Three printed versions of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended a long-running conflict between America and Mexico were the most expensive of these lots.
They raised $16,250 (£12,695) in all at PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium).
William H Richardson’s ...A Private Soldier in the Campaign of New and Old Mexico, an 1848 second edition in pictorial wrappers of this first-hand account of the US takeover of New Mexico, the conquest of Chihuahua and a march through Texas under the command of Col Doniphan of Missouri, made $2,750 (£2150).
Not published until 1900, in Arcadia (Florida) and on the presses of the Champion Job Rooms, it was a first edition in original salmon wrappers of A Veteran of Four Wars…
A record of pioneer life and adventure as well as a previously …Unwritten History of the Florida Seminole India Wars, this was the autobiography of Francis CM Boggess.
By then 67 years old, he wrote not just to set the historical record straight, but to raise the funds for an X-ray that would locate a bullet still lodged, presumably very painfully, in his knee.
Rough living
Manuscript highlights included, at $8500 (£6640), a diary kept by a young Bostonian, J Russell Hodge, while living and working alongside his father in Roosevelt, Montana Territory, in the years 1866-68. He was engaged in a gold-mining and milling operation.
The diary, said PBA, contains gripping accounts of desperados, thievery, vigilante actions and even a trial in which he and his father were charged with murder when a man was killed while they were defending both their home and the mine.
Father and son were both wounded at the time, but the writer was not one to get too emotional, it seems.
He records the aftermath by writing: “A surgeon soon arrived and after dressing father’s wound attended to me… whilst under the influence of chloroform Drs. Glick and Maupin took off my hand.”
