Beschreibung:

Lot of 6, including: 47 pp journal of Quaker and self-taught naturalist John H. McIlvain documenting his first journey "Far West" to Fort Laramie from March 1853 until June 1853, and five, 7 x 11 in. photographs of various buildings at Fort Laramie taken in 1931, each stamped on the reverse W.W. Scott, Omaha, Nebraska and inscribed by a previous owner. An antiquarian of sorts, John M. McIlvain was a Quaker, lumber mill owner, self-educated ornithologist, and naturalist. McIlvain's interests directed him towards the American West, to Fort Laramie and other western forts, to live and study with American Indians. Two years before his visit, the American government and some Plains Indian chiefs agreed upon the first installment of the Fort Laramie Treaty that attempted to end tribal rivalries and permit travelers and railroad workers on the Platte River Road. The government allocated territory to tribes and installed head chiefs to ineffective councils, but the treaty failed when the United States government seized back the land in the 1860s after the discovery of gold in the area. McIlvain, however, visited Fort Laramie and the surrounding plains during a relatively peaceful time in the spring of 1853. Suited to the comforts of urban life in Philadelphia, the journey West was physically and socially hard for McIlvain. He struggled to find his place within the small cohort of people travelling with him. He wrote often about his loneliness and the snickering of members of his traveling companions or Western settlers in taverns and trade depots. Like his culture, he had a difficult time being accepted into American Indian society. Having little to no prior study or knowledge of American Indian customs, he called tepees sinew tents and believed that he could communicate with American Indians by signs...universal among the tribes that did not exist (June 1853?). Still, he was very intrigued by American Indians and disgusted by the low ebb of morality of settlers who sometimes poisoned starving Shawnee and Windolts(?) like unwanted vermin (Kansas, April 14, 1853). He described American Indian languages as the most soft and plaintive of any [he] ever heard and was amused by women slinging their infants in their papooses (Kansas, April 14, 1853). Despite his original plans to live with American Indians, he spent more time at various military posts. He did stay with a kind-hearted Kansas man in his wigwam for a few nights. During his travels, he made one friend, the chaplain at Fort Laramie who shared similar interests. The two went on various ornithological expeditions, acquiring a wide variety of specimens that would eventually be in displayed in McIlvain’s house museum in Philadelphia. One item he obtained for his collection was not a bird, but a bloody arrow pulled from the body of a soldier who died during a minor altercation with a local tribe. A strange man in American Indian and Western society, McIlvain felt most welcomed in nature. He marveled at the surrounding scenery, especially around the Platte River. After visiting the Platte, he wrote: [It] is one of the most beautiful streams I ever beheld; like most others in this land, it is sparsely timbered, although intervals occur for a distance of 100 miles, in which there is no wood. Its banks are generally low, different in this respect widely from [illegible]...although the channel is rapid, it is almost everywhere fordable, its width is from 1 to 1 1/2 miles. A range of bluffs extend on either side, sometimes running parallel....You approach one of these bluffs imagining it to be half a mile distant, but find after traveling for an hour that you are as remote as when you set out. Where you first strike the Platt [sic] these elevations greatly resemble those in the vicinity of the beach or ocean and are of a yellowish sand, but as you advance with an almost continuous upward gradation, these become grand and awfully sublime...Oh did I posses the painter's art, or the poet's lyr