Israel Dodge (1760–1806)

Israel Dodge exemplified the adventurous spirit of a young, expanding United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. He carried forth the traditions and legacy of the renowned American branch of the Dodge family, descended from Tristram Dodge, an English immigrant who reached Massachusetts in 1661. Israel, along with his brother, John, transplanted cultural mores of both family and country to the western frontier in their varied roles as soldiers, farmers, merchants, traders, and public servants.

Born in Canterbury, Connecticut, on September 3, 1760, Israel Dodge matured quickly in colonial America. At the age of fifteen he traveled to Africa aboard a slave ship and fought with the Connecticut militia in the American Revolution two years later. He was wounded in 1777 at the Battle of Brandywine during a hand-to-hand fight with a British regular and earned the rank of second lieutenant in the Continental army by the war’s end. Afterward, he followed his brother, John, to the newly acquired US territories in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.

Israel Dodge met his future wife, Nancy Hunter, while transporting supplies between Kaskaskia and Clark’s Colony, a fortified settlement on the Mississippi River below the mouth of the Ohio. They married by 1781, and Nancy moved briefly to Kaskaskia. The young Nancy Dodge gave birth to Henry, the couple’s only child, a year later. Israel settled his family at Spring Station, near present-day Louisville, Kentucky, and later at Bardstown. In the early 1790s he left his family and sought a more prosperous livelihood on the frontier of Spain’s Upper Louisiana.

In 1793, Dodge joined his brother, John, in the young settlement of New Bourbon, located in what is now Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri. They pledged loyalty to the king of Spain and established a prosperous life through a variety of endeavors. The census of Spanish Illinois listed Israel as an agriculturalist, but he also engaged in lead mining, produced salt on the Saline River, and operated a prosperous distillery, breweries, and a mill on Dodge Creek. In 1799 he petitioned the region’s lieutenant governor, Charles de Hault Delassus, for a land grant of one thousand arpents, which Dodge had already improved. The concession was granted a mere ten days later after the endorsement of New Bourbon’s founder, the lieutenant governor’s father, Pierre-Charles Delassus de Luzières, who proclaimed the beneficence of Israel Dodge and the value of his business endeavors to the people of Spanish Louisiana. Dodge prospered both personally and professionally in his new home, for he remarried in 1804, taking Catherine Camp as his wife. Dodge’s business interests flourished through multiple ventures within the region and through trade via New Orleans.

Despite his loyalty to the Spanish crown, Dodge retained good standing as a patriotic American after the transfer of Louisiana to the United States and, in fact, raised the US flag in Ste. Genevieve on the occasion of the American takeover in 1804. William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory and the Louisiana Territory, appointed Dodge as sheriff of the Ste. Genevieve district in that same year, an appointment that he carried throughout the rest of his life. Henry Dodge, who had joined his father and uncle in 1796, contributed to the family’s frontier enterprises and served as deputy sheriff in Ste. Genevieve. Israel Dodge lived the remaining two years of his life in the Ste. Genevieve district, dying in 1806 at the age of forty-six.

Dodge represented the entrepreneurial zeal that contributed to the settlement of early Missouri. As an American he brought cultural traditions from the eastern United States to its newest territorial addition at the turn of the nineteenth century and participated in the transplantation of political institutions as well. He provided much-needed agricultural products, minerals, milling services, and trade to the inhabitants of the Louisiana Territory. Although reputedly known as an undisciplined rabble-rouser in his youth, he facilitated the development of both capitalist and democratic European traditions in Upper Louisiana during the tenuous transitional period in the early nineteenth century.