Due to the poverty of his father and the ill health of his mother, Cheves was sent at an early age to live with his grandmother, and remained there until the age of eight; spent six more years with one uncle working on the farm and as a herdboy and occasionally attending the local schools; then two more years with another uncle, a farmer and small merchant.
While working in the mining country, he became involved in the spontaneous defense of two British-born abolitionist speakers from a rowdy crowd, and developed a lifelong antipathy to slavery.
In June 1845, he married Elizabeth Smith of Pike Grove in Kenosha County, like himself a native of Scotland (born February 10, 1822).
During his term of office he speculated in personal loans, often to his profit; but also sustained reverses in that business, and in several years of expensive and vexatious litigation.
He then purchased a soap and candle factory in Racine, which he conducted successfully for several years, as well as engaging in other branches of business (and continued to operate his rebuilt farm).
Pleasant, Norway, Rochester, Raymond, Waterford and Yorkville) as a member of the Liberal Reform Party (a short-lived coalition of Democrats, reform and Liberal Republicans, and Grangers formed in 1873, which had secured the election for two years of a Governor of Wisconsin as well as electing a number of state legislators, but was in the last throes of disintegration.
[6] Elizabeth lived until July 7, 1902, dying after a fall at the old family farm in Norway; in her obituary, Patrick was recalled as "one of the most prominent farmers and Republicans in the county.