John Frink and Martin Walker: Stagecoach kings of the old Northwest

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2002 by Matile, Roger

However, Walker, too apparently engaged in some management activities. In Grubb v. John Frink & Company, an 1852 personal injury lawsuit against the company (Abraham Lincoln was the plaintiff's attorney) filed in Sangamon County Circuit Court, stagecoach driver William Danner testified that he had "no acquaintance with Mr. Frink having never seen him, have a slight acquaintance with Mr. Walker, have seen him at Beardstown & at Rushville."19

Whatever their individual responsibilities, starting in June of 1840, Frink and Walker were partners. The company, although formally named Frink, Walker & Company, was popularly known throughout the Midwest as simply Frink & Walker. The company operated from their main stage depot at the southwest corner of Dearborn and Clark streets in Chicago. Frink & Walker also maintained stagecoach storage sheds, where repairs were also done on coaches and where veterinarians treated horses, at the northwest corner of Wabash and Randolph streets.20

Frink, the entrepreneurial innovator, realized that steamboats were logical extensions of the company's transport of mail and passengers. Early in the company's history, he was responsible for buying the Frontier, described as "a small steamer," which the company used to link its stage line station at Peru with Peoria. Frink also invested in the construction of two other steamers on the Illinois River, the Chicago and the Governor Briggs..21

An advertisement in the July 17, 1840 Illinois Free Trader, published at Ottawa, announced that Frink & Walker stages connected with the Frontier at Peru for regular packet service to Peoria. There, larger steamboats carried passengers on to St. Louis. The company's steamboat acquisition allowed it to offer faster and undoubtedly more comfortable service down the Illinois River to Peoria and then on to St. Louis than by traveling by stage alone. However, the overland route from Peru all the way to St. Louis was also apparently maintained to take into account periods of low water and winter ice that hindered or prevented steam boat traffic.22

Contemporary accounts of Frink and his activities suggest he was one of the more interesting and important-if lesser-known-characters in northern Illinois economic and transportation history. He was by all accounts uninhibited and headstrong, and could be vindictive to his enemies-all characteristics that were often admired during the state's frontier era.23

In an 1874 letter to John Dixon,24 Elihu Washburne25 recalled that Frink "was a Massachusetts man-a man of strong mind, wonderful natural intelligence, indomitable will, great sagacity, and a remarkable knowledge of human nature. I never knew a man who could so readily and accurately take the measure of another man."26 Washburne also observed that Frink, a sharp businessman, was able to keep his political passions separated from business matters. He noted that while Frink was a Whig, he was "careful in expressing his opinions and subordinating politics to stageing," during the 1830s when Jacksonian Democrats controlled contracting for the nation's mail delivery.27