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Ewings, Walker, and Company in order to hold ambitious 
traders to their interests. At a later time they induced 
George Hunt and William Sellars of Vincennes, two of the 
best buyers for the American Fur Company in Indiana, to 
desert their old employers and work for them.®^ 
Altho the Ewings were harsh and brutal, they showed more 
ability in handling their traders than did the American Fur 
Company. When Rousseau wrote to the Ewings, “Gentlemen, 
i think you are verry Deceitful”,®^ the Ewings replied with 
the present of a breastpin which buried the grievance.®® Al- 
tho the Ewings would bully the helpless trader, they would 
always give way before the resentment of a good one and even 
sometimes take him into partnership. 
William Brewster, the American Fur Company agent at 
Detroit, was tactless and unpopular. He offended James Ab- 
bott, one of his best buyers, to such an extent as to cause him 
to start trading on his own responsibility.®^ Comparet and 
Coquillard, who had worked for Astor, did the same, and they 
all three forced up prices by offering their furs to the highest 
bidder. These conditions increased the rivalry between the 
Ewings and Brewster.®^ 
In the third decade of the nineteenth century there were 
peculiar conditions in the fur markets that made the country 
south of the Great Lakes of especial interest to all dealers 
in furs. Nutria had pushed out the muskrat as the material 
for the cheaper kinds of hats, and the silk hat was taking the 
place of the beaver among fashionable people.®® As beaver 
and muskrats declined in price, raccoons and minks began 
Ewing Papers of dates July 27, August 28, December 7, 1828 ; March 17, April 
21, 1832 ; January 8 and 10, April 13, May 1, June 10, 20, and 30, November 6, 1839. 
Hunt was for many years a fur trader at Fort Wayne and was employed by William 
Brewster of the American Fur Company to take charge of Indiana, Ohio, and eastern 
Illinois in 1837. William Brewster, Detroit, December 21, 1837, to Ramsey Crooks, 
president of the American Fur Company, American Fur Company Letters, for period 
after 1827 are in the New York Historical Library. They are now being calendared. 
Elkhart, December 7, 1828, in Ewing Paper’s. 
®® January 12, 1829, in ibid. 
®^ William Brewster to R. Crooks, Detroit, January 23, 1835, in ibid. 
®® “Competition in the skin market here has driven Mr. Brewster up to our extreme 
limits in every thing, or nearly all.” R. Crooks to Benjamin Clapp, Detroit, July 10, 1835, 
in ibid. 
®® The letters of C. M. Lampson, the London agent for most American exporters, 
during 1834, 1835, and 1836, to R. Crooks, January 29, 1835, February 3, 1836, American 
'Fur Company Letters No, 2, contain many complaints about the effects of nutria upon 
the muskrat market. Muskrats were selling at 35 cents in New York in 1830 and 
were down to 22 cents in 1834, and down to 12 cents by 1840. Crooks wrote to Brewster 
June 17, 1837, “Rats, Beavers & Otters are dead stock.” Ibid., No, 5. 
