The year 1822 also brought to Fort Wayne the families of William Nesbit Hood and his brother, Robert Hood, who came from Dayton, Ohio. The Hoods also secured a license for trading with the Indians. Although successful in their operations, they never entered into large scale trading such as the Ewings, and later became involved in politics and real estate speculation. Most of the traders at Fort Wayne seldom left town, but had a number of men called “engages” in their service who accompanied the Indians in their hunts, supplied them with goods in small quantities, and watched them that they did not sell their furs to traders other than their employers. The furs brought in consisted principally of deer and raccoon skins. Bear, otter, and beaver were becoming scarce. In the eighteen-thirties, when the beaver prices tumbled and the raccoon skins became popular, the Maumee-Wabash region became for a few years the center of interest of the American fur trade, as this area produced large numbers of raccoons. The skins when brought in were loosely rolled or tied, but they were afterward made into packs which were three feet long and eighteen inches wide after being subjected to a heavy pressure in a wedge press. The values of the furs were nominal, as they were paid for in goods passed off to the Indians for two or three times their actual worth. Moreover, fur prices fluctuated greatly, depending upon the fashion. On February 24, 1823, John Hays wrote to Calhoun tendering his resignation as Indian agent at Fort Wayne, pointing out that he was too far from his home at Cahokia, Illinois. After elaborating on the benefits the Indians had received under his administration of the agency, he strongly recommended that Benjamin B. Kercheval, his present assistant, be appointed as his successor. Kercheval was an excellent man for the position, but did not receive the appointment, as Hays had allowed the news of his intended resignation to leak out before writing to Calhoun. As the fears of British intrigue around Fort Wayne had vanished after the War of 1812, the agency at Fort Wayne came to be regarded as a political plum. The state delegation in Congress had been exerting pressure on the president for some time to appoint citizens of Indiana to positions in the state. Calhoun, early in 1822, had refused to remove Hays in order that John Tipton, a native of Indiana, could be appointed in his place. However, when the Indiana delegation heard of Hay’s intended resignation, they carried the matter of their recommendation of Tipton directly to President Monroe and secured his approval before Calhoun had the opportunity to recommend Kercheval. When Kercheval brought the news of his failure to Hays, the latter wrote to Lewis Cass, “I never was more disappointed and mortified than on the arrival of Mr. Kercheval. I certainly should not have resigned at this moment, had I not thought Mr. Kercheval would be successfull.”[22]