My Genealogy Hound

GAGE, C. D., of Gage & Matteson, props. Oak Grove Poultry Farm, Sec. 5; P. O. Wever; born at Smithfield, R. I.; for a number of years was a factory operative, working from fourteen to eighteen hours per day, at a salary barely sufficient to support life; in the meantime his parents died; he learned the blacksmith trade, served an apprenticeship of two years, then worked in a carriage-shop at Millbury, Mass.; he then started West, with all his worldly possessions in a carpet-sack; he traveled alternately by canal and on foot, to Buffalo; visited Toledo, Cincinnati, Ohio and Manchester, Ind., working at his trade wherever he could find work; reached St. Louis, thence came to Fort Madison in 1849; from there, with rifle and carpet-sack, he started on foot and alone for California; reached Des Moines, then beginning to be settled, and troops to remove; there he took a horse and buggy and pot of paint, and, under the direction of Dr. Clark, former editor of a Jackson Co. paper, started out to stake a bee-line road from Des Moines to Omaha; he ran out of stakes the first day, and substituted elk-horns, which were scattered all along the route; at what is now Lewis, Cass Co., he found the Mormon trail, which he followed to Kanesville, then Mormon headquarters; he remained at Council Bluffs about two months, then commenced carrying the mail between that place and Des Moines, and took the first mail trip ever made between the two places; after acting as mail-carrier for two months, he joined Professor Owens’ party, then making a geological survey of the State, and spent some time along the Des Moines River; in the fall he was discharged, went to St. Joseph, Mo., and assumed the management of a hotel; the following spring (1850) he went to California, worked in the mines for two years, then returned to Rhode Island via the Isthmus, and to Iowa in the spring of 1852, and commenced the business of carriage and wagon making at Fort Madison, where he bought a tract of 150 acres of timber-land adjoining the city limits, and did an active business furnishing steamboats with wood, and lighting steamboats over the rapids, until the war broke out; in 1854, he bought the 230-acre farm now owned by Matteson & Gage, valued at $45 per acre. When the war commenced, he went South as a sutler for two years; in 1864, he invested $2,500 in a Montana outfit, and spent eighteen months in that region, engaged in various speculations and adventures; had numerous hairbreadth escapes from Indians and from drowning on the rapids of the Yellowstone River, which Gage and twelve others descended on a flatboat for 1,100 miles; reached Omaha in thirty-one days, making 3,100 miles in that time; from Omaha he came back to Lee Co. with $40 in his pocket, and soon after commenced improving their present poultry farm. He is unmarried, and makes his home with his brother-in-law, J. A. Matteson, who came to Lee Co. from Rhode Island in 1854. He has filled various positions of trust — Justice of the Peace, and others. Mr. Gage is a Democrat, and has served as Deputy Sheriff, etc.