Dec 01, 2011 - Sale 2263

Sale 2263 - Lot 88

Price Realized: $ 780
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 200 - $ 300
(CANADA.) Adams, J.R. A gold prospector's anxious letters to his business partner. 5 Autograph Letters Signed, each 4 or more pages; condition poor, with separations at folds and intermittent loss of text. Barkerville and Victoria, BC, 1888-89
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Additional Details

Adams writes to his friend Reuben E.G. Albertstone (1842-after 1910), a very early photographer in Sitka, Alaska. Albertstone had worked a claim in the former boom town of Barkerville, then already falling on hard times. Adams spent the summer of 1888 searching for one of Albertstone's shafts on a hillside with only the vaguest of directions, while contending with double-crossers, skeptics, a hostile prostitute, and four "tenderfoots" who volunteered to work the claim briefly before returning to Illinois. The first two letters were written from Barkerville, and the last three from more civilized Victoria as Adams planned his next summer's expedition.