Dec 01, 2011 - Sale 2263

Sale 2263 - Lot 156

Price Realized: $ 6,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(IDAHO.) Jackson, William E. Diary of a very early cattle drive from Oregon through Idaho to Wyoming. 60 pages of manuscript diary entries and 8 additional manuscript leaves. Small 8vo, contemporary 1/4 calf, worn, front cover detached; internally clean and legible; signed and inscribed by author on front endpapers. Vp, diary entries from 23 May to 3 August 1876, with other entries through 1878
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

William Emsley Jackson (1858-1945) was only seventeen when he and his younger brother Lorenzo signed on to help drive a thousand head of cattle from Oregon across Idaho and Wyoming to market in Cheyenne. His diary of the journey is the earliest known account of a cattle drive from the Pacific Northwest over the Rocky Mountains.
The present manuscript was revised and greatly expanded from Jackson's original trail notes during the months after his return. The original abbreviated notes have been published in Agricultural History 23 (October 1949) as 'William Emsley Jackson's Diary of a Cattle Drive from La Grande, Oregon, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1876,' pages 260-273 (offprint copy included here).
The passages include descriptions of rattlesnake encounters, crude rope ferries over the Snake River, and carrying their water supply in ten-gallon kegs. At one point near Sinker Creek in Idaho, not far from Boise, Jackson passed a human skeleton and was told that "an emigrant train of 50 wagons was massacred by the Indians" in that spot. He also observed "scattered along the road numerous pieces of wagons such as tires, bands, straps, pieces of the woodwork partly burned up, etc., which is sufficient evidence in my mind that it was once not the safest place for a person to be in." Jackson would have been considerably more nervous if he knew that the Battle of Little Big Horn would take place later that month a few hundred miles to the northeast, while he was still on the trail.
The diary entries are preceded by a 6-page essay on the meteor of 21 December 1876, written in Plymouth, IL. On the final leaf are an undated poem and a diary entry written by Jackson on this 20th birthday in Augusta, 22 September 1878.