(CALIFORNIA) John Gold Rush letter from a struggling miner

Sale 2432 - Lot 99

Price Realized: $ 1,875

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750

(CALIFORNIA.) ____, John. Gold Rush letter from a struggling miner. Autograph Letter Signed "John" to his sister in Maine. 3 pages, 10 x 8 inches, on one folding sheet; several ink smudges, minor foxing. Prairie City, CA, 31 July 1856

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Writing from a mining camp near Sacramento, John writes after three years in California: "I have wore out all the cloathes that I brought out with me except my coat & blancketts. I wear wollen shirts alltogather & have not had a white shirt on but once sence I have been out here . . . A standup dickey would feel very odd on my neck now. . . . Money is not so easy got here as people think at home, nor is gold dust to be found any where and every where here. . . . It does not take long to make a fiew thousands if one only gits on right spot of ground, but those spots are fiew and far between." He also mentions "the disturbance in San Francisco, the Vigilent Committee hung two more men a fiew days ago and are sending quite a number of the rascalls out of the state on every steamer, and there is need enough of it, no doubt." Prairie City, where John was camping, has long since disappeared from the map, not even a ghost town. The site is now covered by rocks from a later mining operation.