Mar 15, 2012 - Sale 2273

Sale 2273 - Lot 153

Price Realized: $ 6,240
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
CUSTER, ELIZABETH BACON. Unpublished manuscript memoir of her 1903 trip to Japan. 149 manuscript pages, additional manuscript notes, and 31-page scrapbook of pictures and menus; various sizes, condition generally strong; housed in an attractive tray case. Japan, November-December 1903 and undated
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Additional Details

Elizabeth Bacon Custer (1842-1933) was best known as the widow and biographer of George Armstrong Custer of Little Bighorn fame. In her later years, she was also an intrepid international traveler. These manuscript notes document her 1903 trip to Japan, apparently part of a book project which never reached fruition.
The bulk of this collection is a 93-page manuscript following a diary format, with revisions made for later publication. Two of these manuscripts also take the form of letters addressed to "Dear Agnes" (possibly her old friend and heir Agnes Bates Wellington), but even these look more like works in progress than actual letters. Custer travelled as part of a group of nine women (one of them, author Bertha Runkle, later published a novel based on her experiences in Japan). As a military widow visiting on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, she took particular notice of the nation's military preparations. She describes "the school children singing national airs as they marched thro' the streets for exercise, beginning the first military school at five, ascending grade by grade, finally a year at a kind of West Point, then must serve as common soldier for a year or more. Son of a noble or peasant compelled to do this." Also worth quoting are her evocations of a Tokyo neighborhood she called "the Coney Island of the Japs": "A capital marionette theatre, front entirely open, the zoo, the aquarium, a vaudeville with acrobats & bicyclists . . . booths for all kinds of Jap food--raw fish and eels, cakes baked while you wait, sake hot or cold & tea everywhere. Groups of figures life sized dressed in flowers apparently, which turned out to be growing plants made to twist and writhe themselves into kimonos and blossom at the same time. . . . It was do whatever tricks the artificial florists of Japan make them do" (page 14).
Provenance: Doris Harris Autographs of Los Angeles; collector Philip Jones of Connecticut. See Susan Wabuda, "Elizabeth Bacon Custer in Japan: 1903" in Manuscripts XXXV:1 (Winter 1983), 12-18.