fort and making him guilty by association for allowing counterfeiting to take place. Ford was also the captain of a company of the Illinois Territorial Militia from July 15, 1811, to August 8, 1811. Ford was later promoted to major, being one of two such military ranks available in the 4th Regiment of Militia in the Illinois Territory on November 28, 1811. James Steele, Sr. also spelled Steel, who had been a private in Ford's Company, succeeded him as captain of the Grand Pierre militia. In the War of 1812, Steele served as a private in Captain John Cochran's company of the 1st Regiment of Illinois (Territorial) Militia, under the command of Captain Absolem Cox, at Kaskaskia on September 3, 1812. The residency of James Steele was recorded in the first Illinois State Census in 1818 and the 1820 U.S. Census as living in Pope County, Illinois, now present-day Hardin County, Illinois. At the time the state and federal censuses were conducted, Steele was a criminal member of the Sturdivant Gang of counterfeiters which operated in the Rosiclare area of Hardin County from the 1810s to 1820s. Property holdings James Ford was a substantial land owner, who owned a 500-acre plantation at his home in Tolu, Kentucky, as well as holding numerous other properties on the Kentucky and Illinois sides of the Ohio River. Through his first wife's family, he secured the rights to the Miles Ferry, which soon became known as Ford's Ferry, though this is not the infamous one he operated later, upriver from Cave-in-Rock, called Ferry Ohio. Through his second marriage, he secured control of the Frazier Salt Works, at the Lower Lick Great Salt Springs, in the Illinois Salines in Gallatin County, Illinois, during the late 1820s. Slave-holding James Ford owned a considerable number of slaves in Kentucky. He leased out his slaves for saltmaking operations under a contract with the U.S. government at the U.S. Saline, near Equality, Illinois. The influence of James Ford was felt as far away as Springfield, Illinois, which can be attested to in the Sangamo Journal newspaper, where he ran a fugitive slave notice, with detailed physical descriptions of two runaway slaves he owned. The cruel and ruthless treatment Ford showed toward his slaves was told in numerous stories many true and untrue. In one tale, Ford was alleged to have punished one of his slaves by using a vise