The Papers of William W. Cleghorn, Part Two

ABSTRACT: William W. Cleghorn (1815–1878) was an Indian trader and fur trader who worked in northern Indiana and later in the Kansas Territory. Cleghorn’s business and personal papers, held by the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, are here excerpted with scholarly footnotes, and published for the first time. The papers provide a look into mid-nineteenth-century Indiana and the West through the lenses of Native Removal, the Indian trade and fur trade, the operation of the federal Office of Indian Affairs, and the webs of patronage and influence that made up life for so many people like William Cleghorn. This second part of the transcribed papers (the first appears in our December 2024 issue) deals with Cleghorn’s life from 1856 until his death; correspondence also details the sharp decline of the fur trade precipitated by decades of white settlement and the Panic of 1857.