Nov 21, 2024 - Sale 2687

Sale 2687 - Lot 232

Price Realized: $ 500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(WEST--COLORADO.) Gibb W. Palmer. Letter describing an early trip to Denver by wagon train, and city's "murders and robries." Autograph Letter Signed to Homer E. Chapin of Oneida, NY. 4 pages, 8 x 5 inches, on one folding sheet; mailing folds, minimal wear. With original illustrated cover from Cheney's Billiard Hall of Denver (stamp removed). Denver, CO, 2 July 1866
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This letter writer arrived in Denver just eight years after it was founded. He starts with a description of the trip west. "We had a gay old time. There were five wagons and twelve men when we first started out, but when we got to Fort Kearney the soldiers stationed there stoped us." They waited to merge with another wagon train to increase their numbers "for fear that the Indians would gobble us up if we went through with a small outfit." They saw "antilopes, wolves, prarrie dogs, prarrie chickens, geese, ducks, rattlesnakes and numerous other varmints" and "a number of Indians but they did not trouble us. They looked as if they would like to, but we kept the guns sticking out of the wagon."

In the city: "Denver is a gay place . . . full of fun and gamblers. It is a rough place in the night. Last night . . . there was a man muged and had his pockets picked of $150. . . . Murders and robries going on almost every day here, and up in the mountains. . . . I have been driveing mules up to the mountains and back." He also reports that a friend named West "has gone to work gulch mining."

With--3 letters from Palmer to Chapin while in Civil War service, each dated "Headquarters, Army of the Potomac," November 1864 to February 1865.