Gold Rush Letters and Diaries Lead Swann's Americana Auction

Printed & Manuscript Americana comes to Swann Galleries on November 21 featuring items of mining interest from Alaska, California, Colorado, and Nevada including diaries, letters, and photographs featuring drunken miners by Nevada’s P.E. Larson.

Abel E. Babcock's 152-page diary of his experience in the Californian gold fields (estimate: $3,000 - $4,000) from December 31, 1851 to September 12, 1852, covers his journey from Litchfield, Michigan, via New York City, Panama, and Costa Rica to San Francisco. Having settled at Mud Springs (now El Dorado), he finds it impossible to cover his living expenses as a miner and takes on a variety of odds jobs and day labor. The diary chornicles Sacramento's boom, a cholera epidemic, endemic violence, and the lynching of a Native American. The diary ends with the first eight pages of Babcock's essay A Description of California As It Is In 1852, in Two Pictures. 

The 1850-1855 letters of Gold Rush miner Warren H. Porter to his wife and family (estimate: $15,000 - $25,000) also include the report of his fatal shooting by an outlaw. Like Babcock, he reports exhausted mining conditions. These conditions are also depicted in photographer P.E. Larson's images of a beer hall and gambling hall, and Floyd W. Sheelor's panoramic view of the Gold Rush boomtown of Dawson City, Yukon Territory, circa 1915 (estimate: $2,000 - $3,000).

Other highlights from the auction include:

• John Eliot’s 1643 New Englands First Fruits tract describing the earliest efforts to evangelize in Massachusetts which also includes the first printed description of young Harvard College
• Cotton Mather’s 1699 Pillars of Salt: An History of Some Criminals Executed in this Land for Capital Crimes, with Some of their Dying Speeches tract 
• a 1833 manuscript diary of a Mormon mission to western New York
• correspondence of a very early amateur baseball club from Oneida, NY
• a photo album of 1920s family vacations in Death Valley and throughout the West
• Confirmation of arms and nobility in favor of the Hernández Solórzano family, hand-painted coat of arms, Puebla, May 15, 1715
• archive of the pioneering female artist Arrah Lee Gaul