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In June of 1849 Abraham Lincoln received a letter from his despondent friend David Davis, Judge of the 8th Judicial Circuit in Illinois.  Lincoln at that time had just finished his first and only term in the US Congress and was scrambling for an appointment as Commissioner of the General Land Office, a powerful position with a fat salary.  The normally loquacious Davis wrote him a brief letter promising his support, then finished glumly “The untimely death of my poor friend Colton has overwhelmed me with grief.”[1]

Davis had known Colton since the early 1830s, when they were both young men studying law in Lenox, Massachusetts.  Both Davis and Colton moved west, eventually settling in Bloomington, Illinois, where they formed a legal partnership that lasted until 1844, when Colton relocated to St. Louis.  Davis and his wife “loved him as a brother & the death of but few in the world would have afflicted us more,” Davis lamented.[2]  Although Lincoln did not share the close bond with Colton that the distraught Davis did, he nevertheless knew him well, having met him in the courtroom more than twenty times.

Colton was the unlucky victim of a freak accident at the heart of what can only be described as a perfect storm of misfortune that struck St. Louis in mid-May, 1849. 

St. Louis at that time was bustling with activity.  Located at the confluence of the Missouri and Missisippi rivers, St. Louis was the last major urban center where emigrants headed for the California gold rush could stop and get supplies.  All those extra people in the city’s boundaries did nothing to help the problems of poor sanitation and overcrowding that plagued most 19th century metropolises.  In the early spring Asiatic cholera broke out, and by the warm, humid May it had killed more than 4,000 of the town’s citizens.

Wells Colton did not die of anything so pedestrian as cholera.

Adding to the city’s misfortunes, on May 17 the steamboat “White Cloud,” docked near the north business district, caught fire and burned through her moorings.  The floating inferno drifted down river, colliding with and setting fire to 22 other steamboats, plus several flatboats and barges, before coming to rest on the riverbank just opposite Locust Street.

Wells Colton also did not die in a steamboat fire.

The heat from the conflagration that was once the “White Cloud” was so intense that one of the buildings on the levee caught fire.  The flames leapt from building to building, consuming four blocks along the levee before spreading westward.  The fire reached several hundred feet in the air and could be seen for miles as it devoured block after block of wooden buildings.[3]

Wells Colton did not die in the fire on land, either.

No, Wells Colton was simply out for a stroll with a friend from the office and had the misfortune to walk right past a house that was being blown up to try to contain the fire.  A large fragment of wood struck him “between the point of his shoulder & his neck with such force as to Splinter his collar bone making a hole as large as your first which reached to his lungs.”[4]

Of course the wound was fatal, but poor Colton had no idea at first that he was done for.  He sent Davis a heartbreakingly pathetic letter on Monday the 20th of May.  Because his dominant left hand was all but useless, he wrote with his right hand, the handwriting was a laborious scrawl, the page torn roughly from the tablet.  Nevertheless, Colton was either unwilling or unable to grasp the gravity of his situation and remained stubbornly optimistic that he would survive, writing Davis that he expected “to be bed fast for many weeks.”  He summed up with the last and greatest understatement of his life: “A hard lick.”
He solidered on for three more days, but by Thursday it became cler to all that his lungs were damanged to the point where he could hardly breathe.  A visiting friend "saw too plainly that all was over with him," but Colton himself was not willing to believe that he would die until the following morning.  "You never saw a man who was so unwilling to give up this world," his friend observed, "he said to me just before his death he could hardly realize that he had to part from me, that it did not seem to him like he was really going to die although he knew he could not live."  When the end finally came on Friday morning, May 24, 1849, Colton "died easy, without a Struggle."[5]   

1David Davis to Abraham Lincoln, 6 June 1849, Davis Family Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL.
2 David Davis to Julius Rockwell, 26 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.
3Thomas Lynch, The Volunteer Fire Department of St. Louis, 1819- 1859, (St. Louis: R. & T.A. Ennis, 1880), 85-87.
4 David Davis to Julius Rockwell, 26 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.
5W.H. Barksdale to David Davis, 2 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.

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