James Depew was interviewed by the Pantagraph in 1908 when he was 82 years old, a retired old McLean County settler living with his children in Elgin, Illinois. He opined that he expected to live to a hundred years old, because he was feeling very young and spry in his old age.
He related how his family came to McLean County in 1835 to farm land owned by his uncle, Benjamin Depew. He was just a small boy but he remembered learning to drive four or six yoke of oxen to break the prairie. The yokes were homemade affairs made of buckeye wood and the plows of oak. The plow maker was his uncle, Benjamin Depew. His family farmed 240 acres three miles south of Bloomington for Benjamin and paid him one third of all the crops in rent. At that time actual money was scarce and debts were paid in trade. Depew recalled the "red roots" of a small prairie shrub that could stop a large team of oxen in their tracks while plowing. (The oxen in this photo are McLean County oxen, but from a much later period.)
James Depew fought in the Mexican War in the company of Captain Duncan, who captured Santa Ana. James was not there for the culminating act because he was wounded and taken to the hospital during the capture. He wore a pin made of Mexican cannons the rest of his life to remember those exploits. When the Civil War began, James Depew once again enlisted -- in the 5th Illinois Cavalry. He believed that he was the last of his company in the Mexican War to be alive.
After the war he returned to McLean County and worked as a carpenter until he was seventy-one years old. He even worked as a Bloomington police officer for two years.
The old settlers were tough men who worked hard into their golden years and adventurous men who galloped off to Mexico for glory or California for gold. They fought for the Union and then came home and worked forty more years of hard physical labor.