Feb 04, 2016 - Sale 2404

Sale 2404 - Lot 164

Price Realized: $ 3,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(KANSAS.) Howe & Hoak. Payroll and supply ledger for a Union Pacific railroad labor gang working in the Kaw Reservation. 21, [26] pages, plus 4 pages of later memoranda. Folio, original 1/4 calf, moderate wear; tear to page 158 with slight loss of text and other minor wear; inscribed on front pastedown "Payments made on Howe & Hoak's work through the Caw Reserve." Kansas, June 1869 to July 1870
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The Union Pacific Rail Road, Southern Branch (UPSBRR) was chartered to build a north-south line connecting the Kansas Pacific Rail Road with Texas. Two other companies were granted competing rights, but the Cherokee reservation had only granted permission for one line, so Congress ruled that only the first line to reach Cherokee territory would be allowed to continue. This set up a race across southeastern Kansas. The UPSBRR began construction in earnest in December 1868 and chose a route heading southeast from Junction City through Council Grove, Emporia, Chanute, and Chetopa. They won the race, entering Cherokee land in June 1870.
Howe & Hoak were hired by the UPSBRR to do grading along the part of this route which passed through the Kaw Reserve near Council Grove, a reservation which had already been dramatically reduced and overrun by white settlers. This is the record book for the Howe & Hoak labor gang. The first page is a chart of "grade on the U.P.S.B.R.R." Pages 2 through 21 are the monthly payrolls for their gang. In the rear of the book are 26 pages of accounts with merchants for supplies used by the work gang. Most of them are with the firm Shamleffer & James, who operated a trading post at Council Grove. The supplies included food, tobacco, whiskey, clothing, and more. Also in the rear of the volume are two pages of paint recipes date 1881 by Reuben Hoak.
Reuben Nathaniel Hoak (1844-1933), who kept this record, was a native of Harrisburg, PA, served in a Pennsylvania regiment in the Civil War, and settled in Fannin County, TX by 1877.