?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 400
(MICHIGAN.) Seeley, Lewis W. Letter from a lonely lumberjack, written on birch bark. Autograph Letter Signed. 2 pages on one strip of bark, 11 x 3 inches; original folds and missing a few letters but surprisingly stable. Summit, Ogemaw County, MI, 2 January 1879
Lewis W. Seeley was born in New York in 1857, and wrote this letter on his twenty-second birthday from a logging camp in northern Michigan. Writing to his cousin Elcety, he employs some creative spelling along with his unusual choice of stationery: "Well I am old enough to think of giting me a woman. I have ben looking the woods all over but I can't find any, so I have got discourage and am goin to be a old old old bach as long as I live." He also describes life in the camp: "I can't think of more to write, thare is so mutch nois. Thare is thirty six men run out and in, sou I can't keep track of my leter. The forman he sits rite side of me a swaring about som thing. I have a good mind to give him a clip rite a crost the mouth. I will if I ever catch him in town. He is as mean a man as the Irsh race ever had." Seeley married two years after writing this letter, raised a family in Petoskey, MI, and had a long career on the railroad.
