by his father, then Secretary of the Interior, to rescue immigrants who were trapped in the Sierra by heavy snows. He returned in 1852 with dispatches for the government. He then completed his course in law and settled in St. Louis. He practiced law there from 1854 to 1856, when he moved with his young brother, Thomas Jr., and brothers-in-law William T. Sherman and Hampden B. Denman to Leavenworth, Kansas, and began speculating in lands, roads, and government housing. They quickly established one of the leading law firms of Leavenworth, as well as a financially powerful land agency. In 1858, Ewing married Henrietta Young, daughter of George W. Young, a large planter of the District of Columbia, whose family was prominent in the settlement and history of Maryland. He soon afterward took charge of his father's salt works in Ohio. Civil War In April 1861, Governor William Dennison appointed Ewing as the brigade-inspector of Ohio volunteers. He served under Rosecrans and McClellan in western Virginia. Ewing became colonel of the 30th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in August 1861. In November 1861, when his brother-in-law William T. Sherman was relieved of his command in disgrace, Ewing aided his younger sister Ellen Ewing Sherman in making the rounds of Washington D.C., denying sensationalist media claims that Sherman was insane, and personally lobbying the President for Sherman's reinstatement. Ewing and his sister argued that Sherman's requests for men and material in Kentucky had been denied in Washington, and that the charges of insanity had been part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas. Eventually the political influence of the Ewing family persevered, and with the assistance of Henry Halleck, Sherman was returned to command. President Abraham Lincoln praised Sherman's "talent & conduct" publicly to a large group of important officers, and later banished Thomas to a meaningless post on recruiting duty in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. Under McClellan, Ewing commanded a regiment and then a brigade in the Kanawha Division in the IX Corps. In the Battle of South Mountain, he led the assault which drove the enemy from the summit; and at midnight of that day, he received an order placing him in command of the brigade of Colonel Eliakim P. Scammon, who was in temporary command of the Kanawha division after its commander Major General Jacob D. Cox had been elevated to command of the IX Corps, replacing the fallen Major