Silas Dinsmoor was one of the more colorful members of the Dinsmore clan. Unlike some of his brothers, Silas chose to keep the spelling of his last name in line with his ancestors. In the postscript to a letter to his brother in 1807, he wrote, “I am not ashamed that I am my father’s son, and I will wear the name he gave me in honour of his memory.”1 Silas was born in Windham, New Hampshire on September 26, 1766, the son of John and Martha McKeen Dinsmoor. Out of eleven children, Silas was the second youngest. The family was very patriotic as evidenced by the service of his father in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and in Silas’ own record of service for the government. Thomas, his youngest son, described him as having reddish hair and bright blue eyes. He was tall and quite strong, though not stocky. His voice was clear and his speech retained a bit of the Scottish brogue of his father and grandfather, both of whom were Scotch-Irish immigrants.2 Silas was proud of his heritage, but also proud of the United States of America, the country whose birth he witnessed as a child.

Although little is known of Silas’ childhood, his letters make it clear that he remained close to his older brother, John, who was the father of James Dinsmore, and to his younger brother, Billy. He also stayed in touch with many of his numerous nephews and nieces and offered them a place to stay when they were in need. Because his family was not very wealthy, Silas had to work his way through Dartmouth College. When he graduated, he acquired a teaching position at Atkinson Academy, near Windham, where he experimented with teaching girls and boys Logic, Greek, and Rhetoric – subjects usually only taught to boys at the time. Two years later, Silas traveled to the nation’s capital, Philadelphia, in the hopes of finding a job with the government. He received an appointment to the Army Corps of Engineers but when the Government offered to make him an Agent for the Cherokee, Silas quickly accepted. He moved to Tellico Plains in Tennessee and remained in the South for the next four years.

He evidently found some aspects of his new position satisfying, like the task of “civilizing” the Native Americans. At the time, it was felt by the United States government that if the Native Americans could only learn to live like “civilized” European Americans, peaceful relations would result. Of course, many Americans who accepted this remedy believed that the Indians’ way of living was somehow inferior and thus incompatible with European civilization. Silas Dinsmoor was among this group and he complained that he was living in “the land of barbarism.” He also wrote of his “pleasure at seeing the Cherokees emerge in degree from a State of uncultivated nature to that of herdsmen, husbandmen & manufacturers....”3 On the other hand, he did recognize that he was dealing with intelligent and proud people. When treating with the Native Americans for the sale of land to the government, Silas noted that “the Cherokees know the worth of their land too well to sell it for a song or anything under the value.”4

His term at the agency expired in 1798 and Silas again traveled to Philadelphia in hopes of another appointment, spending Christmas at Mt. Vernon with George Washington on his way. A stint with the United States Navy on the USS George Washington took him on an exciting assignment to Algiers to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates and then on to Constantinople and when he returned, he was assigned to the Choctaw Agency where he would be stationed in Washington, Mississippi Territory, near the city of Natchez. Silas’ first years at the Choctaw Agency were rather quiet and he wrote little about his work with the Indians. It was during this time, though, that the Treaty of Mount Dexter was agreed upon and signed – a treaty in which the Choctaw gave up about four million acres at $0.02 per acre. Thomas Jefferson was not entirely pleased with the Treaty of Mt. Dexter, though, because he had wanted the best of the Choctaw land – that lying on the Mississippi River – which the Indians refused to sell. Once again, Silas was faced with Native Americans who were not nearly as ignorant as the government wished they were.5

When the ink had barely dried on the treaty, Silas finally received permission to leave the Agency to visit his family in New Hampshire. He had kept in touch with some of his former female students at Atkinson, but Mary Gordon had made a particularly strong impression. He eventually convinced her to marry him but it was not easy – her parents and friends were wary of her having to follow her husband down into Indian territory. Silas was almost forty years old and Mary was eleven years his junior when they married in the summer of 1806. When it was time for Silas to return south, Mary was pregnant and it was decided that she should stay longer in New Hampshire until he could make a decent home for her. Upon receiving the news of the birth of a son, Silas wrote to his wife, “May he inherit all his mothers virtues uncontaminated by his father’s foibles, may he be useful while in life & his end be peace!” Very aware of the possibility that the infant might die while young, he cautioned her to “enjoy him as a blessing with gratitude & be prepared to resign him when called for.” 6

His return to Mississippi coincided with the leaking of the Aaron Burr conspiracy. Since Silas knew both Burr and his accomplice, James Wilkerson, he had to testify at the trial. By the time that whole episode ended, he was able to collect his family and bring Mary and his son down to his Agency house. Although Mary was often described as being weak or an invalid, she had several more children; unhappily few of them grew to adulthood. Seven children were born, only two survived to the age of twenty – Silas G. and Thomas. Owning at least two plots of land in the area, Silas purchased approximately eight enslaved African Americans to do the housework and farm labor for his family, but little is known about them except for Winny who worked closely under the supervision of Mary and took care of the young children.

In 1813, Silas was recalled to Washington and lost his job at the agency. The problems began in 1811, when some Natchez planters complained to him about enslaved African Americans either running away or being stolen by men heading north on the Natchez Trace. Silas considered it his duty to stop this thievery and insisted on enforcing an old law that required slaveholders to carry papers with them proving ownership. This irked a lot of men from Tennessee who considered themselves above having to back up their gentleman’s word with proof, including Andrew Jackson, and the latter did not hesitate to take out his frustrations on the War Department. As a result, Silas was cautioned by his superiors not to interfere with men known to be gentlemen. With more than a hint of sarcasm and as an intended insult to the Tennesseans, he begged his superior, “not [to] impose on me the unpleasant task of discriminating between the exterior appearance and the reality of a gentleman.” 7

The stubborn agent refused to back down in the face of his naysayers, and he was replaced. Taking his family to Alabama, Silas became the Principal Surveyor for the Land Office in New Orleans. Once again, personal enmity interfered with his duties and, after losing his job, he was forced to appeal directly to politicians in Washington, D.C. to help him reclaim his lost wages and, more importantly, to restore his reputation. His financial situation precarious, he mortgaged his enslaved African Americans and eventually sold his land in Mississippi, but these moves did not ease his situation. In 1826 he traveled to the nation’s capital to argue his case. While he was gone, his seventeen-year-old son, Gordon, died of the yellow fever, and a distraught Mary closed up their house and followed her husband east to stay with her sister. The Great Mobile Fire, which swept through the city that summer, consumed most of the buildings, including the bank where Silas and Mary had stored their valuables. A silver sword he had received from George Washington in 1798 melted and all of his journals and private papers were burned.

In 1829, when Silas finally received his money from the Government Land Office, he took Mary and Thomas to Cincinnati, where they rented a home in the Mill Creek Valley. His oldest son, Silas G., met the family and found a mercantile job in the city. This is where the family was when his James and Martha Dinsmore stopped to visit on their wedding trip. Some time after 1831 Silas moved his family to a plot of land he bought in Belleview Bottoms, Kentucky, on the Ohio River in Boone County. They lived in a log cabin and farmed on about 130 acres that included an island in the middle of the river. Although he is listed as having ten enslaved African Americans in the 1840 slave schedules, by 1844 he claimed only one and by the next year he had none, so it is likely that Thomas did most of the farming.8

From his farm in Kentucky, Silas wrote many letters to his nephew, James, and his family, who were then living in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. A witty and amusing letter writer, he tried to convince James that Kentucky was the best place to live. By 1837, he though he had found the perfect spot for his nephew’s family nearby and wrote to James, describing the land as “Arcadian” and “just fit for shepherds.”9 James was won over by the land, his uncle, and his own dream of a tranquil life and by 1842, he and his family were permanently installed in their new home only a mile away from Uncle Silas’ family. On the occasion of Silas’ 78th birthday, James and Martha had a large picnic on their front lawn and invited all their neighbors from miles around. One can imagine that the homemade wine and cider were flowing freely and a good many stories were being told. Less than three years later, on June 17, 1847, Silas died. Dinsmore family legend states that when he fell ill, he and Mary stayed at James’ house where he could be more easily nursed. He was buried on a high hill above his nephew’s house, overlooking the Ohio River. His was the first known grave in what would later become the Dinsmore family graveyard. Silas or Mary chose the epitaph for his tombstone from the Book of Psalms. It reads, “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace.”

Silas Dinsmoor certainly did not die a wealthy man, but he had the satisfaction of being able to look back on a life of adventure, love, and loss, knowing that to the end he never sacrificed his integrity for anything. On his sixtieth birthday he had written to his wife, “Through how many & varied scenes have I passed? In poverty & confidence, in the city & the Wilderness, in Civil & savage society, on sea & on land, in all the quarters of the earth, in war & in peace! The Lord has been my preserver.”10 He was respected by many who knew him and he outlived all of his brothers and sisters and five of his children.

¹ Silas Dinsmoor to John Dinsmore, 27 May 1807.
² Evabeth Miller Kienast, “The Story of Big Bear, Silas Dinsmoor, 1766-1847” (unpublished, 1989), 41.
³ Silas Dinsmoor to John Dinsmore, 16 July 1798.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ David A. Bagwell, “The Treaty of Mount Dexter of 1805 and the Old Indian Treaty Boundary Line of 1809” (unpublished, 2001), 3-5.
⁶ Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Dinsmoor, 12 June 1807.
⁷ Silas Dinsmoor to W. Eustis, 13 November 1811.
⁸ Boone County Tax Assessments, 1844, 1845.
⁹ Silas Dinsmoor to James Dinsmore, 24 October 1837.
¹⁰ Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, 26 September 1826.