Ochnig Bird, then 21 years old had just moved from Pennsylvania to Indiana, traveling a thousand miles, having seen “a grate many places”, some “quite sickly”, but was now in “a first rate place for merchandising… on the Wabash River where the Indiana and Erie Canal is progressing.”

He had been working on the Canal as an Engineer, but hoped to convince Pettibone to come join him as a business partner, to “speculate in Trade or in Land, there is a going to be some first rate lands sold here soon and those who have the Change, have the first opportunity, and the Trade from the Indians is Good in this Country. The Miami Indians… draw from Government every year $ 25,000 which all comes around threw the hands of the Merchants for Goods at a double profit… The Indians “- of the Miami and Pottawattomi tribes are as thick as white men here … and the way merchants make Change out of them is a caution.”

Both Bird and his friend, Pettibone, went on to achieve success in life, but not as business partners. Pettibone remained in Pennsylvania as partner in his father-in-law’s store; he went on to become a railroad executive and industrialist. Bird remained in Indiana, working as engineer and railroad builder in Fort Wayne, then going into politics; he served in the state legislature before and after the Civil War, when, as a Democratic State Senator, he refused to vote for the amendment to the US Constitution giving freed slaves the right to vote.