Mar 19, 2015 - Sale 2376

Sale 2376 - Lot 197

Price Realized: $ 4,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
MANUSCRIPT PUBLISHED UNDER A PSEUDONYM IRVING, WASHINGTON. Autograph Manuscript, unsigned, working draft of an article entitled 'Jabez Doolittle and his Locomotive,' with numerous scattered holograph corrections, published as a letter to the editor in the May, 1839, issue of Knickerbocker under the pseudonym 'Hiram Clackenthorpe,' concerning the first person to have crossed the Rocky Mountains in a locomotive. 4 1/2 pages, 8vo, written on rectos of separate sheets, each mounted to blank leaf in—or bound into—a booklet; some scattered smudging and soiling. The booklet, 8vo, cloth covered stiff wrappers; 19th-century owner's inscriptions on front pastedown. Np, circa May 1839
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'. . . I was one among the first band of trappers that crossed the Rocky Mountains. We had encamped one night on a ridge of the Black Hills . . . when we were roused by the man who stood sentinel . . . . We started on our feet, and beheld a streak of fire coming across the prairies . . . . We had hardly time to guess what it might be, when it came up, whizzing, and clanking, and making a tremendous racket, and we saw something huge and black, with wheels and traps of all kinds; and an odd-looking being on top of it, busy as they say the devil is in a gale of wind. . . .
'. . . I make no doubt, Sir, this supposed infernal apparition was nothing more nor less than Jabez Doolittle, with his Locomotive, on his way to Astoria. . . . [H]is transit shows that those mountains are traversable with carriages, and that it is perfectly easy to have a rail-road to the Pacific. . . .'