Sep 17, 2015 - Sale 2391

Sale 2391 - Lot 372

Price Realized: $ 2,125
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(WEST.) Slater, William C. Three letters from a Gold Rush emigrant on the California Trail, plus one announcing his death. 2, 2, 4, 2 manuscript pages, various sizes, most with integral address leaves, including inked postmarks from Iowa City, IO and Sacramento, CA; poor spelling, moderate to heavy wear and separations at folds, though minimal loss of text. (MRS) Vp, 1850
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Early in 1850, William Crawford Slater (circa 1810-1850) left his wife and four children in Dane County, Wisconsin to join an overland wagon train for the California gold fields. He wrote these letters from the trail, starting with Iowa City on 27 March, then from Princeton, MO on 21 April, and finally with a letter started in western Nebraska on 16 June and mailed from Fort Laramie, WY on 22 June. Each is addressed to his son-in-law Samuel Knox but begins "Dear wife and children." Slater found the land near Laramie "a very sickley cuntery, very bad water . . . called alkli water . . . like water with clay sterd in it. We boile this water, make it in coffey or tea." He adds that "we have pased through three tribes of Indiens, called the Foxes, Pawneas, and Sues. Those Sues are harmeles . . . a grate meney of them paid us a visit this morning to beg bread." For lack of wood, dried buffalo chips were used for fire: "Johnson is bakeing bread with the chips at this time." He concludes this last letter, "Be shore, right fer to me how you are git along to Sacramentto Sity, Calaforna."
Slater's final letter is followed by one from William Johnson to the Slater family, 29 September. Writing by amanuensis from Ophir, CA in the heart of gold-mining territory, Johnson warns: "I am about to break painful news to you. I wish you to nerve up while I inform you that William C. Slater is no more. He died Aug 29th at the Big Meadow above the sink of St Mary's River and received at the hands of the train as decent a burial as the circumstances would admit of." The causes of death were given as the "sick headache," diarrhea, and typhoid fever. Reporting generally on westward emigration, he notes that "a great many persons died on the road from cholera. . . . There are hundreds starving and dying from disease on the route. Added to this, the Indians are very troublesome, killing, scalping, and stealing at a terrible rate. . . . Capt. Waldo, who went out with a relief train a month ago, has gone on to the head of the Humbolt River to turn the emigrants back to Salt Lake to winter." Provenance: Charles Hamilton auction, 20 May 1965, lot 49, to the consignor.