Dec 01, 2011 - Sale 2263

Sale 2263 - Lot 164

Price Realized: $ 5,040
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
"A PARTY OF INDIANS HAD ATTACKED A CATTLE CAMP 3 MILES OUT" (KANSAS.) Archive of Wilson family letters, including one describing the 1878 Cheyenne breakout. 75 Autograph Letters Signed, most by Agnes Wilson: 22 to her husband James Wilson written from Scotland, 1873, and 3 while travelling in the west, 1878; 31 to relatives in Scotland, written from America, 1874-79; 10 letters from James to Agnes while travelling in the west, 1878; 3 letters from Kansas land promoters, 1878; and 6 later family letters. Vp, bulk 1873-79
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These letters tell the story of a Scottish family's emigration to America, their journey to the Kansas frontier, an escape from the Cheyenne, a tragic death, and a return to Scotland.
Agnes Ledgerwood (Hately) Wilson was born in Scotland in 1845, and married Presbyterian minister James Kinnier Wilson. He went to America to study at the Auburn Theological Seminary in 1873, and then sent for Agnes the following year. He preached for three years in Cedarville, NJ, until an economic crisis caused the church to reduce his pay by more than half. In June 1878, they settled in WaKeeney, Kansas, a new community promoted by the firm Warren, Keeney, & Co. Agnes wrote to her sister Mary: "At first I thought it terribly forlorn & desolate, but now I am getting even to admire & like it. There is silent majestic grandeur in these vast green plains & a delightful feeling of freedom" (26 June 1878). Her nine long letters from WaKeeney are full of details of life on the newly tamed plains: farming, house construction, and a surprisingly cultured congregation. They sometimes visited their 800-acre farm outside of town, "where the cattle are kept in the care of Al, our herd boy, & have dinner in the dugout, cooking our dinner on the hearth, & eating & drinking from tin plates & cups, in regular Kansas camp fashion" (29 September 1878). The town grew very rapidly, with the value of the land increasing tenfold within a year, and Agnes thought WaKeeney was "promising to be the largest city between Kansas City & Denver" (27 April 1879).
These reveries were broken by the escape of several hundred Cheyenne from their Indian Territory reservation in October 1878. They passed through Kansas on their way to Nebraska, where they were later captured. While James was away on church business, the news came to their house that "a party of Indians had attacked a cattle camp 3 miles out, the cattle had stampeded, & the men had come running into town, all in a fright, only escaping with their lives." En route to the train station to evacuate town, she "felt utterly miserable, I can assure, flying from our new house on that dark, foggy night, with two helpless infants, & a heart full of fear & anxiety. The station was full of men, looking mostly pale & uneasy, nearly all armed & enrolling themselves under Mr. John Keeney into a company to attack the Indians at daybreak" (3 November 1878). The collection also includes an undated note which Agnes wrote to her husband while she and the children sought refuge in a nearby Russell: "There are about 25 families in town, the court house is full. . . . not on account of the Indians out at WaKeeney, but because it is said another body of them, 1000 strong, have broken away from the reservation and are heading northwards."
The Cheyenne turned out to be a false alarm, but a malarial fever soon swept through the family, killing Rev. Wilson (described in her final American letter of 30 November 1879). Within a year, she returned to Scotland with her children; her son Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson became an eminent physician.