Napoleon Hill (Memphis businessman) dating history

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Napoleon Hill (1830–1909) was an American businessman of Memphis, Tennessee, tagged as "the merchant prince of Memphis" by his contemporaries. He first inherited wealth from his father, made more in the California Gold Rush, and then moved to Memphis, where he became a leading businessman and investor. Hill was the second of eleven children of Duncan Hill, a physician and plantation owner, and Olivia L. Bill. Duncan Hill died in 1844, leaving his mother the Marshall County, Mississippi plantation, worth $40,000 at the time. She remarried to Josiah Deloach in 1848 and she and the children continued to live on the plantation. At age sixteen Hill left home and worked as a store clerk for a time, but left Tennessee for the 1849 California Gold Rush. Successful in California, he returned to Tennessee and by 1857 was living in Memphis, where he built a wholesale grocery business and traded in cotton on commission just before the American Civil War.