The following story was sent to me by Jack Grantham of Dallas, Texas, who is descended from John Crowley's brother, James Crowley, who was a Revolutionary War veteran.  This outlines the family of John and James Crowley and reveals a little about the nature of this pioneer family's treks and eventual settlement in Missouri, before it even became a state.  I have added my own comments in { } for clarification.

"Samuel & Eliza {parents of John and James Crowley} also had a daughter named Mary who married James Kimsey and has many descendants in OR.  She seems to have been the child that filled the 4-year gap between James and John.  Elizabeth Strong {same as Eliza, above} was a child of Wm. Strong.  She had a sister named Sarah who married Benjamin Crowley, older brother of Samuel.  They were the two youngest of the 4 children of Jeffrey Crowley.  Not unusual for two brothers to marry two sisters.  My James married Mary McClain and your John married (first wife) Elizabeth McClain. They were daughters of Thomas McClain, now tentatively identified as one of the group that fought with George Rogers Clark in freeing the Illinois Territory from Canadian invasion.  Birthplace of your John was probably at the race track in Lunenburg County from which Bedford, Pittsylvania, Halifax, Henry, and Patrick Counties were created {counties in southern Virginia, near the Tennessee border}.  All are germane to Crowley history and can be described as Crowley territory.

John's marriage to {Elizabeth} McClain took place probably at her home believed to have been in Henry County along the Smith River.  John, two of his brothers, a sister & her husband, members of the Strong family, and John's widowed mother moved to Georgia after the Revolution and some of them then migrated to Powell Valley which has been designated with several county names including Campbell County.  Powell Valley is not a town.  It is the valley of the Powell River which flows south out of SW VA into TN {and not far from Greene Co., TN where the Couches came from} and continues south where it is joined by other streams to form the TN River & is a river-highway from SW VA & TN to the Mississippi River and thus to the Missouri River tributary, directly to Clay County.

It was in the courthouse in Clay County that Elisha Cameron said that anything John said (about James) could be believed. Crowley migration, thus, is easy to trace.  Easy to get to MO from Powell Valley.  However, documents in the archive of the Western Manuscript Collection mention Samuel and his brother Ben as being with a group at Powell Valley in 1768.   This could be the hunting party they led and which party is also mentioned in biography of Daniel Boone as  his first hunt into KY.  Since Samuel and Benjamin led this 1768 expedition, they must have been explorers of that country in times prior to 1768.  This area was beyond the proclamation line and it was illegal for them to be there, as Parliament was in the process of turning over that vast KY and TN land to Quebec and with it was to go all of the area north of the Ohio River.   On that day in 1836, at the courtroom hearing in Liberty, MO, a question was put to James Crowley.   "Where have you lived since the Revolution?"  His answer must have rambled on and on and not a clear one for he was now an old man with memories that piled up on one another.  The clerk of the court did not try to record his answer precisely as James had mumbled them.  He simply wrote this into the record as an all-inclusive answer.  "....always on the
frontier."

That's what I read in his file at the National Archives.  /s/Jack"

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