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The fortune: The Ewing brothers' firm, W. G. & G. W. Ewing Co. (its business entry is in the Business section), built the largest independent fur-trading house in the West and fought John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company for the trade — a contest the company's own historian called a "war of extermination" in 1838. A few months' catch at the Fort Wayne store in 1840 was worth $40,000, by the History Center's account. The firm also held federal contracts for the removal of Native people to the West, at $55 a person — the contract side of the same trade that made the Ewings rich. But furs were only the first form of the fortune. Their father Alexander had bought 80 acres in 1823 that became the family's Ewington tract, and the brothers' land speculation in Chicago and St. Louis, the History Center says, "earned them millions."
Its scale: Two published estate accounts exist, and they do not add up the same way, so both are carried here. Robert A. Trennert's Indian Traders on the Middle Border, as quoted in the Indiana Magazine of History, values William Ewing's estate at $750,000 at his death in 1854 and George Ewing's at "well over a million dollars" at his death in 1866. Arthur Paulison's Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood (1973) states it more simply: "their combined estates exceeded two million dollars."
What it left: The Ewing name on the land itself — the Ewing tract and Ewing Street — and the brothers' graves at Lindenwood, which they helped found as subscribers and directors. No Ewing foundation survived them; the fortune passed as estates do, and the city's record of it is the estate figures above.
Sources:
- Robert A. Trennert, Indian Traders on the Middle Border, estate figures as quoted in the Indiana Magazine of History.
- Arthur M. Paulison, Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood (1973) — combined estates statement.
- The History Center, Fort Wayne — the 1840 catch, the removal contracts, the Chicago and St. Louis speculation.