You got me curious, as I have never heard of Isaac Galland, Massac, etc. So I spent too much time digging around. I took some notes.
newspaperDr. Isaac Galland, an energetic pioneer, had brought his family across the river from Illinois sometime in 1829. At Ahwipetuk he built a cabin and prepared to make his home there. Durig the following year other settlers arrived. Former friends and relatives cleared small patches in the foret and raised log cabins. Issac R. Campbell, James and Samuel Brierly, W. P. Smith, Colonel Dedman and Abel Galland.
Across the river at the village of Commerce (later Nauvoo), Dr. Galland found a young man who willing to be a schoolmaster for a few weeks. And so Berryman Jennings was hired to teach the first school in Iowa.
Berryman Jennings set out from the Galland home to start his school. With him went Eliza, David and Washington Galland.
It is not known whether all the pupils come to school on the first day. At some time during the first term, which lasted three month, seven boys and a girl were present. The youngest was six years old and the oldest sixteen. Besides the Galland children, there were James Campbell, Tolliver Dedman, James Dedman, Thomas Brierly and George Kinney.
newspaperAfter this building had passed out of use as a school house Samuel Brierly built a story and a half hewed log dwelling house using the old school house as a kitchen. Brierly afterward moved onto a farm about two miles from town. His old dwelling house was afterward used as a place for holding religious services and for school taught by the Rev. Addis, a Campbelite preacher. This was sometime in the 40’s.
At the conclusion of his studies [Jennings] with Dr. Galland, Dr.Jennings located in the northeast part of Lee county where he practiced for a few years, removing to Oregon territory in the early 50’s where he ingaged in steamboat navigation on the bays and rivers of that country ad in mining, amassing a considerable fortune. He was an ardent Mason and was affiliated with lodges at Keokuk and Ft. Madison. After his removal to Oregon he became the first grand master upon the organization of the grand lodge of Oregan A.F. & A. M.
It [Ahwipetuk] was a sparse settlement, too, as is attest by the following extrt from a speech delivered before the Lee County Old Settlers’ association in 1874 by Captain J. W. Campbell:
Forty-five years ago this coming October, my father moved from the present site of Nauvoo, and settled four miles below on the west bank of the river at Ah-wi-pe-tck (which translated from the Indian dialect to our tongue, means ‘beginning of cascades’) on the Sauk and Fox reservation. It is now called Nashville, (since changed to Galland), and almost every association in connection with this place remains still fresh in my memory, although I was but five years old.
“The settlement consisted of four houses, which were occupied by Dr. Isaac Galland, James and Samuel Brierly, Walmart. P. Smith and my father, another log house on top of the hill, near the site of the present cemetery, occupied by Abel Galland and his family.
NewspaperThe prophet had just escaped from “the intoxicated guards” as he was being transferred from Liberty Jail to the Boone County Jail in Missouri in early 1839. He arrived a few days later at Quincy, Ill., and in company with others who escaped with him, joined their families and friends.
From here the prophet was faced with the immediate need of finding another place of gathering for “his scattered and persecuted people.”
Hearing of a large tract of land for sale about 40 miles northward at Commerce, Ill. He and a part of Church officers decided to purchase the Hugh White tract of 135 acres and the Dr. Isaac Galland tract, just west of the White purchase.
At the time of the purchase one stone house and three log houses were found in this vicinity of the “literal wilderness.”
“Commerce” the prophet wrote “was so unhealthful, few could live there; but believing it might becom a healthful place by the blessing of heaven to the Saints, and no more eligible place presenting itself, I considered it wisdom to make an attempt to build up a city.”
Later, on July 3, 1839, the Prophet baptized Dr. Galland, ‘confirmed him a member and two hours later ordained him an Elder.
NewspaperRe: Montrose Fort , Iowa
As director of the Mormon Trails Visitors Center in Montrose, Foley said the thousand of visitors he receives each year want to know where the fort was located largely because they have ancestors who lived at the fort until they were able to build homes in Nauvoo, Il.
And some famous names spent time in and around the fort, including Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, Capt. Nathan Boone (son of Daniel Boone), Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff and Elijah Fordham, David Kilborn (first designer of Montrose), Dr. Isaac Galland (Galland land offices in the fort), and Alanson Ripley (LDS Bishop, land surveyor, and second designer of Montrose).
Wikipedia
Cave-In-Rock is a village in Hardin County, Illinois, United States. Its principal feature and attraction is nearby Cave-In-Rock, on the banks of the Ohio River. Cave-in-Rock was originally a stronghold for outlaws including; river pirates and highwaymen, Samuel Mason and James Ford, tavern owner/highwayman, Isaiah L. Potts, serial killers/bandits, the Harpe Brothers, counterfeiters, Philip Alston, Peter Alston, John Duff, Eson Bigsby, and the Sturdivant Gang, and the post-Civil War bandit, Logan Belt.
NewspaperThe last specimen of this particular lot is Aden Wells, now in jail for killing Stephen Files, and destined either to spend a life residence at the Indianna penitentiary, or, in the classic language of the Wabash, to “stand on nothing, look up a rope and kick at the United States.”
In the Wells family, of which he is the last, the student of social science may find a fair type of all the “Massac gang” and the “Murrill set,” the robbers of the Cave in-the-rock and all the “Old Nauvoo set, which included John Lon, Aarot Long, Granville Young, Jack Reddin, Bill Hickman and many more whose deeds made them noted from Lonisville to Salt Lake City.
The Wells family were mongrels – uniting the blood of three reaces. The ancestor was a flat boatman, whiate, a native of the Big Sandy region of Kentucky, and a runner on the Ohio and Mississippi in the days when boatmen generally were a…
GenforumThe Sturdivant Gang ran the counterfeiting operations in the Ohio Valley region of southeastern Illinois in the late 1810s and early 1820s until they were broken up. It is quite possible Galland's belonged to this group. The Sturdivant's fort was located at what's now Rosiclare, Illinois, in Hardin County, but then a part of Pope County.
Ford's description of the outlaws as an "ancient colony" is fitting as we find family connections between the outlaws of the 1840s with those of the 1820s and even 1790s.
Wikipedia – sturdivant gang
The Sturdivant Gang was a multi-generational group of counterfeiters whose criminal activities took place over a 50 year period from Colonial Connecticut to the Illinois frontier. Although they did not follow the same frontier settlement pattern as most of the "Ancient Colony of Horse-Thieves, Counterfeiters and Robbers".
By the 1810s third-generation counterfeiter Roswell S. Sturdivant led the gang that was based partially at Manville Ferry in St. Clair County, Illinois (modern-day New Athens) as well as at Sturdivant Fort in what was then in Pope County, Illinois (and is now in Rosiclare, Hardin County, Illinois).
Although they didn't base their operations at Cave-in-Rock, they are considered part of the second wave of outlaws associated the cave. Their fort downriver sat on a bluff that is visible from Cave-in-Rock Bluff. They were contemporaries with James Ford and the Ford's Ferry Gang.
The gang was often confused with John Duff's counterfeiting operations by 19th and early 20th Century historians.
Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction -Pope Benedict XVI
So a name-matching might not work well.