Oliver Nixon Unthank, 1842-1928, was a telegraph operator at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. He was born on November 18, 1842 in Newport, Indiana, the son of John Allen Unthank and his wife Jane M. Curtis. During the 1860s, Oliver Unthank worked as a trader, driving a team of oxen between Omaha, Nebraska and Denver, Colorado. From 1869 to 1871, he worked as a telegraph operator in Fort Laramie, Wyoming. On March 30, 1871, he married Emmaline Homer Brandon, 1845-1900. They had seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood: Allen Nixon, George Ralph, Oliver Brandon, William Robert, and Emma Jane. After a series of attacks on settlers by Native Americans in the Fort Laramie area, Unthank and his family left Wyoming and moved to Nebraska. He settled in Arlington, where he managed his father's grain elevator and owned a general store. He married his second wife, Laura Grey, 1869?-1926, on November 15, 1904. Oliver N. Unthank died in Arlington, Nebraska in 1928.