Elkville is a small town in Elk Township in Jackson County, in southern Illinois, roughly sixty air miles southeast of St. Louis, Missouri. But according to the book Historical Sketches of Jackson County, Illinois (1894), Elkville did not exist until 1857. The book describes it as "a small village containing one or two stores and a flour-mill."
Horatio Schwartz married Luana Browning in Du Quoin, Illinois, on May 20, 1860. They had five children: Charles Theodore, born December 1861; William Jeddy, born February 18, 1863, in Du Quoin; Minnie Dell, born September 1867; Robert, born November 24, 1871, and Laura Bell, born November 13, 1874.
As a young man he prospected in the Pike's Peak area of Colorado. He was said to have returned poorer in pocket but richer in experience.
After he was married he ran a hotel in Du Quoin.
Two of his children died young and are buried in Du Quoin.
The family moved to the Lemhi Valley in Idaho in 1881, and farmed there. He ran the stage station at Junction, Idaho, near the present town of Leodore. In 1902 they sold out and moved to Boise along with their two sons and a daughter and her husband.
His cause of death was senility.
What little I remember being told: He had chronic stomach trouble, which made him disagreeable (according to his granddaughter). It may have been due to having been shot, perhaps during his adventure in Colorado.
Wikipedia describes the Pike's Peak Gold Rush as "the boom in gold prospecting and mining in the Pike's Peak Country of western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory ... that began in July 1858 and lasted until roughly the creation of the Colorado Territory on February 28, 1861. An estimated 100,000 gold seekers took part in one of the greatest gold rushes in North American history.... The first decade of the boom was largely concentrated along the South Platte River at the base of the mountains, the canyon of Clear Creek in the mountains west of Golden City, at Breckenridge and in South Park at Como, Fairplay, and Alma. By 1860, Denver City, Golden City, and Boulder City were substantial towns serving the mines."