Trust and Plunder: William W. Cleghorn and the Potawatomi Nation

ABSTRACT: William W. Cleghorn (1815–1878), a fur trader, Indian trader, and landowner, spent much of his life in the western Potawatomi nation in Kansas, before making his permanent home in LaPorte County, Indiana. His network of personal connections, illuminated by the collection of his papers in Indiana University Bloomington’s Lilly Library, included local white officials, tribal agents, enslaved families, and wealthy trading partners like George and William Ewing. It centered on his Potawatomi neighbors and associates, among them the members of his first wife Ann Sharp Rice’s Indigenous family. Cleghorn’s accounts and correspondence reveal the imbrication of the peltry business with land deals, the extraction of resources from Potawatomi families, and the ongoing dispossession of Native Americans after Removal.