Manuscripts
Series of seventeen letters sent by Dwight Bartlett from Nevada and Utah to his family in Connecticut between 1870 and 1873. The letters are addressed to his mother Christine Fisher Bartlett and sister Christina Bartlett Carpenter (later Brainerd). Bartlett's letters provide vivid accounts, many of them disparaging, of his experiences with and observations of life in the West. He writes throughout of his homesickness, illnesses, monetary losses, and the advent of the railroad. He also specifically writes about the Shoshone and Ute Indians in Utah and of the Mormons, who he derides as having "very few men of intelligence and wealth...so they lack the elements that give strength and dignity to a community" (1870, Jan.5); of traveling to San Francisco to organize a company to work the mines in the Cope District (he later wrote that the trip "accomplished nothing"), of the contrast in opportunities for those with a "little style" and poor workingmen, and of his belief that unemployment, especially on the Pacific Railroad, was caused by Chinese laborers (1870, March 5); of the lack of opportunities in the mines near Pine Grove, Nevada, of passing up an opportunity to accompany an expedition to Big Horn because "it is almost certain death for white men to go there unless they go in large numbers and well armed," of his lack of respect for political figures such as U.S. Grant and Ben Butler, of his low opinion of Nevada Indians ("certain...writers have thrown a false and foolish glamour around the character of the Indian"), and of the "frog pond lawyers" in mountain camps (1870, July 27); of the danger of the mines near Virginia City, of which he writes "a larger proportion of men who work in these mines have been killed than of those who were in the war," particularly at the Yellow Jacket Mine (1870, Sep.15); of attending the legislature at Carson, where "it is said votes were sold dog cheap," of the frequent activities of vigilante committees, who stormed a jail and hung a prisoner, and of the jails being so full that "old bums can get drunk with impunity for there is no place to put them" (1871, March 29); of a traveling bull and bear fight and of the haunting of a cabin near Dayton, Nevada, by a spirit named Anne (1871, Aug.2); of fires in Virginia City and Pioche and the subsequent escape of prisoners (1871, Oct.2); and of an earthquake centered near Inyo, California (1872, Apr.13).
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