farm in Warren County, Tennessee where he became active as an anti-missionary Baptist preacher. In 1820, William and Mary Simpson relocated to Howard County, Missouri accompanied by his parents, her mother, three small children and several other relatives. In Howard County, William Simpson and his Kimsey brothers-in-law Benjamin and Thomas claimed land a few miles east of land Benjamin Cooper owned near the Missouri River. In 1831, the Simpson and Kimsey clan moved to Johnson County, Missouri where they acquired land in Post Oak Township and lived until 1838 or 1839 when land became available in the Platte Purchase. William Simpson claimed 160 acres in Pettis Township in the southern part of Platte County. His land was the northwest quarter of Section 6 of Township 51 North, Range 34 West and was near land claimed by several Simpson and Kimsey relatives. The William Simpson land is seven miles due south of Platte City on Road N (4th Street in Platte City) and approximately three and a half miles east of the Little Platte River. The quarter section consists ofrolling hills along the east side of Road N and is approximately one mile southwest of what is now Kansas City International Airport.³⁷

Several other Simpson and Kimsey relatives were among the early Platte County settlers. William Simpson’s older brother James (1780/1784-1852), his sister Jane Simpson Mathews and his Kimsey in-laws also participated in the migration from Johnson County. The William Simpson land in Platte County shared a corner with a quarter section owned by his brother-in-law James Kimsey and was immediately north of land owned by his sons-in-law James Anderson and Alvis Kimsey. The land was a half mile east of a quarter section owned by his brother James and one mile west ofland owned by his brother-in-law Benjamin Kimsey (1802-1865). Two miles to the north, another brother-in-law, Thomas Kimsey (1803-1866) owned a quarter section on the Platte River near a quarter section owned by William’s son Thomas K. Simpson and an additional 240 acres

owned by William’s brother James Simpson. In all, the extended Simpson-Kimsey clan acquired 1720 acres ofland in southern Platte County on the east side of the Platte River.³⁸

In addition to the family members who obtained land during the early years of settlement, the 1840 census listed several other Simpson relatives living in Platte County. These include William Simpson’s brother-in-law Lazarus Mathews as well as the young families of his nephews Thomas Mathews, James Mathews and Johnson Kimsey.³⁹ Lazarus and Jane Simpson Mathews had nine children between 1811 and 1830. Their older sons, James and Thomas, married in Johnson County in 1836 and 1838. Soon after, the Mathews family moved to Platte County where their daughter Sarah Ann was married in 1839 and their daughter Susan was married in 1845.⁴⁰ In contrast to the William Simpson family, most of which moved on to Oregon in 1846, the James Simpson family remained in western Missouri. James Simpson lived in in Pettis Township, Platte County to his death in 1852.⁴¹

The Kimsey family, older brothers of Elizabeth Kimsey Simpson and Mary Kimsey Simpson, were also part of the extended clan which resettled in the Platte. By 1841, Samuel Kimsey (n.d.-1844) and Thomas Kimsey had moved to Platte County where they remained for the rest of their lives.⁴² James Kimsey, another Simpson brother-in-law, went to Oregon.⁴³ The multiple linkages between the Kimsey and Simpson families were continued into a younger generation when William Simpson was the minister at the May 1839 wedding of his daughter Cassia (Casey) Simpson (1822-1846) and Alvis Kimsey (1816-1856).⁴⁴ William Simpson also presided at the November 1840 wedding of John F. Kimsey and Mary Price.⁴⁵ Harriet Simpson, a daughter of William and Mary Simpson, married Larkin Price. Alvis Kimsey and his family, Larkin Price and his family and Duff Kimsey were among the extended Simpson family who moved to Oregon in 1846.

William Simpson’s son Benjamin was 21 years old in 1839 and was not a property owner when the 1839 tax list was prepared. On May 28, 1839, with his father serving as the minister, Benjamin Simpson (1818-1910) married Eliza Jane Wisdom, the daughter of Joseph and Mary Scott Wisdom.⁴⁶ Benjamin appeared on the 1840 census for Platte County and on June 20, 1841, John T. Simpson (1841-1920), the son of Benjamin and Eliza Wisdom Simpson was born in Platte County. Ten days later, Eliza Wisdom Simpson died.⁴⁷ Benjamin Simpson and his infant son John lived in Platte County where Benjamin Simpson served briefly as a Justice of the Peace.⁴⁸ In 1846, they moved to Oregon with the Simpson family.

THE COOPER FAMILY IN THE PLATTE PURCHASE

The Cooper family of Culpeper County, Virginia and Madison County, Kentucky had settled in the Boonslick area of central Missouri by 1810. This family was large and related through marriage to several other families who had followed a similar path to Missouri. In addition to the direct descendants of Benjamin A. Cooper and his ten children, a large number of Cooper cousins continued to live in Missouri. These included the children of the two brothers and the three sisters of Benjamin Cooper who had moved to Missouri. Elizabeth Cooper Woods Peake (1758-1815), widowed twice before leaving Kentucky, had at least five children who moved with her to Boonslick. Her sisters Malinda Cooper Fugate (ca. 1760-ca. 1843) and Frances Cooper Brown (ca. 1766-n.d.) each had twelve children. Benjamin Cooper’s two brothers were killed by Indians during the War of 1812 near Cooper’s Fort but each left a widow and a large family. Sarshel Cooper (1762-1815) had eleven children and Braxton Cooper (ca. 1768-1812) had six children. By 1840, many of the descendants of these families had settled in the Platte Purchase and within a decade several had moved to the Sacramento Valley of California.⁴⁹

The Coopers and the Brown family of Middlesex County, Virginia were large clans which intermarried over three generations in Kentucky and Missouri. Frances Cooper married Samuel Brown (1758-1844) in Kentucky where Brown had served under her brother Benjamin Cooper in the Revolutionary War. With his wife and twelve children, Brown followed his Cooper in-laws to Missouri about 1810 where he participated with his sons in the defense of Cooper’s Fort during the War of 1812. Four of the children of Samuel and Frances Cooper Brown married their Cooper cousins. Robert Brown married Mildred “Millie” Cooper, the daughter ofBraxton Cooper and heroine of Cooper’s Fort.⁵⁰ Robert Brown’s younger brother Benjamin married Millie’s younger sister Mary “Polly” Cooper. Her brother Robert Cooper married Elizabeth Carson in 1813. Benjamin Brown served as legal guardian of his nephew, the young Christopher ”Kit” Carson, after the accidental death of Carson’s father at Boonslick in 1818.⁵¹ In addition, a brother and sister of Robert and Benjamin Brown also married cousins, children of Townsend and Malinda Cooper Fugate. Townsend Brown married Rachel French (Fugate) Still and Nancy Brown (1801-1850) married Rachel’s brother Hiram Fugate.

Another of the sons of Samuel and Frances Cooper Brown, William Brown (1785-1843) moved from Howard County to Clay County in 1832 and into the

Platte Purchase in 1837. William Brown married Mary “Polly” Woods and they had ten children including two sons who married daughters of Braxton and Fannie Hancock Cooper.⁵² Another son of William and Mary Woods Brown was the Sarshel Brown who had raised an illegal corn crop in the Platte area in 1835. By the time the Platte Purchase opened for settlement, Frances Cooper Brown had died and Samuel Brown was elderly but seventeen Brown children, nephews and in-laws claimed 2800 acres in Pettis Township, Platte County. The area came to be called “Browntown” and was near the William Cooper and William Simpson property.⁵³

Born in Madison County, Kentucky, William Benjamin Cooper (1797/8- 1848) was the sixth often children of Benjamin and Anna Fullerton Cooper and cousin of the Browns.⁵⁴ As a young man, William Cooper had been active with his brothers and cousins in the defense of the Boonslick forts during the War of 1812. He also participated briefly in the fur trade when he and his cousin Joseph Cooper assisted mountain man Ezekiel Williams to recover furs hidden on the Arkansas River during the winter of 1814-1815.⁵⁵ In 1818, William B. Cooper married Susan Higgins at Cooper’s Fort in Howard County, Missouri. Susan Higgins Cooper (1801-1877) was the daughter of Josiah Higgins (1782-1841) of Tennessee and Barbara Smelser Higgins (1779-1840). The Higgins family had lived at Coopers Fort at the end of the War of 1812.⁵⁶ After his marriage, William Cooper is likely to have accompanied his father and cousins on the second successful trading expedition on the Santa Fe Trail in 1822.⁵⁷ He later served with the Illinois Mounted Volunteers in the Black Hawk War of 1832.

William and Susan Higgins Cooper owned land in Howard County near the William Simpson family and lived for several years in Saline County, Missouri.

When they moved to the Little Platte, they claimed the southwest quarter of Section 7, Township 51 North, Range 34 West four miles north of the Platte River in Pettis Township. The Cooper land is on the west side ofroad N eight miles due south of Platte City on both sides of a tributary of Brush Creek. The land is near the present day intersection ofl-435 and SR 152 approximately three miles southwest of Kansas City International Airport.⁵⁸ The Cooper land was adjacent to a parcel owned by Alvis Kimsey and a mile south of the Platte County property owned by William Simpson. William and Susan Higgins Cooper lived three miles west of320 acres owned by her brother Jacob Higgins and 160 acres owned by her brother Philemon Higgins.⁵⁹ The land was also about four miles northwest of 240 acres in Pettis Township owned by Susan Cooper’s cousin Jacob Smelser (1805- 1888), a Platte County Justice of the Peace.⁶⁰ Her father, Josiah Higgins was a

prominant Plate County pioneer. Josiah Higgins was elected a Justice of the Peace for Pettis Township in the first Platte County election in 1839. At the time of the 1840 census, he owned four slaves including an adult woman and three children.⁶¹ Josiah Higgins died in Platte County in 1841. William Cooper served as Secretary in the probate of the 1841 eastate of his father-in-law Josiah Higgins.⁶²

On June 8, 1843, the paths of the Cooper and Simpson families converged when Nancy Cooper (1820-1883), the daughter of William and Susan Higgins Cooper married Benjamin Simpson the son of William and Mary Kimsey Simpson. Over three generations the Coopers had moved from Virginia to frontier Kentucky and Missouri. The Simpsons began their journey from Maryland a generation before the Coopers left Virginia but avoided the frontiers and moved more frequently. They settled at two locations in North Carolina, one in Tennessee and two in Missouri before moving to the Little Platte. The William Cooper and William Simpson fa.mill.es J:rnd been neighbors in the 1820s in Howard County and were neighbors twenty years later in Platte County when Nancy Cooper married the young widower Benjamin Simpson.⁶³

Benjamin and Nancy Cooper Simpson remained in Platte County less than three years after their June 1843 wedding. In addition to Benjamin Simpson’s son John, they had two sons born at Elm Grove, Platte County, Missouri. Their first son Sylvester (1844-1913) was born March 21, 1844 and their second son Samuel (1845-1899) was born November 10, 1845. In April 1846, with three children under the age of five, Benjamin and Nancy Simpson left Missouri on the Oregon Trail.

Several other Boonslick pioneers and their descendents were among the early Platte County settlers. Joseph Todd (1777-1851) was one of the Boonslick defenders during the War of 1812 where his older brother Jonathan was killed by Indians. Todd moved to Clay County in 1823 and Platte County in 1839 where he and his sons claimed 640 acres in Lee Township between Bee Creek and the Platte River.⁶⁴ Joseph Still, whose father Joseph W. Still was also killled by Indians in 1814, settled in Platte County in 1839 where he acquired 160 acres in Carroll Township.⁶⁵ Three grandsons of Archibald and Elizabeth Cooper Woods also claimed land in the Platte. William C. Woods and Adam C. Woods settled on adjacent quarter sections in Pettis Township near several members of the Brown family and their brother Archibald Woods claimed two parcels in northeastern Platte County near a bend in the Platte River.⁶⁶

During the early period of settlement in the Platte Purchase, Stephen Cooper (1797-1890), a son ofSarshel Cooper, was serving at Council Bluffs in what would become Iowa where he had been appointed Indian Agent for the Potawatomi by President Martin Van Buren. When John Tyler became president in 1841, Stephen Cooper was replaced as Indian Agent and moved to the northern part ofthe Platte Purchase where in 1844 he was elected to the Missouri legislature from Holt County. Many years later, with self-deprecating humor, he recalled his experience as an unlettered frontiersman encountering parliamentary procedure:

…there was much sport at my expense. Some of them proposed to bet that I would not say ten words again throughout the session. I remarked that if I couldn’t talk sense, I would talk nonsense.⁶⁷

He modestly claimed revenge over his legislative colleagues by pointing out that they had considered him crazy for predicting the trancontinental railroad. As he explained, “I have lived to see the day, and have ridden on the iron horse four times and heard him snort.”⁶⁸

The following year, Stephen Cooper served with John C. Fremont’s 1845 military reconnaissance expedition to the southern Rocky Mountains. Known to history as the “Great Pathfinder”, Fremont, as he had on previous expeditions, surrounded himself with experienced mountain men, exceeded his formal orders and improvised his way into controversy. Fremont wrote from Washington in April 1845 offering Cooper a salary of$2.50 a day. As Fremont explained to Cooper,

Colonel Benton tells me that you have accepted an appointment in my party and I am glad to have with me a man for whom he has so high an opinion, as I have no doubt that on this trip we shall need men of the best quality…⁶⁹

Cooper joined Fremont on three days notice on May 28, 1845 and accompanied him from Missouri to Bent’s Fort in the Rocky Mountains where Fremont divided his company. Fremont with Kit Carson, Joseph Walker and others turned north through the Rocky Mountains to Salt Lake and west to California. Cooper was a member of a second party of about 30 men commanded by J. W. Abert and guided by mountain man Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick. Abert’s party turned south exploring the Canadian River in what is now New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma

before returning to Missouri in October.⁷⁰ The following year, Stephen Cooper organized a wagon train to California where he became active in public affairs.⁷¹

LIFE IN THE PLATTE PURCHASE

With the opening of the Platte Purchase, the western edge of settlement had reached the Missouri River. In contrast to the frontiers of previous generations, the Little Platte had little or no frontier period. Once it had been cleared of lndians, it was quickly and fully populated. The pioneers could immediately plant crops and build houses without fear of the Indian raids that had delayed settlement for several years in Kentucky and Boonslick.

One of the early settlers arrived in the Platte November 4, 1837 with his wife and children and acquired land approximately twenty miles northwest of William Simpson. He built a house and purchased com and pork for the winter. Within six weeks, he was writing his brothers in Lincoln County, Missouri expressing his satisfaction with the land he had acquired and his confidence that he would be able to protect his ownership.

We are sometimes threatened with Spanish claims being laid over our improvements, but I for one am not alarmed…There are occasional controversies about Claims, but nothing serious resulting of these disputes.⁷²

He cheerfully invited his brothers to visit his new home, “We could give you some hog and hominey and chat the time off quite pleasantly.”

In contrast to the experience in Kentucky and Boonslick where land ownership was confused and uncertain for a decade or more, settlers in the Little Platte could have some degree of confidence that they would soon be able to purchase title to the public lands on which they lived and worked. In 1838, the federal government enacted a general preemption law allowing persons then living on public lands to buy up to 160 acres ofland they had settled at a fixed price. The following year, the state of Missouri began a survey of the Platte County boundaries and in 1840, a surveyor began to lay out section lines.⁷³ In September 1841, the Congress enacted a new law extending preemption rights to men who had settled before June 1840 and making the proceeds of some public land sales available to the states for roads, bridges and other internal improvements. To obtain land under the preemption laws, settlers were required to occupy the

property and make improvements like clearing land and building a house as well as obtain a survey of the property and purchase the land at a public land office.⁷⁴ In 1842, the Congress authorized the establishment of a public land office in the Platte Purchase. The office opened in Plattsburg February 1, 1843 where it operated continuously until 1859.⁷⁵

The rapid settlement of the Platte region demanded equally rapid development of community institutions to serve the pioneer families. The federal Land Ordinance of 1785, commonly known as the Northwest Ordinance, had specified that public lands be laid out in one mile square sections and six mile square townships. The federal ordinance also required that section 16 in each township be reserved “for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.”⁷⁶ Missouri law used the federal townships as the basic unit oflocal government and required that each township organize and finance its schools using the proceeds from the sale of the sixteenth section. By 1842, many of the townships in Platte County had organized schools including the Brown district in Township 51 North, Range 34 West near the Simpson, Kimzey and Cooper property.⁷⁷

The intention of the state and federal laws had been that the sixteenth section in each township would be sold at auction and the proceeds would be used to build or operate schools. In Platte County, settlement occured prior to any land survey and, as a consequence, many of the sixteenth sections were occupied by so called squatters. Instead of the competitive bidding of an auction, the sixteenth sections in Platte County were sold at the minimum price of $1.25 an acre to the squatters. According to a local historian, the 1840 sale of school lands in Platte County raised only $21,000 rather than the $200,000 which he estimated would have resulted from competitive bidding.⁷⁸ The first schools in Platte County and throughout the region were simple, one room buildings constructed of round or hewed logs with a door on one side and a window on the other. A slanting board below the window served as a desk at which students stood or sat on stools. Families paid a tuition of$2.50 for each three month term. The tuition, sometimes paid in farm products, was used to pay a salary to the teacher who often boarded with a nearby family. By the end of 1846, 27 school districts had been formed in Platte County.⁷⁹

RELIGION IN WESTERN MISSOURI

Religion had played an active role in the frontier life of North Carolina,

Kentucky and Tennessee where circuit-riding evangelists and camp meeting revivals carried the gospel to scattered residents. In Western Missouri, religious competition intensified and erupted into violence. By the time of the Platte Purchase, several Protestant denominations were actively competing for believers. William Paxton remembered that Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and Disciples of Christ were active in Platte County and that they preached in school houses and camp grounds because no churches were built during the first decade after settlement. According to Paxton, “Hardshell Baptists were the leading denomination…they were an excellent people but their ministers were not educated and were seldom paid.”⁸⁰ As an Anti-Missionary Baptist, William Simpson was a preacher in a denomination which relied on the common-sense interpretation of the Bible by untrained and unpaid clergy. As he had in Howard County and Johnson County, William Simpson farmed during the week in and preached when he could. Between his arrival in Platte County and 1846, when he left for Oregon, William Simpson performed 36 weddings for relatives and neighbors.⁸¹

At the same time that settlers were rushing into the Little Platte in 1837 and 1838, the simmering hostility between Mormons and their non-Mormon neighbors was exploding into civil war in nearby Caldwell County. The Mormon Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, had been formed in western New York state in 1830 soon after the publication of the Book of Mormon and its revelations. The following year, the fast-growing church moved its headquarters to Ohio and established a colony, called Zion, near Independence in Jackson County, Missouri. From its earliest days, the new church was the target of attack by its neighbors. One local newspaper reported the Mormon migration to Missouri and observed, “…we should not rejoice much in the acquisition of so many deluded, insane enthusiasts.”⁸²

By July 1833, 1200 Mormons had settled in Jackson County and non Mormons were organizing opposition to the newcomers. While some of the opposition to the Mormons was religious in nature, much of it was political and economic. A statement of grievances prepared by local residents in 1833 explained, “…it requires no gift of prophecy to tell that the day is not far distant, when the government of the county will be in their hands.”⁸³ The Missourians took particiular exception to what they regarded as a Mormon invitation to “free brethren of color in Illinois” to settle in the Jackson County Zion. The Missourians foresaw,

…the corrupting influence of these on our own slaves and the stench both

physical and moral, that their introduction would set off in our social atmosphere, and the vexation that would attend the civil rule of these fanatics…⁸⁴

Joseph Smith, the Mormon founder, prophet and eventual martyr described the hostility and violence which forced his followers out of Jackson County in 1833,

…they commenced at first to ridicule, then to persecute, and :finally an organized mob assembled and burned our houses, tarred and feathered, and whipped many of our brethern and :finally drove them from their habitations.⁸⁵

The Mormons left Jackson County during the winter of 1833-1834 and moved north across the Missouri River into Clay County where they found temporary safety. Alexander Doniphan, David Atchison and William Wood, the Clay County attorneys who would promote the annexation of the Little Platte the following year, agreed to represent the Mormons in their Jackson County claims. By June 1836, the mood of the Clay County residents had changed and the· Mormons were denounced at a public meeting where they were urged to leave Clay County peacefully. At the same time that Clay County residents were moving west into the Little Platte, Mormons were moving north into an unpopulated area which became Caldwell County. The Mormons established 2000 farms, built 150 houses and began constuction of a temple at the place they called Far West.

The Mormon population grew quickly in Caldwell County and spilled over into nearby Daviess and Carroll Counties. By June 1838, conflict between the Mormons and their neighbors had resumed. Mormons had formed covert, paramilitary units for self-protection and Sidney Rigdon, a Mormon leader, was calling for violence to confront violence,

…it shall be between us and them a war of extermination…for we will carry the seat of war to their own houses and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed. ⁸⁶

On election day in August 1838, a brawl broke out in Daviess County when non Mormons attempted to prevent Mormons from voting. The election day riot resulted in an arrest warrant for Joseph Smith and the activation of six companies of militia by Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs. Mormon groups armed themselves and looted nearby towns. Non Mormons retaliated and by late October

the Mormon militia and the Missouri militia were engaged in skirmishes.

On October 27, Governor Boggs issued an order mobilizing the Missouri militia. As he explained, “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated, or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.”⁸⁷ Three days later, a Missouri mob of200 or more attacked Mormon families gathered for safety at Hauns Mill where 17 Mormon men and boys were killed and 15 wounded.⁸⁸ The following day, an overwhelming force of Missouri militia surrounded the Mormon capital of Far West. After brief negotiation, the Mormons surrendered their arms, gave up Joseph Smith and other leaders to arrest and agreed to leave the state ofMissouri.⁸⁹

Responding to the Governor’s order, Major John Boulware mobilized three companies of the Platte County militia which had been organized the previous fall. The Platte County battalion traveled to Caldwell County but arrived after the Mormon surrender.⁹⁰ By April 1839, 12,000 or more Mormons had left Missouri for Illinois and Joseph Smith had escaped from custody to rejoin his followers. The Mormons built a new capital, Nauvoo the Beautiful, in Illinois on the Mississippi River where, in June 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother were arrested and lynched by Illinois militia. Soon after, Brigham Young began planning the 1847 migration to a Mormon Zion in Utah.

James Goff(1809-1887) was one of the Mormons who moved from Missouri to Illinois and later to Utah. He was a teenager living in Howard County in 1832 when he encountered Mormon missionaries and joined the Mormon Church. He was the third child of Daniel and Sarah Simpson Goff and a nephew of William Simpson, the frontier preacher. James Goff had grown up in Warren County, Tennessee and moved with the Simpson-Kimsey clan to Howard County, Missouri and later to Johnson County, Missouri. In the 1840s, after most of his Simpson relatives had moved to the Platte Purchase, James Goff and his family moved to Hancock County, Illinois where he arranged the proxy Mormon baptism of his grandfather Thomas Simpson, a devout and life-long Methodist. Goff later moved to Utah where he died in 1887.⁹¹

THE PANIC OF 1837

At the same time that land-hungry settlers were rushing into the Little Platte, the United States was entering a period of economic depression. The early 1830s had been a period of economic expansion with public optimism and growing

prosperity. In the frontier areas, easy credit supported widespread land speculation. Public land sales in the United States increased from $3 million in 1832 to $25 million in 1836. In June 1836, the federal government attempted to restrain the credit supply and stabilize the economy by requiring buyers of public lands to pay in gold or silver rather than the notes issued by under-capitalized local banks and corporations. As the government explained, the specie circular of 1836 was designed to prevent “the monopoly of the public lands in the hands of speculators and capitalists, to the injury of the actual settlers in the new states…as well as to discourage the ruinous extension of bank issues and bank credits.”⁹²

The circular effectively reduced land speculation. In 1837, public land sales declined to $7 million.⁹³ The Treasury policy also resulted in demand for gold and silver on the frontier and a reduced supply of specie to pay debts in other parts of the country just as international lenders were increasing interest rates and seeking greater security. The prosperity and inflationary spiral of the early 1830s collapsed in the spring of 1837. During May, 800 banks closed as prices fell and anxious depositors and lenders attempted to recover their money.⁹⁴ One of the casualties was the Mormon-owned bank in Ohio which had been used to buy church property in Missouri. In addition to its economic consequences, the failure of the Mormon bank in Ohio contributed to religious tensions in Missouri. During this period, economic panic swept throughout the United States resulting in unemployment and riots in eastern cities and business failures in every area of the country. Hard times continued for several years with depressed land prices, falling commodity prices and limited credit.

In Missouri, the impact of the 1837 depression was delayed until the middle of 1841. The mining industry, the fur trade and the Santa Fe Trade had remained profitable while the migration into Western Missouri stimulated commerce on the Missouri River. In contrast to banks in other states, the Bank of the State of Missouri opened when other banks were failing and resisted intense pressure from the public and St. Louis business community to accept the devalued notes of other banks. Through prudent management, the Bank of the State of Missouri was the only bank in the western United States which did not close during the panic.⁹⁵ On the Missouri frontier, the impact of the national :financial crisis was mitigated somewhat by the growth in economic activity and the federal policy offering public lands for sale at a fixed price. The preemption laws of 1838 and 1841 protected settlers by fixing land prices and discouraging speculation. Land prices in the Platte remained stable but money was was limited and there were few opportunities for profit. For the settler in the Platte Purchase, the

extended depression meant that hard work did not result in discernible improvement in living standards or prosperity. The expectations that the new lands of the Little Platte would quickly enrich the early settlers were frustrated and within a decade some Platte settlers were planning another move westward.⁹⁶

THE NEXT FRONTIER

Disappointed by their experience in Missouri, many of the farmers and shopkeepers who had settled the Platte Purchase were soon considering their alternatives. They knew or had heard that the prospects for settlement in the area immediately to the west, in what is now Kansas and Nebraska, were not good. The area was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was dry, treeless and, by all accounts, populated by particularly fierce Indians. The area was a place to hurry across not a place to settle. The place to settle was 2000 miles away near the Pacific Ocean in an area called Oregon which was the subject of a long standing territorial dispute between the United States and Great Britain or a territory of Mexico called California.

The Platte residents were familiar with the continental drama unfolding in front of them. Some, like William Cooper and his cousin Stephen Cooper, had first-hand experience on the Santa Fe Trail and in the Rocky Mountains. Others had neighbors or knew of prominant Platte County residents who had crossed the plains and established themselves in Oregon or California. As early as 1840, residents of Western Missouri had convened in the Platte County town of Weston and formed the Western Emigration Society. In 1841, John Bidwell, a Platte County school teacher, was one of the leaders of the 34 person Bidwell-Bartleson party that reached California by overland trail. The following year, nine members of the 1841 party returned to Missouri following a Southern route along the Santa Fe Trail. Joseph Chiles of nearby Jackson County, Missouri, traveled overland to California in 1841, returned to his Missouri home in 1842 and took his family to California in 1843. During the winter of 1842-1843, Oregon missionary Marcus Whitman returned from the northwest and spent a week in western Missouri promoting Oregon settlement before continuing to Washington, New York and Boston. Peter Burnett, a prominant Platte City lawyer was one of the leaders of the 1843 emigration to Oregon and Cornelius Gilliam of Platte County was one of the organizers in 1844.⁹⁷

Local residents were aware of the excitement each spring at the nearby communities oflndependence and Westport where emigrants outfitted themselves

and organized to cross the plains. By the mid-1840s, emigrants were reporting their observations and experiences in letters to friends and family in Missouri. Some of these letters were published in local newspapers and provided a source of information, not all of it accurate, about the overland journey and the paradise awaiting on the Pacific shore. In some cases, early travelers returned to Missouri to promote migration.

Emigration during the 1840-1844 period relied on experienced guides to locate the route and avoid the dangers of the trail. By 1846, several of the participants from earlier years had returned and were preparing guidebooks for the overland traveler. Lansford Hastings of the 1842 party returned in 1845 and published a guidebook in 1846. Overton Johnson and William H. Winter of the 1843 party and John M. Shively all returned from the West that year and began writing trail guides. In November 1845, Elijah White and others arrived in Missouri carrying 541 letters written that summer in Oregon. There was no shortage of information about the trip. Although California and Oregon remained outside the United States, they were permanently connected to the Platte by trail, family and expectation.⁹⁸

In March 1846, Stephen Cooper published an open letter in the St. Joseph Gazette announcing his intention to go California and inviting others to join him.⁹⁹ At the same time that Stephen Cooper was organizing his wagon train at Council Bluffs to travel to California, his cousin Nancy Cooper Simpson and her Simpson in-laws were assembling a family group for the trip to Oregon.

William Simpson was 53 years old and the patriarch of a family of more than twenty sons, daughters, in-laws and grandchildren who started for Oregon in April 1846. He was a veteran of previous migrations with his family to Tennessee, to Missouri and twice within Missouri. These moves had all been westward but they had been incremental. They involved selling land, loading wagons with possessions and traveling through settled country to areas where government land had recently become available. In their earlier moves, William and Mary Simpson had been accompanied by their Simpson and Kimsey siblings and their families. The trip to Oregon would be different. It would be far longer and far more dangerous than the previous moves and it would be made without many of the relatives who had accompanied them from Tennessee to Missouri.

Barnet Simpson (1836-1925), the youngest child of William and Mary Simpson, many years later remembered that his mother had been apprehensive

about the many risks of the overland trail and had prepared for the worst. According to Barnet Simpson,

When we started across the plains, all our neighbors told mother what a dangerous trip it was and how we were sure to be killed by Indians or drowned or die of cholera or be run over by buffaloes.¹⁰⁰

Aware of the hazards, Mary Simpson was concerned about the perfunctory style of trailside burials. Rather than allowing her loved ones to be wrapped in the nearest blanket, she spent the winter of 1845-1846 carding, spinning, weaving and dying cloth from which she fashioned shrouds for each family member should they be killed or die on the trail.

From the perspective of ten year old Barnet Simpson, the expedition to Oregon was a festive family event,

Our whole family came to Oregon in 1846, except my brother Thomas…all the rest of my brothers and sisters were along so there was quite a clan of us.

According to Barnet, his oldest brother Thomas K. Simpson (1815-1852) and his wife were cautious about abandoning their Platte County farm before they knew more about life in Oregon.

Tom…decided to let us come out and see if we liked it and if we did, he would sell out and come.¹⁰¹

In 1852, Thomas Simpson rejoined his parents and siblings in Oregon.

The Simpson family that traveled west in 1846 left a far larger clan in Missouri including members of the extended family that had been part of their life in Tennessee and in three Missouri counties. In addition to his oldest son Thomas, William Simpson was leaving his older brother James and sister Jane S. Mathews in Platte County. Mary Simpson was leaving her sister Elizabeth K. Simpson as well as her brothers Benjamin, James and Thomas Kimsey. For Nancy Cooper Simpson, it was her parents William and Susan Higgins Cooper who were remaining in Platte County. The elder Coopers left for Oregon in 1848. William Cooper died on the trail. His widow Susan H. Cooper continued to Oregon where she remarried in 1856 and settled near her daughter.¹⁰²

On April 18, 1846, three generations of the Simpson family left Missouri.i with two wagons and four yoke of oxen.¹⁰³ William Simpson the frontier preacher, and his wife Mary were the leaders of the family group moving to Oregon but the trip across the continent was made possible because they were accompanied by 17 vigorous young adult relatives. The traveling party also included six or more children under the age of ten. In a century and a half, their Simpson ancestors had moved from the shores of Chesapeake Bay to the Missouri River. In one long, hard spring and summer, the William Simpson family would travel twice as far to the Pacific. They were beginning the journey that Samuel Simpson, then an infant in the wagon, would later describe in his poem “The Campfires of the Pioneers” as “A hundred nights, a hundred days,” toward the “sweet horizons of dreams.”¹⁰⁴ The hundred days and nights would stretch into 150 before they could rest in Oregon.

THE PLATTE PURCHASE NOTES

1. Governor John Miller, message ofNovember 20, 1832 to the Missouri General Assembly in Howard I. McKee, “The Platte Purchase”, Missouri Historical Review, Vol. XXXII (January 1938), p. 135.
2. Walter Williams, ed., A History of Northwest Missouri, Vol. I, (Chicago and New York, 1915), p. 43.
3. Floyd Calvin Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians, Vol. I (Chicago, 1943) p. 62.
4. Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Treaties, 1778-1883, (New York, 1972), Vol.
II, p. 473.

5. United States Senate, 24th Congress, 1st Session, Document 251 quoted in McKee, “Platte Purchase”, p. 139.
6. American State Papers, 18th Congress, 1st Session, Senate, May 14, 1824, p. 79.
7. Report of John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, to President James Monroe, January 24, 1825, in Martin Ridge and Ray Allen Billington, America’s Frontier Story: a Documentary History of Westward Expansion (New York, 1969), p. 282.
8. Williams, Northwest Missouri, p. 44.

9. McKee, “Platte Purchase”, pp. 135-136.

10. Lewis F. Linn letter of January 23, 1835 to Henry Ellsworth in History of Clay and Platte Counties, Missouri (St. Louis, 1885), p. 545. This centennial history is attributed to “Gatewood”.
11. The members of the Clay County Committee included: David R. Atchison (1807-1886) a lawyer who subsequently represented Missouri in the United States Senate from 1843 to 1857; Peter H. Burnett (1807-1895) a lawyer and 1843 emigrant to Oregon who subsequently served as the first Governor of California from 1849 to 1851; Alexander W. Doniphan (1808-1887) a lawyer who subsequently served as Colonel of the Missouri Mounted Volunteers in the Mexican War; Andrew S. Hughes (1789-1843) a lawyer, Indian Agent and Clay County farmer. McKee, “Platte Purchase”, pp. 134-138.
12. William M. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, Missouri, (Kansas City, Missouri, 1897), pp. 14-15.

13. Ibid., p. 13.

14. No author, The Platte Purchase, (St. Joseph, Missouri, 1918), p. 11.

15. Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians, p. 441

16. McKee, “Platte Purchase”, p. 140.

17. Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians p. 64; McKee, “Platte Purchase”,
p. 142.
18. Louise Barry, The Beginning of the West: Annals of the Kansas Gateway to the American West, 1540-1854 (Topeka, Kansas, 1972), p. 314; McKee, “Platte Purchase”, p. 142.
19. Kappler, Indian Treaties, Vol. II, p. 473.
20. Ibid.

21. John E. Sunder, Joshua Pilcher: Fur Trader and Indian Agent (Norman, Oklahoma, 1968), p. 120; Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians, p. 64; Barry, Beginning of the West, p. 315.
22. Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians, p. 64.

23. Presidential Proclamation of March 28, 1837 in McKee, “Platte Purchase”,
pp. 146-147.

24. Barry, Beginning of the West, pp. 325-326.

25. Ibid., p. 337.

26. Ibid., p. 329.

27. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, p. 18.

28. Ibid., p. 21.

29. Ibid., pp. 26-27; Barry, Beginning of the West, p. 361; Gatewood, History of Clay and Platte Counties, pp. 553-555; Population Schedules, Sixth Census of the United States, Roll 228, Missouri, Vol. 5.
30. Jesse Morin, “History of Platte County, Missouri” in Edwards Brothers, An Illustrated Historical Atlas of Platte County, Missouri, (Philadelphia, 1877), p. 9.
31. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, p. 15, 19.

32. Ibid., p. 27.

33. The names of the residents on the 1839 tax rolls was published in Morin, “Platte County” in 1877 and was republished in the county history attributed to Gatewood in 1885.
34. Betty Runner Murray, ed., Platte County, Missouri Records, 1839-1849 (Platte City, Missouri, 1993), pp. 3-9. The 1839 list includes five Cooper families, five Higgins, six Kimseys and four Simpsons.
35. Ibid., p. 46.

36. The Kimsey family name is spelled variously in Missouri and Oregon records as Kimsey, Kimzey, Kirnzy and Kinsey. The most :frequent spelling appears to be Kimsey. Faye M. Lightburn, Revolutionary Soldier Samuel Brown (Baltimore, 1993), pp. 310-311.
37. Murray, Platte County Records, p. 120.

38. Ibid., pp. 120-124.

39. Ibid., p. 46, 50, 68.

40. Shirlie Rice Simpson, “Thomas Simpson and Mary Knight”, Simpsons a Gathering of the Clan, Vol. I, Number 12, p. 1.
41. Ibid., Spring 1993, pp 12-13, Fall 1993, pp. 2-4.

42. Lightburn, Revolutionary Soldier Samuel Brown, pp. 310-311.

43. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, pp. 409-410.

44. Nadine Hodges, ed., Marriage Records of Platte County, Missouri, 1839-1855,
(Independence, Missouri, 1966; reprinted 1974), p. 1.

45. Ibid., p. 5.

46. Ibid., p. 1. Napoleon Bonaparte Wisdom, the brother of Eliza Wisdom Simpson, married Elizabeth Simpson, a sister of Benjamin Simpson. Napoleon and Elizabeth Simpson Wisdom were 1846 emigrants to Oregon and eventually settled on a Donation Land Claim near the Simpson-Kimsey families. Lottie L. Gurley, Genealogical Material in Oregon Donation Land Claims, Supplement to Vol. I (Portland, Oregon, 1975), p. 22.
47. Benjamin Simpson letter of April 12, 1897 to Sylvester Simpson, possession of the author. John T. Simpson crossed the plains to Oregon in 1846 with his family.
48. Hodges, Marriage Records of Platte County, p. J.
49. Lightburn, Revolutionary Soldier Samuel Brown, pp. 61-63, 263-279, 285-289.

50. According to legend, seventeen year old Mildred Cooper volunteered to ride for help when Coopers Fort was attacked during the War of 1812. Boon’s Lick Sketches, March 27, 1939.
51. Lightbum, Revolutionary Soldier Samuel Brown, p. 77, 89, 265.

52. Mary “Polly” Woods was the daughter of Adam and Anna Kavanaugh Woods and the younger sister of Patrick Woods (1774-1810) who married Rachel Cooper, a younger sister of Benjamin Cooper. Although Adam Woods lived in Madison County, Kentucky and Howard County, Missouri, he does not appear to have been related to the Archibald Woods who married Elizabeth Cooper, a sister of Benjamin Cooper. Archibald Woods was killed in the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782. Ibid., pp. 61-67, 109-110, 400-401, 406-408.
53. Ibid., pp. 51, 61-62, 77, 81; Murray, Platte County Records, pp. 199-120.

54. Lightburn, Revolutionary Soldier Samuel Brown, pp. 267-272.

55. Kirke Wilson, “Boonslick and the Fur Trade in Fact and Fiction”, Boonslick Heritage, March 1994, pp. 3-7.
56. Platte County Historical Society, Cemetary Records of Platte County, Vol. I, (Platte City, 1980), p.66.

57. Josiah Gregg, The Commerce of the Prairies (New York, 1844, reprinted Lincoln, Nebraska, 1967), p. 7. Gregg, who had grown up with the younger Coopers at Cooper’s Fort, mentions that “Colonel Cooper and sons” went to Santa Fe in 1822. There is no other evidence that William Cooper went to Santa Fe.
58. Murray, Platte County Records, p. 120.
59. Ibid., p. 5. 50,217. The name is variously spelled Philomon (1839 tax list), Phileman (1840 census) and Philemon (1849 tax list). To add to the confusion, the seventh child of William and Susan Higgins Cooper was Philomen Cooper (1834- 1865).
60. Ibid., p. 120.

61. Ibid., p. 50.

62. Nadine Hodges and Mrs. Howard W. Woodruff, ed., Platte County, Missouri Abstracts of Wills and Adminitrations, (Kansas City, 1969), p. 22.
63. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, p. 59.
64. Lightburn, Revoluntionary Soldier Samuel Brown, pp. 343-348; Murray, Platte County Records, p. 8, 84, 128.

65. Lightburn, Revolutionary Soldier Samuel Brown, p. 289; Murray, Platte County Records, p. 8, 84, 123.
66. Lightburn, Revolutionary Soldier Samuel Brown, p. 409; Murray, Platte County Records, p. 119, 130.
67. Stephen Cooper, Sketches from the Life of Maj. Stephen Cooper, (Oakland, California, 1888), p. 14.
68. Ibid.

69. Captain John C. Fremont letter of April 22, 1845 to Stephen Cooper, Ibid., p. 15.
70. Stephen Cooper, “Autobiography of Major Stephen Cooper” in Colusa County (Orland, California, 1891), p. 358. By 1888, when his autobiography was written, Cooper had become confused about which President had appointed him.

71. Cooper, Sketches, pp. 14-15, 17. In California, Stephen Cooper served as Alcalde of Benicia, Judge of the Sonoma District and Justice of the Peace in Colusa County.
72. John Downing letter of December 17, 1837 to Ezekiel and Andrew Downing, Platte County Historical and Genealogical Society Bulletin, Winter 1989, Vol. 42, No. 1, p. 13.
73. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, pp 24-27.
74. “Preemption Act of 1841”, Henry Steele Comm.ager, Documents of American History, Vol. I (New York, 1968), pp. 291-292.
75. Murray, Platte County Records, pp. 114-115.
76. “Land Ordinance of 1785”, Comm.ager, Documents of American History, Vol.
I, pp. 123-124.
77. Laverne Taulbee, “Schools of Platte County”, Platte County Historical and Genealogical Society Bulletin, Vol. 49, No. 3, August-November 1996, pp. 22-24.
78. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, p. 46.
79. Ibid. Taulbee, “Schools of Platte County”, p. 22.
80. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, p. 22.
81. Hodges, Marriage Records of Platte County, pp. 1-8.
82. Missouri Intelligencer and Boon’s Lick Advertiser September 17, 1831 quoted in Stephen C. Le Sueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia, Missouri, 1987), pp. 71-72.
83. Ibid., p. 79.
84. Missouri Intelligencer and Boon’s Lick Advertiser, August 10, 1833, Ibid.
85. Joseph Smith letter of March 1, 1842 to John Wentworth in William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen, ed., Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers (New York, 1967), p. 14.
86. Sidney Rigdon oration, July 4, 1838, Caldwell County, Missouri, Ibid., p. 95.

87. Lilburn W. Boggs, Governor of Missouri, orders of October 27, 1838 to General John B. Clark of the Missouri State Militia, Ibid., pp. 102-103.
88. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My Name: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York, 1945; republished 1963), pp. 236-237.
89. Mulder and Mortensen, Among the Mormons, pp. 106-110.

90. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, p. 22, 25.
91. Don Simpson, “A Simpson-Goff Record”, The Simpson Clan, Fall 1995, p. 2.

92. United States Department of the Treasury, Circular of July 11, 1836 in Commager, Documents of American History, Vol. I, p. 283.
93. Brodie, Joseph Smith, p. 190.

94. Ibid., p. 198.

95. Shoemaker, Missouri and Missourians, p. 442, 478.
96. Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, third edition (New York, 1967), pp. 364-368, 372-380.
97. Barry, Beginning of the West, pp. 428-575.

98. Ibid.

99. Stephen Cooper, “To California Emigrants”, published March 13, 1846 in The Gazette, St. Joseph, Missouri and republished in Dale Morgan, ed., Overland in 1846, Vol. II (Georgetown, California, 1963), p. 489.
100. Barnet Simpson interviewed by Fred Lockley, Oregon Journal, March 18, 1925. William Barnett Simpson was recounting experiences which had occured 79 years earlier
101. Ibid.

102. Gurley, Oregon Donation Land Claims, Supplement to Vol. I, p. 129.

103. David Simpson letter of March 26, 1897 to Sylvester Simpson, possession of the author. David Simpson recalled that the departure from Missouri occurred on his eighteenth birthday.

104. Samuel L. Simpson, “The Camp Fires of the Pioneers”, Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. I, No. 4, December 1900, pp. 385-394.

INDEX

Abert, J.W., on 1845 Fremont expedition, p. 16.

Anderson, James, land in Platte County, p. 11.

Atchison, David, represents Mormons in Jackson County, p. 20.

Bank of the State of Missouri, p. 22.

Bidwell, John, 1841 emigration to California, p. 23.

Boggs, Lilburn, mobilizes militia, p. 20; Mormon extermination order, p. 21.

Boulware, John, mobilizes Platte County militia, p. 21.

Brown, Benjamin, marriage to Mary “Polly” Cooper, serves as guardian of Kit Carson, p. 13. ·

Brown, Robert, marriage to Mildred “Millie” Cooper, p. 13.

Brown, Samuel (1758-1844), marriage to Frances Cooper, p. 13.

Brown, Sarshel, 1835 eviction from Little Platte, p. 6; son of William and Mary Woods Brown, p. 14.

Brown, William (1785-1843), to Platte Purchase 1837, p. 14.

Browntown, Pettis Township, Platte County, p. 14.

Burnett, Peter, 1843 emigration to Oregon, p. 23.

Calhoun, John C., on Indian policy, p. 3.

Carson, Elizabeth, 1813 marriage to Robert Cooper, p. 13.

Carson, Christopher “Kit”, at Boonslick, p. 13, 1845 Fremont expedition, p. 16.

Chiles, Joseph, overland 1841, 1842, 1843, p. 23.

Chippewa, in Platte region, p. 2; and Treaty of Chicago, p. 5; relocation p. 9.

Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints , see Mormon Church.

Clark, William, negotiates 1836 treaty in Kansas, p. 7.

Cooper, Benjamin A., land in Howard County, p. 11; at Cooper’s Fort, p. 13.

Cooper, Benjamin and Anna Fullerton, at Boonslick, p. 14

Cooper, Braxton (ca.1768-1812), at Cooper’s Fort, p. 13.

Cooper, Frances Cooper (ca. 1766-n.d.), marriage to Samuel Brown, p. 13.

Cooper, Joseph, in 1814-1815 fur trade, p. 14.

Cooper, Mildred “Millie”, marriage to Robert Brown, p. 13.

Cooper, Nancy (1820-1883), 1843 marriage to Benjamin Simpson, p. 15.

Cooper, Robert, marriage to Elizabeth Carson, p. 13.

Cooper, Sarshel (1762-1815), at Cooper’s Fort, p. 13.

Cooper, Stephen (1797-1890), Indian agent, Missouri legislature, 1845 Fremont expedition, p. 16; to California, p. 17; letter in St. Joseph Gazette, p. 24.

Cooper, William Benjamin (1797/8-1848), at Boonslick, 1818 marriage to Susan Higgins, on Santa Fe Trail, in Black Hawk War, p. 14.

Cooper, William and Susan Higgins, in Howard County, in Saline County and Platte County, p. 14; 1848 emigration to Oregon, p. 25.

Cooper’s Fort, defense of, p. 13.

Council Bluffs, Iowa, relocation of Presbyterian mission, p. 8.

Daviess County, 1838 election day riot, p. 20.

Dodge, Henry, negotiates 1836 treaty in Wisconsin, p. 7.

Doniphan County, Kansas, relocation of lndians to, p. 8.

Doniphan, Alexander, represents Mormons in Jackson County, p. 20.

Dougherty, John, negotiates 1836 treaty in Nebraska, p. 7.

Downing, John, in Platte Purchase, p. 17.

Elm Grove, Missouri, birthplace of Sylvester and Samuel Simpson, p. 15.

Far West, 1838 Mormon surrender, p. 21.

Fitzpatrick, Thomas “Broken Hand”, on 1845 Fremont expedition, p. 16.

Fremont, John C., 1845 expedition to the Rocky Mountains, p. 16.

Fugate, Malinda Cooper (ca. 1760-ca. 1843), in Boonslick, p. 13.

]Gilliam, Cornelius, 1844 emigration to Oregon, p. 23.

Goff, Daniel and Sarah Simpson, parents of James Goff, p. 21.

Goff, James (1809-1887), in Howard and Johnson County, joins Mormon Church, moves to Illinois and Utah, p. 21.

Hastings, Lansford, overland 1842 and 1845, published guidebook 1846, p. 24.

Hauns Mill, 1838 massacre, p. 21.

Higgins, Barbara Smelser (1779-1840), at Cooper’s Fort, p. 14.

Higgins, Jacob, land in Platte County, p. 14.

Higgins, Josiah (1782-1841), at Cooper’s Fort, p. 14; in Platte County, p. 15.

Higgins Philemon, land in Platte County, p. 14.

Higgins, Susan (1801-1877), 1818 marriage to William B. Cooper, p. 14.

Holt County, Missouri, Stephen Cooper elected to legislature, p. 16.

Hughes, Andrew S., relocates Indians, p. 8.

Iowa Indians, and Treaty of 1830, p. 2; negotiate Platte treaty, p. 7; in Platte Purchase, p. 8; relocation, p. 8.

Jackson, Andrew, and Platte Purchase, p. 6.

Johnson, Overton, 1843 emigration, writes guide, p. 24.

Johnson, Thomas, 1835 eviction from Little Platte, p. 6.

Kansas Indians, Treaty of 1825, p.2.

Kimsey, Alvis (1816-1856), land in Platte County, p. 11; 1839 marriage to Cassia Simpson, p. 12; land in Platte County, p. 14.

Kimsey, Benjamin (1802-1865), land in Howard County, p. 11; land in Platte County, p. 11.

Kimsey, Duff, to Oregon in 1846, p. 12.

Kimsey, James, land in Platte County, p. 11, to Oregon, p. 12.

Kimsey, Johnson, in 1840 census, p. 12.

Kimsey, Samuel (n.d.-1844), in Platte County, p. 12

Kimsey, Thomas (1803-1866), land in Howard County, p. 11; land in Platte County, p. 11.

Linn, Lewis F., and Platte annexation, p. 5.

Little Platte, see Platte Purchase.

Martin, Zadock, premature settlement of Platte, establishes Martinsville, p. 10.

Mathews, James, in 1840 census, p. 12.

Mathews, Jane Simpson, children of, p. 12.

Mathews, Lazarus, in 1840 census, p. 12.

Mathews, Thomas, in 1840 census, p. 12.

Miller, John, 1832 message to Missouri General Assembly, p. 4.

Missouri, Compromise of 1820, p.l; Enabling Act of 1820, p. 1; and Platte Purchase, p. 6.

Missouri Legislature, 1824 memorial, p. 2; 1831 memorial, p.4; accepts Platte Purchase, p. 8; establishes Platte County, p. 10.

Mormon Church, in Jackson County, Missouri, pp. 19-20; in Clay, Caldwell, Daviess and Carroll Counties, p. 20; 1838 extermination order, massacre at Hauns Mill and 1839 departure from Missouri, p. 21.

Omaha, and Treaty of 1830, p. 2. Osage, and Treaty of 1808, p. 2.

Oto, and Treaty of 1830, p. 2.

Ottawa, in Platte region, p. 2; and Treaty of Chicago, p. 5; relocation, p. 9.

Panic of 1837 in Missouri, pp. 21-22.

Paxton, William, Platte Purchase in 1837, p. 9; on religion, p. 19.

Peake, Elizabeth Cooper Woods (1758-1815), in Boonslick, p. 13.

Pettis Township, Platte County, Simpson and Kimsey land, p. 11.

Pilcher, Joshua, negotiates 1836 treaty in Nebraska, p. 7

Platte City (Falls of the Platte), 1839 county seat, p. 10.

Platte County, created 1838, p. 10; tax rolls of 1839, p. 10; 1840 boundary survey, 17, schools, p. 18; militia organized, p. 21.

Platte Purchase, description, pp. 1-2; annexation, pp. 3-4; and Treaty of Chicago, 5; 1835 agitation for annexation, p. 5; 1835 eviction of squatters, pp. 5-6; 1836 legislation, p. 6.

Post Oak Township, Johnson County, Simpson and Kimsey families in, p.11. Potawatomi, in Platte region, p.2, p. 6; and Treaty of Chicago, p. 5; relocation, p.9.

Preemption laws of 1838 and 1841, p. 17; during Panic of 1837, p. 22.

Public Land Office, 1843 at Plattsburg, p. 18.

Rigdon, Sidney, Caldwell County Oration, p. 20.

Sac and Fox, and Treaty of 1830, p. 2; negotiate Platte treaty, p. 7; in Platte Purchase, p. 8; relocation, p. 8.

Shively, John M., 1845 returns from West, writes guide, p.24.

Simpson, Barnet (1836-1925), memories of overland trail, p. 25.

Simpson, Benjamin (1818-1910), 1839 marriage to Eliza Jane Wisdom, p. 12; 1843 marriage to Nancy Cooper, p. 15.

Simpson, Benjamin and Nancy Cooper, on Oregon Trail, p. 15.

Simpson, Cassia (1822-1846), 1839 marriage to Alvis Kimsey, p. 12.

Simpson, James (1780/1784-1852), land in Platte County, p. 11; dies in Platte County, p. 12.

Simpson, John T. (1841-1920), birth in Platte County, p. 12

Simpson, Mary Kimsey (1797-1858), 1813 marriage, p. 11; prepares for overland trail, p. 25.

Simpson, Samuel (1845-1899), born Platte County, p. 15; poetry, p. 26.

Simpson, Sylvester (1844-1913), born Platte County, p. 15.

Simpson, Thomas, proxy Mormon baptism, p. 21.

Simpson, Thomas K. (1815-1852), land in Platte County, p. 11; to Oregon in 1852, p. 25.

Simpson, William (1793-1858), on 1839 Platte County tax roll and 1840 census, p. 11; performing weddings in Platte County, p. 12; preaching in Platte County, p. 19.

Simpson, William and Mary Kimsey, in Tennessee, Howard County, Missouri and Johnson County, Missouri, p. 11; 1846 emigration to Oregon, p. 24.

Sioux, and Treaty of 1830, p. 2; and Platte Purchase, p. 6.

Smelser, Jacob (1805-1888), land in Platte County, p. 14.

Smith, Joseph, Jackson County experience, p. 20; 1838 surrender and escape, p. 21.

Specie circular of 1836, p. 22.

Still, Joseph, at Boonslick and in Platte County, p. 15.

Taylor, Zachary and Treaty of September 1836, p. 6.

Todd, Joseph (1777-1851), at Boonslick and in Platte County, p. 15.

Treaty of Chicago of 1835, p. 5.

Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1830, p. 2; and Platte Purchase, p. 6; p. 7, p. 8. Tyler, John, replaces Stephen Cooper, p. 16.

U.S. Congress, 1832 Platte annexation, p. 4; Treaty of Chicago of 1834, p. 5,. Van Buren, Martin, Platte Purchase proclamation, p. 8; appoints Stephen Cooper, p. 16.

Weakly Dale Farm, 1835 militia muster, p. 5.

White, Elijah, 1845 return from Oregon, p. 24.

Whitman, Marcus, in Western Missouri, 1842-1843, p. 23.

Williams, Ezekiel, in 1814-1815 fur trade, p. 14.

Winter, William H., 1843 emigration, writes guide, p. 24.

Wisdom, Eliza Jane (n.d.-1841), marriage, birth of son, death in childbirth, p. 12.

Wisdom, Joseph and Mary Scott, parents of Eliza Wisdom Simpson, p. 12.

Wood, William T., 1835 resolution to Congress, p. 5; represents Mormons in Jackson County, p. 20.

Woods, Adam C., in Platte County, p. 15.

Woods, Archibald, in Platte County, p. 15.

Woods, William C., in Platte County, p. 15.

Young, Brigham, begins planning emigtration to Utah, p. 21.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

The Platte Purchase is the 1836-1846 segment of an incomplete narrative tracing the path of the Simpson and Cooper families across the continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. Earlier parts of the narrative have been completed and are available from the author for the cost of printing and postage. These include:

For We Cannot Tarry Here: The Cooper and Simpson Families on the Frontier, 1750-1800 (1990), 150 pages.

A Most Healthful and Pleasant Situation: The Simpson Family in Maryland, 1688-1760 (1991), 50 pages.

A Very Improving State: The Simpson Family in North Carolina, 1755- 1804 (1994), 62 pages.

“Boonslick and the Fur Trade in Fact and Fiction”, Boonslick Heritage, March 1994, 9 pages.

“The Death of Sarshel Cooper”, Boonslick Heritage, March 1995, 6 pages.

Kirke Wilson

172 Hancock Street

San Francisco, California 94114