Although considered the nation’s frontier in the 1820s and 1830s, northern Illinois, especially the area within 100 miles of Lake Michigan, didn’t fit in with the experiences of the pioneers of Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.
When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, it provided access to the Great Lakes that was far easier and less expensive than before. The Hudson River-Erie Canal-Great Lakes route allowed entire families to travel in relative comfort and speed directly into the frontier community of Chicago from their eastern homes. From there, they then headed west to settle on the extensive, agriculturally rich prairies stretching all the way to the Mississippi River. As a result, the era of the buckskin-clad frontier subsistence farmer was either very brief or in many cases nonexistent in many areas of northern Illinois.
But while the bulk of the area’s earliest settlers were not the hard-bitten frontiersmen history books favor, some early settlers did participate in what most of us would consider real frontier experiences.
One case in point was young Edward Ament. A teenager in 1824, Ament arrived in Peoria on the Illinois River from Livingston County, New York, looking for work and a chance at the American Dream. He quickly found a job working for Joseph Ogee, a Metis (mixed French and Native American heritage) trader and interpreter, who later founded what became Dixon, Illinois. While working for Ogee, Ament met John Kinzie, the foremost Indian trader in Illinois at that time who was an executive for the American Fur Company. Kinzie needed help getting a Mackinac boat loaded with 4,000 pounds of Indian trade goods up the Illinois River to Chicago, and young Ament was willing to help.
John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company monopolized the fur trade from posts all over what would one day become the Midwest, including St. Louis, Chicago and Peoria. An accomplished silversmith who specialized in the kinds of decorative items that were valuable trade items, Kinzie joined Astor’s company in 1816. Kinzie also proved an honest trader, which made him extra popular with his Native American customers.
In 1822, the American Fur Company purchased the government-owned trading post, called a “factory,” at Chicago when the U.S. abandoned its failed attempt at a government monopoly on the fur trade. By 1824, Kinzie had become arguably the most prominent citizen of the village growing up around the Chicago trading post as well as a major player in Astor’s company.
When Ament joined the company in Peoria in the fall of that year (although he likely didn’t know it) he was participating in the end of the fur trade era in the southern Great Lakes. Within another decade, the trade would be dead in Illinois. But that fall, Ament helped Kinzie and Medore Beaubien work the heavily laden boat up the Illinois River to the stream’s upper rapids, then the head of navigation on the river. Soon the towns of Peru, Marseilles and Ottawa would grow there, attracting settlers and earning money as major transshipment points between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River system.
After the trade goods were loaded aboard oxen-drawn wagons for the trip north to Chicago, Kinzie took a route up the established High Prairie Trail from the rapids to Chicago that passed through Kendall County. Ament later said he liked what he saw of the country the party passed through. After reaching Chicago, he befriended Peter Specie, one of the area’s earliest settlers and boosters, who told Ament the area along the Fox River was possibly even better and richer farming country than it looked.
For the next two years, Ament worked around Chicago, including helping to raise the first log cabin on the site of Evanston.
In 1826, he decided to try earning money by mining lead in Galena with his six brothers. Then having amassed a small grubstake, the Aments tried homesteading in Bureau County’s Red Oak Grove, but Edward had kept Specie’s description of land along the Fox River in the back of his mind. So in 1831, he headed back to the Fox River Valley to prospect for land, meeting Specie again at John Doughterty’s cabin in Big Grove, the namesake of today’s Big Grove Township.
Ament boarded with Specie in Specie Grove for a short time, while looking for land. He found a good spot in Section 3 of what is today Kendall Township, and then went back to Bureau County to collect his brothers. Four of them, Calvin, Hiram, Anson and Alfred, decided to go to Kendall County with Edward. The party arrived May 10, 1831, and immediately set out to make a life for themselves. One early historian described the five brothers as “the youngest squatters” in Kendall County.
Almost exactly a year later, on May 1, 1832, Edward did his part to settle the prairie when he married Emily Ann Harris, daughter of William Harris. It was the first marriage recorded within the bounds of what would become Kendall County. However, the couple had only a short time to enjoy wedded bliss before they had to flee for their lives when the Black Hawk War broke out a couple weeks later.
After the war scare, Edward and Emily came back to their claim on the prairie and proceeded to raise their family. Of the other Ament boys, we know the fate of three. Hiram married another of the Harris girls, Nancy, who later died. Hiram later relocated to Oregon Territory with his second wife and his younger brother, Anson and his wife. Calvin, their older brother, became a Methodist minister and moved south.
Edward and Emily Ann had a long and fruitful life. Their descendants still live in Kendall County, and the family name has been memorialized in Ament Road near the old family pioneer homestead. Edward, who came to northern Illinois with a load of fur trade goods, lived to see the muddy trading post at Chicago turn into a great city before his death in 1888 and see the lonely prairies crisscrossed with railroad tracks.
It was an eventful and interesting life well lived.
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