Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Allen was an early Iowa banker who built Terrace Hill, the Iowa governor’s mansion, in 1869, before business failures forced him to sell it to Frederick M. Hubbell in 1884.

Frank Allen was the nephew of Capt. James Allen, the dragoon leader who selected the location of modern-day Des Moines in 1843.

Iowa historian David Wiggins chronicled the founding of Des Moines in his 2002 book “The Rise of the Allens: Two Soldiers & the Master of Terrace Hill.”

Capt. Allen and his nephew were never close. James graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1829, the year Frank was born. When James first set foot on Des Moines soil, Frank was 14 and an orphan, selling peaches on his grandparents’ farm in Indiana.

But according to Wiggins, the soldier’s career paved the way for his nephew’s success.

James Allen graduated in the same West Point class as Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and like Lee, Allen studied engineering and logistics, two military skills that were also essential for city building.

Allen’s first significant assignment was an 80-day expedition in 1832 to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, for which he kept a Lewis-and-Clark style journal. His reporting impressed superiors, who assigned Allen to help with a harbor project at Chicago, then a backwater community with grand plans.

The Chicago posting lasted five years, with Allen witnessing the birth of the commerce that would drive the city, and eventually leading efforts to create a seaport by extending a dock from the shorefront into Lake Michigan.

During those years, Allen saw fellow officers profit from their public positions, and he did so, too. Technically, such dealings were wrong, but they were widely practiced at the time, Wiggins wrote.

Allen and other officers even participated in land-flipping schemes. But they were undone by the Panic of 1837, the recession triggered by President Andrew Jackson’s elimination of the nation’s central bank.

With Chicago battling recession, Allen was reassigned to the removal of Native Americans who were living west of the Mississippi River. He wound up in Iowa in 1842, where indigenous Sac and Fox tribes were forced to sell their homelands to the U.S. government and agreed to leave at the end of three years.

The Des Moines River at the time was expected to become a major commercial artery, and Allen was ordered to establish a fort farther north than Fort Sanford near present-day Ottumwa.

After a brief exploration, he chose the juncture of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, although a superior, Col. Stephen Kearny, had earlier “reached the conclusion it was unfit” for a fort, according to an “Annals of Iowa” article written in 1943.

Allen suggested calling it “Fort Raccoon” or “Fort Iowa,” but Gen. Winfield Scott said neither name was sufficiently dignified and “directed the name be Fort Des Moines.”

On May 20, 1843, Allen, 47 soldiers, supplies and several Native Americans, including Chief Keokuk, arrived at the forks on the steamboat Agatha. “The boat turned up the Raccoon River … and unloaded on its north bank,” according to the “Annals of Iowa” article.

Allen’s fort had none of the trappings of traditional military enclosures – no parapets, no gates – only a series of log cabins and huts arrayed along the strip of land between the two rivers.

“Keokuk located his tribe on the west side of the Des Moines River,” where a trading post was soon established and flourished until 1845, when the Native Americans were marched out of Iowa.

Capt. Allen left Fort Des Moines in 1846, to fight in the Mexican-American War, but died en route of “congestive fever,” according to Wiggins, who believed Allen planned to return after the war and participate in growth like he’d seen in Chicago a decade earlier.

Allen left behind partnerships in several enterprises that were later taken up by his nephew, Frank, when he arrived in Des Moines as a 19-year old entrepreneur in 1848.

Young Frank carried a mysterious bag of gold coins, which helped launch his new life. I’ll write more about that in the future.