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Updated: June 14, 2025
If there are any settlers now left of the Iowa of that day, they will remember that the winter was bitter cold. On the way back from the surveying party to Eddyville, just before Christmas, I encountered one of the bitterest of those bitter days. A companion named Vance rested with me overnight in a cabin. We had scant food for ourselves or for the mare we led.
Even where there was a ferry, the charges were so high that they were out of reach of most of the emigrants. As for me, all my funds had been absorbed in procuring my outfit at Eddyville, in Iowa. We had not dreamed that there would be use for money on the Plains, where there were neither supplies nor people. But we soon found out our mistake.
When William Kelly, an owner of iron works near Eddyville, Kentucky, first proposed this method in 1847, he met with the ridicule which usually greets the pioneer inventor.
I have been received with much hospitality and kindness, and could stay a month with pleasure; but General Andrew Jackson having provided us a boat, we shall set off on Sunday, the 2d of June, to navigate down the Cumberland, either to Smithland at its mouth, or to Eddyville, sixty or eighty miles above, at one of which places we expect to find our boat, with which we intend to make a rapid voyage down the Mississippi to Natchez and Orleans.
Writing under date of September 30, 1856, from the Suwanee Iron Works, Eddyville, Kentucky, he claimed to have started "a series of experiments" in November 1851 which had been witnessed by hundreds of persons and "discussed amongst the ironmasters, etc., of this section, all of whom are perfectly familiar with the whole principle ... as discovered by me nearly five years ago."
William Kelly, an ironmaster of Eddyville, Kentucky, brought into action by an American report of Bessemer's British Association paper, opposed the granting of a United States patent to Bessemer and substantiated, to the satisfaction of the Commissioner of Patents, his claim to priority in the "air boiling" process.
I have, therefore, only to assure you of my health and safety, without entering into any of those details which you will see anon. Shaw is with me. To-morrow we pursue our journey by land to Nashville in Tennessee, and thence down the Cumberland to Eddyville, where we expect to find our boat, and intend to go from that place to Orleans in ten days. Arrived at Nashville on the 29th of May.
I have been received with much hospitality and kindness, and could stay a month with pleasure; but General Andrew Jackson having provided us a boat, we shall set off on Sunday, the 2d of June, to navigate down the Cumberland, either to Smithland at its mouth, or to Eddyville, sixty or eighty miles above, at one of which places we expect to find our boat, with which we intend to make a rapid voyage down the Mississippi to Natchez and Orleans.
She rests in an unknown and unmarked grave in the Platte valley. What shall I say of that October drive from the home near Indianapolis to Eddyville, Iowa, in the delightful atmosphere of Indian summer? It was an atmosphere of hope and content. We had the wide world before us; we had good health; and above all we had each other.
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