A to Z Challenge 2024 - Professionally Speaking - L is for Lawyer

My great-great granduncle Major Wellman Packard (1820-1903) was not a military officer.  Major was his given name, not a rank. He has been known down the generations in the family as Wellman Packard.  He was a lawyer in Illinois, and was friends with another Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.  In the collections of the Library of Congress is a letter that Wellman wrote to his friend Abe on 22 February 1860.  Lincoln had previously written to Wellman asking him to take care of a matter that Lincoln had somehow overlooked:  he was supposed to have paid the Bloomington, Illinois, property taxes of one William Florville, a Haitian immigrant.  In his letter to Lincoln, Wellman reports that he has done as Lincoln asked and paid the taxes.  Wellman had collected ten dollars from another man who owed it to Lincoln, and used it to pay Florville's taxes of $10.10.  On the balance of ten cents, Wellman dismissed any debt on Lincoln's part, saying, "Bal 10 cts which will be just enough to drink my health with, which please do if it suits you -- but in any event you need not "remit" at the present high rates of exchange!  

Wellman goes on to ask Lincoln about a certain case.  Then a bit of the politics of the day comes in to Wellman's next remark: "My brother-in-law N. S. Sunderland has just returned from Ohio, and he assures me the tide of politics is settling decidedly in favor of 'Old Abe' for President."(1)

 Twenty-five years after Welllman died in 1903, a small book that he had written was printed in a very small edition of only 30.  It was reprinted in 1971, also in a limited edition, but larger, of 500 copies.  I was provided a copy by a cousin.  In this small book, Wellman wrote of a trip he took to California with a party of "forty-niners," people lured by the discovery at Sutter's Mill of gold.  Wellman went on the trip to observe, not to go panning for gold.  One of his observations: "It was indeed providential that the news came to us late in the autumn months of 1848, and the journey overland could not be attempted until the following spring.  Even then very many started without the necessary preparation, and suffered the penalty of their want of foresight in much suffering and unnecessary hardship and privation."

One of the more thrilling events was the day the wagon train in which he was traveling found a tremendous herd of bison bearing down directly on it.  The herd was as has been described of herds that once roamed the plains in the thousands, and it took several brave men on horseback, with their lungs and with firearms fired into the air to turn the herd and save the wagon train.(2)

Major Wellman Packard, a man of law and letters, returned to Bloomington and died there 28 February 1903.

(1) Abraham Lincoln Papers, Series 1.  General Correspondence.  1933-1916: Major W. Packard to Abraham Lincoln, Wednesday, February 22, 1860 (Florville's Taxes), https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.0241700/?st=pdf (accessed 17 April 2024).

(2) Packard, Major Wellman. Early Emigration to California, 1849-1850.  (Reprint: Fairfield, Washington: Ye Galleon Press, 1971).