Background
James was born in 1782, in Maryland, the son of Joseph Austin and Elizabeth (Hosten) James. In 1803 the family moved to Illinois and four years later to Florissant, Missouri, near St. Louis. Nothing is known of James's youth.
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Thomas James
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In 1809 James accompanied the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company's first and most important expedition up the river. At Fort Mandan he quarreled with Lisa and quit the company, but later, at Fort Raymond, joined Henry's detachment for the first organized invasion of the hostile Blackfeet region. On the abandonment of the venture he returned to St. Louis in August 1810. James spent two years in Pennsylvania, where he married, and for the following two years was engaged in river trade and transport between St. Louis and Pittsburgh. In 1815, at Harrisonville, Illinois, he opened a branch store for McKnight & Brady of St. Louis, which he conducted for several years. Early in 1821 the return from New Mexico of several members of the Robert McKnight trading party of 1812, all of whom had been imprisoned by the Spanish authorities for nine years, prompted him and John McKnight to organize an expedition for Santa Fe. Leaving in May, proceeding by way of the Mississippi, the Arkansas, and the North Fork of the Canadian, and undergoing extreme hardships and many perils in the Comanche country, they arrived on December 1. James asserts that he was the first American trader to reach Santa Fe after the revolution, but if the dates given by himself and William Becknell are correct, the latter was two weeks ahead of him. In June 1822, the party, with Robert McKnight, whose brother had found him in Durango, joined the Glenn-Fowler party and returned. Late in the year James and the McKnights took a trading party into the Comanche country, in the present Oklahoma, but after many disasters, including the death of John McKnight, they made their way back in 1824. For some years James operated a mill in Monroe County, Illinois, at what became known as James' Mills and later Monroe City. He served two terms in the legislature (1825-1828); in 1825 he was made a general of militia; in 1827 was appointed postmaster of James' Mills, a place he retained till his death, and in the Black Hawk War commanded a spy battalion. He died at Monroe City in December of 1847. In the year before his death he published in book form the story of his frontier experiences (Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans, Waterloo, Illionis, 1846), edited, probably written, by a local teacher-law-yer, Nathaniel Niles. The book was, however, immediately suppressed and most of the copies were destroyed. A copy found about 1909 was reprinted by the Missouri Historical Society in 1916, with annotations and additions by Judge Walter B. Douglas.
Achievements
Personality
James was six feet tall and of powerful frame. His portrait in the Douglas volume reveals intelligence, will, and candor, and refutes an unfriendly characterization of him as "an ordinary looking man. "
