en
years of age, he acted as deputy for his father, who was sheriff of Bath
county, Kentucky. Some three years later his father gave him three hundred
dollars, with which he bought one hundred head of yearling cattle. For
three years he herded these cattle among the mountains of Kentucky, about
twenty miles from civilization, having as his only companions his horse,
dog, gun, milk cow, and the cattle. His meals usually consisted of a stew
made of bear meat, venison, or turkey, and a piece of fat bacon. At the
end of the three years the cattle were sold for about ten dollars a head,
and the youthful dealer having attained his majority went to Missouri and
became a land agent for eastern speculators, and soon began to speculate
for himself. In 1821, concluding that Missouri was too far from a market,
he sold some of his land and resolved to move to Illinois. At that time
the site upon which Springfield was to stand had been chosen as the
temporary county seat of Sangamon county, because eight men, some of whom
had families, lived within a radius of two miles from the site, and at no
other place in the county could the lawyers and judge secure board and
lodging. Iles quickly discerned the advantages of the Sangamon country as
a place of settlement, and straightway built a log store sixteen feet
square, went to St. Louis and bought fifteen hundred dollars worth of
goods, which he loaded on a keel-boat and had towed up the Mississippi and
the Illinois by six men, whom he paid seventy-five dollars for their
services. When the land was offered for sale, in 1823, Iles bought a
quarter-section.

Another quarter-section of the town site was bought by Pascal Paoli Enos.
The fact that the frontier is a great social leveler is well illustrated
by the combination of Enos and Iles as joint owners of a town site. The
Enos family had come from England in 1648, and Pascal Paoli Enos, son of
Major-General Roger Enos, was born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1770. He
was graduated from Dartmouth College in 1794, studied law, was a member of
the Vermont legislature in 1804, married in Vermont and moved to
Cincinnati in 1815, later to St. Charles, Missouri, then to St. Louis,
then to Madison county, Illinois, and in 1823 was appointed by President
Monroe receiver of public moneys for the land-office in the District of
Sangamo. Thus the elderly scholar joined the shrewd but youthful
frontiersman.

Col. Thomas Cox was the third of the trio of the