explanations to Grant and decided the department needed major reforming. During his first month in office, he fired all the clerks in one room of the Patent Office; he noted that every desk was vacant, and concluded that the employees were either involved in corruption or lacked the integrity to reform the department. Almost twenty employees were found to be entirely fictitious; they had been created by a profiteering ring to defraud the government by falsely receiving pay for work that was not performed. Chandler also fired unqualified clerks who profiteered by hiring out their work to lower-paid replacements and pocketing the salary difference. In addition, Chandler simplified Patent Office rules, making patents easier to obtain and reducing the cost for applicants. In December 1875, Chandler banned persons known as "Indian Attorneys", whose claims to represent Native Americans in Washington were questionable. He found the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be the most corrupt, and he replaced its commissioner and chief clerk. In addition to Indian Affairs, Chandler also investigated the Pension Bureau. This review resulted in the identification and removal of numerous fraudulent pensions, which saved the federal government hundreds of thousands of dollars. Chandler also revoked as many as 800 fraudulent land grants that had been approved during Delano's tenure. Later life and career On his resignation from Grant's cabinet, Delano returned to Mount Vernon where for the next twenty years he served as president of the First National Bank of Mount Vernon. He was a longtime trustee of Kenyon College, which awarded him the honorary degree of LL.D.; among his charitable and civic donations was his endowment of Kenyon's Delano Hall; this building was in use until it was destroyed by a fire in 1906. His Lakeholm mansion, built in 1871 at the outskirts of Mount Vernon, is now part of Mount Vernon Nazarene University. On April 3, 1880, John W. Wright, a judge from Indiana, was convicted at trial of having assaulted Delano on a Washington, D.C. street corner on October 12, 1877. Wright, who had been an Indian Agent in the Interior Department while Delano was secretary, had been convicted of fraud and blamed Delano. On the day of the assault he was in the company of Walter H. Smith, formerly solicitor of the Department of the Interior; Wright was accused of provoking a fight by questioning Delano's honesty as Secretary of the Interior and