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Editor of the Fort Wayne Times · Governor of Utah Territory · Fort Wayne's first historian of itself
On the record
John W. Dawson was born 21 October 1820 at Cambridge, Dearborn County, Indiana, and came to Fort Wayne as a lawyer, farmer, and editor. In 1853 he and T. N. Hood leased George W. Wood's interest in the Fort Wayne Times, and Dawson's anti-Nebraska Times faced Thomas Tigar's pro-administration Sentinel across the town's newspaper war; he sold the paper in 1865, and it merged into the Sentinel in 1866. President Lincoln appointed him the third governor of Utah Territory in 1861; the appointment collapsed within about three weeks amid hostility from Mormon residents, and Dawson was beaten by three men in Parley's Canyon on his road east. Back in Fort Wayne he turned to the town's own past. His newspaper articles of 21 and 23 October 1871 are John Chapman's first biography and remain a principal source on him, and his Charcoal Sketches of Old Times in Fort Wayne, published in the Daily Sentinel in 1872 and compiled by the Allen County Public Library in 1959, is the founding local history behind much of this record. He died in Fort Wayne on 10 September 1877.
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- § 06 — people of the record
Sources: Wikipedia, "John W. Dawson"; Utah History To Go, Utah State Historical Society; Dawson, Charcoal Sketches of Old Times in Fort Wayne (ACPL, 1959).