Apr 08, 2014 - Sale 2344

Sale 2344 - Lot 277

Price Realized: $ 2,375
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 250 - $ 350
(WEST.) Group of Swain family letters regarding the search for gold and the Civil War. 5 Autograph Letters Signed; various sizes, minor wear; with 3 envelopes, one with faint Fort Bridger postmark, and another stamped and marked in Virginia. Vp, 1859-64
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Julius Marshall Swain (1835-1911) went west in 1859, drawn up in the Pike's Peak Gold Rush. He wrote to his friend Frank from a small settlement called Republican Fork in Kansas, with grim news about the prospects: "A set of desperate fellows with nothing but starvation before them had shot the proprietors of Denver City and were about to burn the place. Great numbers were on the road home with nothing to support life but what they could beg of wagons going east" (16 May 1859). His brother Joseph nonetheless went west himself in 1862, writing to Julius from Fort Bridger, UT in a wagon train heading to San Francisco, telling of an ugly split with his business partner. Fortunately, "he had not a friend on the train & he was obliged to come to terms. . . . He is left behind somewhere & I hope never to meet him again" (23 July 1862). In the Civil War, Julius served as a telegrapher in the Signal Corps and with the 39th Massachusetts. His two war-date letters to his wife discuss efforts to lay a submarine telegraph cable, Wilson's Wharf, VA, September-October 1864. The collection also includes a letter from brother Edwin Swain of the 39th Massachusetts to sister Elizabeth Smith, discussing a visit to Mathew Brady's studio, Poolesville, MD, 12 March 1863.