Yankee Doodle would have been a proper tune for James Clyman, an extraordinary individual who graced Vermilion County with his presence in its early years.
He was born on a farm in Virginia owned by George Washington in 1792. Forty years later he was in Vermilion County and he served with young Abraham Lincoln in Captain Jacob Earley’s Company in the Black Hawk War in 1832. Thus, the man had a bit of a connection with the First and 16th Presidents of the United States.
Then, there was the land purchase recorded in the Domain Land Sales register. It recorded Clyman purchased two tracts of land in Vermilion County, Illinois, on Independence Day, 1828. They totaled a little over two hundred acres and cost a dollar and a quarter an acre.
James had a wanderlust that lasted the first 50 years of his life. When he came to Vermilion County in the latter half of the 1820s he had already served in the War of 1812, and been to the far west where he established a reputation as a mountain man.
He reportedly sold beaver skins in St. Louis in 1827 for more than $1,200, and he had money to spend. He came to Vermilion County after he left St. Louis and he used part of his funds to invest in a store. His partner in the enterprise was Dan Beckwith. The store was in the new settlement of Danville and it was Beckwith who put the Dan in the village name.
The store wasn’t a resounding success because people made most of what they needed, and lived off the land. The more successful store in the village was operated by Gurdon Hubbard. It had begun as a trading post where several clerks were employed to handle the large amount of furs brought there for trade by Native Americans. By the late 1820s that business was declining and Hubbard was stocking more goods for the settlers who were beginning to arrive in numbers in Vermilion County.
Clyman stayed in the county and did some surveying, a skill he had learned while in the army. Then in 1831, Governor John Reynolds selected him to mark and improve the Hubbard Trace that extended from Chicago to Vincennes, Ind. It was an opportunity Clyman did not pass up.
He put together a crew and began work on the Trace (now Illinois Route 1) that ran through Danville. Improving the road was challenging in the early 1830s because it was little more than a trail, but Clyman was up to the task. He was paid two dollars a day and was assisted by county resident Stephen Gundy. Workers on the road earned 75 cents a day and contractors were paid 5 to 15 cents per yard for grading.
Clyman took time off from the project to serve in the Black Hawk War in 1832, but returned and completed marking and improving the road. Vermilion County received a map, drawn by Hubbard, and a description of the road in 1833.
Clyman would have had stories to tell as the men sat around the campfires of an evening while working on the Hubbard Trace. He may have told them about participating in William Henry Ashley’s three year expedition to the far west in 1823 with fur trappers. It was an American Fur Trading Company journey that also did a lot of exploring. Clyman reportedly did a little medical work on the trip when he sewed up famed mountain man Jedediah Smith after he was mauled by a grizzly bear.
After he finished the road project he left Vermilion County and continued his wandering. He went to Wisconsin for a few years and then Oregon. His travels ended in California when he was 57 years old. He married 27 year old Hannah McCombs there in 1849. He had escorted her family to California as a guide for a wagon train. The couple had five children but only one survived to adulthood. Clyman farmed the rest of his life and wrote a little poetry. His diaries have proven valuable to researchers of the past.
His eventful life ended on Dec. 27, 1881. He was laid to rest in Tulocay Cemetery in Napa, Calif. There is a fine grave marker with a plaque containing a brief history of Clyman. Hannah joined him there in 1908 in the Clyman plot.
When you travel historic Illinois Route 1, you might give a thought to the man with wanderlust who made those improvements to the old road more than a 190 years ago. James Clyman, surveyor, mountain man, trapper soldier, explorer, farmer, and poet.
He left a handprint on Old Vermilion.