Regarding the selfish and grasping cousin of Mr. Ward’s, from pages 3-6 of The Autobiography of David Ward (1912, self-published, held by the Library of Congress). Eber eventually moved to Detroit, where he died. David Ward made his home in Oakland County, Michigan.
My Uncle Samuel left Lake Ontario before the close of the war of 1812, residing at Salina, N. Y., and boiled salt there for a while. He married there “Aunt Betsey,” and afterwards moved to Northern Ohio at or near Conneaut, and finally moved to Michigan and settled at Newport (now Marine City) on the St. Clair River. He engaged there in farming, small merchandising, building and navigating small sail craft on the Lakes, and eventually in building, owning and navigating first-class passenger steamers, and buying much pine land from the United States. He died at Marine City at nearly seventy years of age, and willed nearly all of his property of about one million dollars to a son of Uncle Eber’s, named Eber B. Ward [1811-1875], who was my cousin. This gave E.B. Ward, in addition, practically the franchises of the steamboat lake passenger and freight routes, as he largely monopolized these routes. These monopolized lake steamboat routes, fairly managed, were worth another million or two of dollars, as the passenger traffic to the West by lakes continued immense for some fifteen or twenty years afterwards.