Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/226



established a trading post six miles above the mouth of the Des Moines on the Iowa side.

In 1820 Dr. Samuel C. Muir, a surgeon in the United States army, was with a command stationed at Fort Edwards (now Warsaw, Illinois). He crossed the river and built a cabin where Keokuk now stands. he had married a beautiful and intelligent Indian girl of the Sac nation and their home was on a little Iowa farm where he cabin stood. Some years later an order was issued by the War Department requiring officers of the army at the frontier posts to abandon their Indian wives. Dr. Muir, who was a native of Scotland and a graduate of Edinburgh University, refused to desert his wife and resigned his commission. He lived happily with his wife in their modest and beautiful home on the banks of the Mississippi until 1832, when he was stricken with cholera and died suddenly, leaving his Indian widow and five children destitute, as his property became involved in litigation which consumed most of it.

In 1821 Isaac R. Campbell explored the southern portion of the territory embraced in Iowa and afterward settled near the foot of the Des Moines Rapids in Lee County, where he opened a farm and kept a public house. In writing his recollections of southern Iowa at that time, he says:

“The only indications of a white settlement at the time of my first visit at the Rapids was a cabin built by Dr. Samual C. Muir on the site of the present city of Keokuk. The next cabin built by a white man in that vicinity was about six miles above, where a French trader, Le Moliere, had established a post. Another Frenchman, M. Blondin, had a cabin a mile farther up the river. At the head of the Rapids the Indian Chief, Wapello, with a band of his tribe, had a village. This was near where Louis Honore Tesson, a French trader, had established a post and secured a grant of lands in 1799. The ruins of his buildings and his old orchard were here found.”

Peter A. Sarpy, a French trader, had, as early as 1824, been engaged in the Indian traffic at a place called Traders'