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of the new Missouri Territory. When Edward arrived in the frontier outpost of St. Louis, Missouri was seven years away from statehood. Bates saw no buildings or homes along the riverbank, only battered canoes and flatboats chafing at their moorings. Some 2,500 villagers dwelt predominantly in primitive cabins or single-story wooden houses. When he walked down Third Street to the Market, he recalled, “all was in commotion: a stranger had come from the States! He was ‘feted’ and followed by young and old, the girls looking at him as one of his own town lasses, in Virginia, would have regarded an elk or a buffalo!”

With help from his brother, Bates secured a position reading law with Rufus Easton, a distinguished frontier lawyer who had served as a territorial judge and delegate to Congress. “After years of family and personal insecurity,” Bates’s biographer Marvin Cain writes, “he at last had a stable situation through which he could achieve the ambition that burned brightly in him.” Mentored by his older brother Frederick, the lawyer Easton, and a close circle of St. Louis colleagues, Bates, too, passed his bar examination after two years of study and instantly plunged into practice. Lawyers were in high demand on the rapidly settling frontier.

The economic and professional prospects were so promising in St. Louis that the Bates brothers determined to bring the rest of their family there. Edward returned to Virginia to sell his father’s estate, auction off any family slaves he would not transport to Missouri, and arrange to escort his mother and his older sister Margaret on the long overland journey. “The slaves sold pretty well,” he boasted to Frederick, “a young woman at $537 and a boy child 5 years old at $290!” As for the land, he expected to realize about $20,000, which would allow the family to relocate west “quite full-handed.”

Edward’s attempts to settle family affairs in Virginia dragged on, complicated by the death of his brother Tarleton, a fervent Jeffersonian, killed in a duel with a Federalist. “I am ashamed to say I am still in Goochland,” he wrote Frederick in June 1818, nearly a year after he had left St. Louis; it is “my misfortune rather than my fault for I am the greatest sufferer by the delay.” Finally, with his female relatives ensconced in a carriage and more than twenty slaves following on horseback and on foot, the little party set forth on an exasperating, difficult expedition. “In those days,” one of Bates’s friends later recalled, “there were no boats on the Western rivers, and no roads in the country.” To cross the wilds of Illinois and Indiana, a guide was necessary. The slow pace caused Bates to worry that Frederick would think him “a lazy or squandering fellow.” He explained that if accompanied only by his family, he could have reached St. Louis “in a tenth part of the time & with 1/4 of the trouble and expense—the slaves have been the greatest objects of my embarrassment.” The journey did have benefits, he reported: “Mother & Sister are more active, more healthy & more cheerful than when they started. They bear the fatigues of hot dry traveling surprisingly.” And once they reached St. Louis, Bates assured his brother, he would “make up in comfort & satisfaction for the great suspense and anxiety I must have occasioned you.”

As he again settled into the practice of law in St. Louis, the twenty-five-year-old Bates fully appreciated the advantages gained by his older brother’s prominence in the community. In a fulsome letter, he expressed fervent gratitude to his “friend and benefactor,” realizing that Fred’s “public reputation” as well as his “private wealth & influence” would greatly enhance his own standing. His brother also introduced him to the leading figures of St. Louis—including the famed explorer William Clark, now governor of the Missouri Territory; Thomas Hart Benton, editor of the Missouri Enquirer; and David Barton, speaker of the territorial legislature and the guiding hand behind Missouri’s drive for statehood. Before long, he found himself in a partnership with Joshua Barton,