He fought with a future president and to expand the West

By Gale Metcalf for Senior Times

It is 840 miles or so as the crow flies between the borders of Washington state and Missouri, but close enough one of Missouri’s most storied citizens to have a Washington county named for him. Benton County.

Created in 1905, the county name honors Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri’s first United States senator and a man who had one of history’s most notorious fistfights with a future president.

The fight left Andrew Jackson with a gunshot wound to the arm and Benton lying at the base of a flight of stairs where he had been thrown head first during the brawl.

But in his lifetime, Benton championed the Pacific Northwest, pushed for the inclusion of the western territories into America’s domain, and described the land that would become Benton County as comprising “a clear sky, pure air, and a supreme salubrity.”

He was the father-in-law of noted explorer, military officer and U.S. Sen. John C. Fremont.

Born in 1782 in Orange County, North Carolina, he began studying law as a young man but was called to take over family affairs after his father passed away. It led him to run 40,000 acres of bequeathed land outside of Nashville, Tennessee, where he met perhaps the state’s most prominent citizen, Jackson.

When the War of 1812 broke out, Jackson, liking what he saw in

Benton, gave him a rank of lieutenant colonel and named him an aidede-camp.

It wasn’t long after that when Benton learned that Jackson had made insulting remarks about his brother, Jesse.

The two hot-tempered men were soon in a bitter quarrel. Jackson even made it publicly known he would “horse-whip Benton.”

They came to blows in Nashville’s City Hotel, with several combatants involved. Jackson took a bullet in the arm, reportedly fired by Jesse Benton, and men backing Jackson threw Thomas Hart Benton down the stairs.

As Jackson was receiving medical attention, Benton seized the general’s sword, went into the street and broke it over one knee in ceremonious triumph, even though his own body had taken a terrific beating. He and his brother, thinking prudently, retreated to Missouri.

Ironically, Benton, the first man to serve 30 years in the U.S. Senate, became a close ally of Jackson, who was elected president in 1828 and re-elected in 1932. They crusaded against eastern capitalists and monopolies.

Missouri was a historic turning point in his life. When Benton was just 33, he began practicing law in St. Louis, became involved in politics and was editor of The Missouri Enquirer newspaper.

His greatest passion became development of the West, championing such causes as opening the

Oregon and the Santa Fe trails, interior highways, the pony express, the telegraph and transcontinental railroads.

He wanted Texas annexed and wanted a settlement of the Canadian-U.S. border dispute in terms favorable to the U.S. He overcame obstacles that didn’t meet his preference and in 1846 the present boundaries met with his approval. He was a force in achieving today’s boundaries.

Benton fervently believed in the potential of the land that had become part of the U.S.

On May 22, 1946, standing on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Benton described the area between the mouths of the Snake and Yakima rivers that would one day carry his name as a county in Washington state.

Courtesy Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum sombre aspect of the gloomy artemisia – and desolate from volcanic rocks, through the chasms of which plunge the headlong streams.”

Thomas Hart Benton, for whom Benton County is named. This photo is a circa 1850 daguerreotype, an image made from an early photographic process.

“In some respects it is a desert –barren of wood – sprinkled with sandy plains – melancholy under the

“This desert has its redeeming