Lot
461 
(Trail Letters) San Diego, Cal./Jan'y 1, 1850. Dateline on folded letter to New York City, letter with interesting content of traveler on the Gila Overland Route heading for the gold fields…Ten months since I left New York & am still seven hundred miles this side of "El Dorado". The overland journey has proved a "smasher". It has not only smashed all our wagons & more than half our mules but has annihilated nearly a whole year of my life. I wrote to you from Pecos, near Santa Fe, saying that I should probably work through to the Pacific & return by sea to New York & reach there next spring or summer…But what has kept me so long on the route?…You will probably see in the newspapers many details of the route down the Gila & across the desert. Read the worst and think of me.…traveling through an uninhabited territory is nonsense of the most tedious kind. Natural scenery, boundless praires, towering mountains, trailess forests, rush torrents; all that I have seen of this would not repay a man for one days suffocation footing it through the sands of the Gila…For weeks & months we would have been glad of an encounter with the Comanches or Apaches as a relief to the solitude of our journey., cover carried privately to New York and placed in mails with red "New-York/Feb. 7/2cts" cds for local delivery, Very Fine. Estimate $750 - 1,000.
Trail letters carried on this route are substantially rarer than covers carried on the Northern or Southern Routes.
Realized: $1,450