Jun 27, 2024 - Sale 2675

Sale 2675 - Lot 68

Price Realized: $ 2,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(CALIFORNIA.) [Martha Hitchcock.] Letter from an early San Francisco socialite: on the Chinese, her daughter Lillie Coit, and more. [39] manuscript pages, 4¾ x 2¾ inches, in a string-bound "Gregory's Express Pocket Letter Book" with gilt-printed black glossy wrappers; slight loss to eleventh leaf, otherwise minimal wear; Gregory's Express advertisement laid down to inner rear wrapper; inked stamp of later owner on final blank. San Francisco, CA, 31 July [1852]
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Martha T. Hunter Hitchcock (1818-1899), a Georgia native was the wife of military surgeon Dr. Charles McPhail Hitchcock (1810-1885). After years of being stationed on the Texas frontier with their daughter Lillie, they had been transferred in 1851 to San Francisco. In this long and soul-baring letter to an extended family member back home, she describes the city's social whirl of balls, dances, and other events with evident enthusiasm: "Professor Somebodyelse is lecturing upon electricity and spiritual rappings, then we have occasional alarms of fires, duels, accidents, robberies, murders, and arrivals of ships and steamers from all parts of the world, which tend to keep us wide awake. I do not believe that I should ever like any other country so well. . . . I have had my share of savage life, and I long now for all the refinements of civilization." She worries that her husband was in danger of being transferred: "I shall think him crazy if he does not resign."

Martha's daughter Lillie later became an important and colorful figure in San Francisco as Elizabeth Hitchcock Coit (1843-1929), famous for her participation in the volunteer fire corps as a sort of mascot and philanthropic supporter, for her penchant for smoking cigars and dressing in men's clothing to visit gambling establishments, and for funding the construction of the landmark Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. This letter suggests that the nine-year-old Lillie was already keeping her parents on high alert: "Lillie is not very well. . . . You will see how little she has improved in her writing. . . . She is very wild, and rude, and grows apace. I am not perfectly satisfied with her, but hope for the best."

Regarding San Francisco's most famous immigrant group: "I do not care for Chinese things now. I have had a surfeit of them here, where the whole town is full of them. We have ships every week from China, full of curiosities and full of Chinese, the most curious things of all. You would laugh to see them as they arrive, four or five hundred at a time, in their strange uncouth costumes, and their unnatural appearance. The country is overrun with them. . . . Their only approximation to Americanism is in their hats and boots. The first thing they do is to take off their great straw or rather cane hats, and buy a broad-brimmed felt hat."

Hitchcock had little to say about the gold miners, but notes: "I hear nothing of Joe Singleton or Charley Lucas. They are up in the mines. I doubt if Charley will do much anywhere until he gets steadier." The letter is unsigned, but the frequent references to her husband Dr. Hitchcock the military surgeon and daughter Lillie make the identification certain.