Sep 26, 2019 - Sale 2517

Sale 2517 - Lot 113

Price Realized: $ 2,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
INCLUDING AN 1874 FRONTIER LETTER FROM NEW MEXICO (IOWA.) Papers of the Colman-Springer-Letts family of Iowa City and Columbus, Iowa. 92 items (0.3 linear feet) in one box; various sizes and conditions. Vp, 1837-1916 and undated
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Additional Details

The central figures in this collection are Nancy Colman Springer (1825-1874) (the wife of Judge Francis Springer), and her daughter Nellie Springer Letts (1857-1911) of Columbus, Iowa. A few later letters are addressed to Nellie's daughter Leona "Leo" Letts Rivers (1888-1965).
The earliest Iowan items in the collection are 39 letters from Eliza Colman Jones of Iowa City to her sister Nancy Colman Springer, 1850-62 and undated. The letters begin just 11 years after Iowa City was founded. Eliza was supporting herself and a young daughter as a single mother; the first letter announces on 22 December 1850 that "I am getting along in the capacity of Land Lady. Notwithstanding I have to work pretty hard, I do not find keeping boarders as unpleasant as I anticipated." Much of her business came while the state legislature as in session: "Our town has been remarkably quiet since the honorable members have left" (23 February 1851). In July 1852, she reported that a local shopkeeper was robbed: "The robbers were pursued and caught in a few days, and lynched most shamefully. They hung one fellow three times, as long as they dare hang him without killing him, and whiped them almost to death with sticks. They then got thorn bushes and beat them while they made them tell where the goods were. Some of the most respectable citizens were engaged in it." Jones went to the prison in an attempt to help the men after the torture. Their unemployed father John K. Colman (born 1787) lived with Eliza during part of this period; he seems to have been a very difficult man. He also wrote 10 letters to Nancy from Iowa City during this same period.
Nancy's son (and Nellie's brother) was Frank Springer (1848-1927), who became a lawyer and journalist in Las Vegas, NM. The town of Springer, NM was named in his honor in 1870. He was the subject of a 2007 biography by David Caffey, "Frank Springer and New Mexico: From the Colfax County War to the Emergence of Modern Santa Fe." Several items in this lot relate to the family's New Mexico connection. Nancy wrote to her daughter Nellie in 1874, describing a medical visit to hot springs near Cimarron, NM on 18 October: "Being ill and quartered in a room with an adobe floor & no mats or skins to spread down to either walk on or sit on was very hard on me, for we could not walk across the room without raising a cloud of dust by the sweep of our skirts. . . . I did not mean to die if I could help it . . . and have my bones laid in this barren and desolate place to be dragged out and devoured by coyotes (wolves), as happened in one or two instances, for there is not boards enough in the whole place to make a box, even to bury one. . . . The descent into the canyon of the Rio Grande is fearful. It is one ledge of rocks above another, forming a sort of unequal stairway with steps ranging from 8 to 10 and twenty feet in height. . . . One who has crossed the Rio Grande may feel prepared to encounter almost any sort of danger." She describes Taos, "that queer old Mexican town," at length. She was not being overdramatic about her poor health--she died 32 days later. The collection includes other (less dramatic) letters from New Mexico, including two by Frank Springer dated 1905 and 1916.
Also included are 11 photographs, many of them by photographers in Iowa and Las Vegas, NM, including a carte-de-visite of Nellie Springer Letts taken in Burlington, IA (illustrated).