Alot of water, silt, and history have washed down old Piney River since that first sawmill was constructed on its banks 200 years ago. Sylvester Pattie is a name that was nearly lost from American history. Though he was a hero of the War of 1812 and a great explorer of the American west, he has been largely forgotten. Pattie was an important figure in the history of Texas County having built one of the earliest sawmills in southern Missouri. He is also the namesake of Paddy Creek and the Paddy Creek Wilderness Area in northern Texas County.
Sylvester Pattie was born near Craig’s Station, Ky., on Aug. 25, 1782, the son of John Pattie (b. 1750, d. 1831) and Anna (Sanders) Pattie (b. 1750, d. 1840). The very day he was born, his father was away with Col. Benjamin Logan and Daniel Boone, fighting the Shawnee Indians in the battle of the Blue Licks. Daniel’s son, Israel Boone, was killed in the fighting that day.
Sylvester Pattie was well acquainted with the American wilderness and spent his whole life fighting the Native Americans. He stayed in Kentucky long enough to see the threat of Indian attacks disappear. Then he moved his family west to face the threat again.
EXPLORATION OF THE GASCONADE REGION
The first man of European descent to see the Gasconade River was a French trader named Charles Claude du Tisne. He paddled past the mouth of the large river while he was headed up the Missouri in 1719. He named it “Gasconade” which is a French word meaning “boastfulness” or “bragging.” One explanation for this was that the mouth of the Gasconade was very wide, implying it was a very large river, but it narrowed quite a bit after one traveled up it.
By the 1740s, many French trappers were traveling the tributaries of the Lower Missouri, including the Gasconade region looking for prime trapping locations. When the Lewis and Clark expedition headed west in 1804, they stopped to camp at the mouth of the Gasconade.
One of the first English speaking persons to explore the Gasconade Basin was Daniel Boone. Boone and his extended family members left Kentucky in 1799 after he had endured legal and financial problems. Daniel moved to St. Charles County, Mo., where he had had been given a generous land grant from the Spanish government.
Daniel Boone and his sons lived much the same way they had in Kentucky being involved in trapping and market hunting. They explored the interior of the southwestern Missouri Ozarks going places that had only been seen by the Indians, French trappers and Spanish explorers before them.
Boone and his sons went on long hunting and trapping expeditions every winter from 1800 to 1805. They trekked far into southwest Missouri. Many of the rivers they trapped and hunted were being seen for the first time by English speaking explorers. They explored parts of the Gasconade, Osage, Big Piney, Pomme de Terre, Niangua and Bourbeuse rivers.
In the fall of 1805, the Boones had a plan to find the headwaters of the Gasconade River. No one knows how far they got or which branches of the river they explored. In those days, the Big Piney Fork of the Gasconade was believed by some to be the main fork of the river.
By 1806, two families had settled near the mouth of the Gasconade. By 1813 there was a small community there with a grist mill and a sawmill. Most of the Missouri Territory was wilderness and the few settlements were clustered along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The entire Missouri Ozarks region was a vast unorganized area, temporarily attached to one county or another. This area was jokingly referred to as the State of Gasconade. It was an area larger than many of the states in the original 13 colonies and bigger than some European nations.
In those days, the Big Piney River was shown on maps as the Big Piney Fork of the Gasconade River or sometimes the Big Sandy Fork. Many old timers of Texas County have said that there were no gravel bars on the river in the 1800s. Those came about after many years of logging and farming resulting in large amounts of gravel being washed from the soil into the river. In those early years the river banks were mostly dirt with a few sand bars.
In the fall of 1810, there was an expedition to explore the lands of the Gasconade to seek out prime hunting and trapping spots, led by Daniel “Morgan” Boone, Jr. and Joseph Robidoux IV. They may have explored regions along the Big Piney River and Roubidoux Creek that are in present day Texas County. Joseph was a member of the famous fur trading family of St. Louis. He would later own a fur trading post on the Missouri River that would be the beginnings of the city of St. Joseph.
Boone and Robidoux came across some fairly good trapping streams teeming with beaver, otter and mink. There were wide areas of prairie on the ridge tops with an abundance of white tail deer, elk, black bear and buffalo. They also noticed another resource that the area had to offer: wide river valleys forested with old growth, short-leaf pine timber.
The timber was very valuable if one could only find a way to saw it into lumber and transport it. St. Louis was already experiencing shortages. The best timber had been cut back for many miles surrounding the city and pine was scarce. As early as 1808, lumber rafts were coming up the Mississippi from St. Genevieve and other ports along the river. Rafts of lumber were also coming down the Ohio River. Some were coming from as far away as Pittsburgh.
Before the war of 1812, a lumber dealer in St. Louis named Thomas Kirkpatrick was running ads in the newspaper with prices he was paying for sawn lumber. The prices per 100 board feet were $3 for oak, $3.25 for walnut or ash, and $3.50 for cherry.
WAR OF 1812
Sylvester Pattie, his wife Nancy “Polly” (Hubbard) Pattie, and their five young children left Kentucky traveling with several families in a wagon train. Among the group was Pattie’s brother-in-law William Harle and Pattie’s father-in-law Thomas Hubbard. They were coming to settle the land that would soon be the new Missouri Territory, organized on June 4, 1812. In the beginning, the Missouri Territory included most of the area contained in the Louisiana Purchase. The name of the territory was changed to avoid confusion with the new state of Louisiana.
The Patties arrived in St. Louis on March 14, 1812. They traveled a little further and lived in St. Charles for awhile. At that time, St. Charles was a French settlement. Mrs. Pattie was often lonely as there was only one other family that spoke English.
In the spring of 1813, British soldiers were coming down the Mississippi River from Canada. The British had enlisted the Fox and Sac Indian tribes to fight with them and were attacking the American settlements along the river. The Indians had been burning the cabins of the settlers. They were killing women and children left home alone while the men were away fighting elsewhere. This was the War of 1812.
Two companies of United States Rangers, 3rd Regiment, were raised in St. Louis, commanded by Major Nathan Boone and known as the “Missouri Rangers.” Because of his Indian fighting experience in Kentucky, Sylvester Pattie enlisted as a Lieutenant and was placed in the 2nd Company. The men had no uniforms or equipment except that which they supplied themselves and they carried their own rifles. The government paid the soldiers 75 cents a day or one dollar if they supplied their own horse.
Several temporary forts were quickly built along the lower Missouri and Mississippi Rivers above St. Louis. These forts were not very large and some were nothing more than a blockhouse made of hewn logs, overlooking a river valley. The Missouri Rangers occupied a fort known as Cap au Gris, located where the Cuivre River flowed into the Missouri.
At one point, the main body of the Missouri Rangers marched on, leaving Pattie in charge of a detachment of soldiers to defend the fort. Within days, Fort Cap au Gris and nearby Fort Howard were attacked by the British and a large band of Sac Indians led by Chief Black Hawk.
The Fort at Cap au Gris held out for several days without major casualties even though they were greatly outnumbered. The Rangers were nearly out of shot and powder. The fort was completely surrounded with no way to escape.
Pattie came up with a plan. He wanted two men to sneak out of the fort, get past the enemy lines and go for help. Pattie asked for volunteers but no one stepped forward. The men believed it to be a suicide mission.
Sylvester Pattie decided to go himself. He shaved his beard and put on a British, Red Coat uniform stripped from a dead soldier that lay outside their walls. He walked across no man’s land in the dark and then through the enemy camp without arousing suspicion. The British and the Indians thought he was one of their own.
Pattie ran all night — a distance of more than 40 miles. He arrived at Fort Bellefontaine at the juncture of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers the next morning. Pattie reported to the commander, Lt. Thomas MacNair, who came marching back to Fort Cap-au-Gris with a force of 500 men. The British and Indians were easily driven away when the reinforcements arrived.
For his heroics, Sylvester Pattie was promoted and was transferred to David Musick’s company of mounted rangers. Later Pattie joined Henry Hight’s company and was placed second in command.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
It has now been more than 200 years since Sylvester Pattie and William Harle began constructing their sawmill at the Slabtown Spring, on Big Piney River, in 1815. When author Rick Gunter was in high school in 1976- ’77, he wrote a research paper about the pioneer history of Texas County. “It was frustrating, trying to find any hard information in the few sources available at that time. One historical character I was particularly impressed with was Sylvester Pattie. There seemed to be very few references to him, except for the 1820 Missouri Territorial census, where his name was misspelled as ‘Paddy.’ One local history source told of a “Boone and Paddy” who built a mill “at the head of Paddy Creek” but little else was known,” writes Gunter.
Now, thanks to the internet, the contents of a few early, rare books are available with information about Pattie, including a book about him written in 1831 by his son, James Ohio Pattie. Another interesting source that has become available is the old records of the Missouri Territorial courts. Many of these cases involved the owners of the earliest sawmills on Big Piney River.
The research and tracking down the story, one fragment at a time, took almost 40 years.
“I’m still not satisfied that I have the complete story but I feel the time is finally right to put the words to paper. Here is the story of one of the earliest pioneers of Texas County,” Gunter writes.