Nov 17, 2016 - Sale 2432

Sale 2432 - Lot 7

Price Realized: $ 688
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(AMERCAN INDIANS.) [Lockwood,] Frank. Letter from a clergyman describing his missionary efforts among the Schaghticokes. Autograph Letter Signed to mother [Julia Maria Stevens Lockwood]. 4 pages, 10 x 8 inches, on one folding sheet; minor wear, slight staining from a paper clip, slight loss at intersections of folds. Gaylordsville, CT, 3 June 1866
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

The Rev. Frank Wilmot Lockwood (1842-1930) was a young Methodist minister from Ridgefield, CT, beginning his service further north in the state along the New York border. Here he describes plans to visit the land of the Schaghticokes, one of the oldest Indian reservations in America: "Last Sunday night I found some Indian people out to meeting up at Bull's Ridge. Some of them have become Christians and are Methodists. There is a tribe of them about 2 miles above here in a mountain by the side of the river, Schaghticoke Mountain, and the tribe are the Schaghticokes. I go among them in a few days to see them. Thus you see I may consider myself a modern Elliott. They are gradually decreasing and in a few years they will be known only in name. They live in log houses and there in the solitudes of that mountain . . . they look off into the distant settlements of the white man and see them rapidly increasing. . . . Soon the last red man shall lie down to look no more out from his favorite mount. . . . the last war whoop sounded." Rev. Lockwood was far from the only white man of the nineteenth century to forecast the imminent extinction of the American Indian. He has been dead for 86 years now, but the Schaghticokes are still here.