Bigger may have been with him on that raid, as he was with Bartholomew in the battle at Tippecanoe. Some years thereafter both men settled in the Clarksville area between Lexington and Gridley where both sleep side by side in the little pioneer cemetery. Clarksville is a bit out of our area, but the Bigger family have been prominent in our history ever since and continuous residents here. Little James Bigger living east of Kappa is the fifth generation descendant of this old Indian fighter and pioneer for whom he is named, along with his maternal grandfather.
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The first Woodford County resident was an uncertain character named Blaylock, for whom a little creek is named in Partridge Township. He was found living in an Indian-like wigwam in 1819, and he almost immediately moved away. Arriving visitors found evidence of possible counterfeiting in his deserted tepee. William Blanchard of Spring Bay Township had settled just south of the present Woodford line in Tazewell County in 1822, and he said the first settler to actually build a home in Woodford County was a man named Darby from Vermont, who built on the Crocker farm on the southeast quarter of Section thirty-five in Spring Bay Township.
Earliest in southeastern Woodford were Amasa and Susannah Stout, who were on upper Panther Creek in western Greene Township, not then formed, in 1828.10 In 1829 the Patrick families came, and in 1830 Young Bilbrey and his wife, Amanda Patrick, came up from Overton County, Tennessee, into the same area. Bilbrey's mother was a Young, and that was his first name, often spelled "Bilberry" in earlier histories.
These first settlers built their cabins (at first some only had three sides) near a spring or a stream for water; and in the timber for fuel, shade and the necessary building material. The Stouts moved to Dry Grove in 1836, but the Bilbreys remain today in our city, the oldest family to live continuously in the immediate El Paso area. Young Bilbrey moved into Money Creek Township south of the Mackinaw in 1850, but some of his children remained.
The first actual written record of anyone crossing over the site that became El Paso goes to a Black Hawk war veteran named John D. Gardiner, who later lived in El Paso and is buried in Evergreen cemetery. He wrote of returning home from that war "when I rode over the site on which El Paso was later built." His pension claim tells of no fights with Indians, but does say, "I was bitten by a rattlesnake," and that the wound was not properly treated for some time until he reached Rock Island.
The war was over with Black Hawk's surrender to the same Colonel Zachary Taylor who had been General Hopkin's aide twenty years before. Oddly, other soldiers in his army in this Indian war included a
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