West Pointer named Jefferson C. Davis who was only a lieutenant, and a raw militiaman who was an elected Captain of his company with little military knowledge named Abraham Lincoln. Fate had another war for these two men thirty years later.
Indians and bison made the original trails, and our pioneers made others as they rode overland to discuss mutual problems, including that of the Indians. The Potawatomi were first to move from our immediate area, leaving from Six Mile Creek near Hudson in 1831 before the war. Some tribes did not leave northern Illinois until 1838. The Delaware, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi and the early Peorias were reasonably friendly, with the Kickapoos usually listed as undesirables. The Sacs and the Foxes were the most dreaded. In the winter of the deep snows (1830-31) local Indians were of more aid than danger to the hard pressed pioneers, and they sometimes brought in food when the whites found hunting too difficult.
The Clarksville to Fort Clark trail was first marked by plowing a furrow, because travel was insufficient to make the route certain. It ran about one quarter mile south of where Allen and Lucy Willis Hart built their cabin on a little hill on the south side of Section twenty-seven in Palestine Township in 1837. Another trail met this one at Bowling Green and went on northward to Versailles and Hanover, later Metamora. Lincoln and the other lawyers of the old Eighth Judicial Circuit traveled this trail.
North of Hanover James Boys operated a stagecoach post office, perhaps first in the county, although Postmaster Simpson Y. Barnard was operating the Josephine office in eastern Greene Township as early as 1836, and it was continued until the railroad was built through Panola in 1853. Josephine stood at the edge of the woods, just west of the stage road toward Hennepin.11 This trail had been blazed by a sixteen year old fur trader and woodsman named Gurdon S. Hubbard in February, 1819. This boy agent of Astor's American Fur Company was trading with the Indians at their Hennepin village, and learned from them that the Kickapoos of Grand Village (West Township in McLean County) might soon move, so he decided to trade with them before they did. He struck out boldly across country in mid-winter for Blooming Grove, where he could go southeastward on the Wabash Indian trail, or the cut off trail just north of it.12
Hubbard went from the Grand Village to trade with the Salt Creek Indians east of Urbana. Marrying Watseka, the Indian girl, he aided in the founding of Danville and became its first merchant. He then originated the direct overland trail to Chicago, for years known as the "Hubbard Trace."
We have located the Josephine post office on or very near the farm home that was later Elias and Mary Ray's, where a white crib now stands on land owned by Leo Render. Another early stagecoach post office was in El Paso Township on land now owned by Mr. and Mrs.
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