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The House of Ewing · Fur and Indian trade
On the record
The Indiana State Library’s finding aid for the George W. Ewing letters states plainly that G.W. Ewing “founded the firm W.G. and G.W. Ewing with his brother William in 1827.” Castaldi’s sequence agrees: after Alexander Ewing’s death, the sons sold most of the Ewington land to raise capital for their fur-trading ventures and formed the company. The brothers’ own trading at Fort Wayne predates the firm — Lasselle’s trader list has William G. and George W. Ewing trading at Fort Wayne from 1822 — so 1827 is the firm’s founding, not the brothers’ arrival in the trade. Robert A. Trennert Jr.’s scholarly monograph on the house is titled for the same span: Indian Traders on the Middle Border: The House of Ewing, 1827–54 (University of Nebraska Press, 1981). Founded 1827.
What it did: fur and Indian trade from a Fort Wayne base — furs bought in, and trade goods (tools, blankets, cloth) supplied out — plus general merchandise, land speculation on a large scale, treaty and claims work, and, in the 1840s, government Indian-removal contracting, including a large role in the Potawatomi removal remembered as the Trail of Death — stated plainly, as the record states it.
Course: the house grew to rival John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company east of the Mississippi. Castaldi puts a few months’ catch in the Ewings’ Fort Wayne store alone at $40,000 in 1840, and the brothers prosecuted a self-described “war of extermination” against the American Fur Company’s trade from 1838 — a war the Astor company ultimately lost in the Midwest (by 1843, Castaldi). Trade reached the Miami and Potawatomi of Indiana, then west — Sac and Fox, Menominee, Winnebago, and peoples in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri and Kansas. The firm’s papers survive in bulk at the Indiana State Library: correspondence, letterbooks and accounts for the 1820s–1850s.
Fate: closed / wound up, 1854–1865. William G. Ewing died in 1854; George, then living in St. Louis, returned to Fort Wayne to wind up the partnership. The settlement of William’s estate was finalised in October 1865 and confirmed at the March Term 1866 of the Common Pleas Court; George W. Ewing died a few months later, 29 May 1866.
Find them on this page
- § 05 — business
Sources: Indiana State Library finding aid, “George W. Ewing letters, 1849–1865” (via OCLC ResearchWorks); Indiana State Library, Ewing family business papers, 1818–1887; History Center Notes & Queries, Castaldi; Trennert (1981); Lasselle, Indiana Magazine of History. Sources as cited in the profile.