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disappointed,” Moses wrote. “Remember, my dear son, that the present is the moment to lay the foundation for your future greatness in life, that much money must be expended before your education is finished, and that time lost can never be recalled.” On Stephen would rest responsibility for the family. “I hope to God I shall be spared until I see you arrive at an age to give protection to your dear mother and sister and little brother Elijah Brown. Remember that to you they will look for protection should it so happen that my life should be shortened. Keep in mind that this may happen.”
    What the eleven-year-old made of this counsel is difficult to know; that he saved the letter suggests he took it at least partly to heart. And when, after three years, his tutors declared him ready for college, he accepted his father’s decision for him to attend Transylvania University in Kentucky, rather than Yale, as his mother desired. The cash flow from the lead mines was diminishing, and the college in Lexington was cheaper than Yale. At Transylvania Stephen handled himself in an “exemplary and praiseworthy manner,” according to his preceptors. But his higher education was cut short after a year and a half. The lead business had gone from bad to worse, and the mine needed new investors. Moses had to travel east to find them; Stephen must come home and manage the operation in Moses’ absence.
    Sixteen was hardly too young to start a career in those days, although it wasn’t the career Stephen had envisioned. He wanted to be a lawyer and hoped to apprentice for the profession. But for now the lead mines—that is, Moses—called, and Stephen couldn’t refuse. He worked at headquarters until, during the summer of 1811, Moses consigned him a cargo of lead to float to New Orleans. Troubles delayed the departure: Stephen contracted malaria, and then a large portion of the downstream population caught yellow fever. Winter brought the yellow fever under control, as it usually did, but that winter also brought something quite extraordinary for the Mississippi Valley: a series of very large earthquakes. The tremors were centered southwest of New Madrid in southern Missouri, yet were so strong they rang church bells in Boston. They also rerouted the Mississippi River and threw river traffic into a horrible tangle.
    By the time Stephen got away, in April 1812, the river was spring full and the ride daunting. “This is one of the worst eddies in the river and ought carefully to be guarded against by hugging the left shore very close,” Stephen wrote of a stretch above Cape Girardeau, in a journal he kept of the voyage. He managed to escape the eddies and guide his barge nearly to New Orleans, only to strike a sandbank almost within sight of the Crescent City. The barge started taking on water and, predictably for a box filled with lead, sank.
    It might have remained on the river bottom had Congress not recently declared war against Britain. The local price for lead plunged as cargoes backed up on the docks, but Stephen guessed that the war would push the price higher. “Sheet lead will sell well, and also shot,” he told Moses. Accordingly he returned upriver to the site of the sinking and, after considerable effort, raised most of the lead.
    The trouble and expense went to naught. Stephen’s prediction about the demand for lead proved wrong, and after several weeks in New Orleans without finding a buyer, he turned north for home.
    The nineteen-year-old was a likely candidate for military service against the British and their Indian allies, and he enlisted. On account of his business experience—and perhaps, too, on account of his comparatively delicate appearance—he was made quartermaster of his regiment in the territorial volunteers. He learned what moving men and animals through unsettled country required: how an army marches on its stomach but sleeps on its