SOUIX INDIAN WA SURVEYOR GOVERNOR SCIENCE SIGNED LETTER Start Price USD 19.99 Current Price USD 127.94 Time Left - Bid Count 8 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Saturday, October 11, 2008 End Time Tuesday, October 21, 2008 Location Garden State - NJ See more about 'SOUIX INDIAN WA SURVEYOR GOVERNOR SCIENCE SIGNED LETTER' Description George Gibbs (1815 - 1873) American Indian Tribal Ethnographer, Athropologist, Geologist, Surveyor of the Northwest U.S. Boundary, Acting Governor of Washington Territory, Brigadier General of Militia and Historian! Here's an 1845 AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED by Gibbs GREAT STAMPLESS FOLDED LETTER, POSTMARKED NEW YORK 5 CTS, ALSO "PAID" MARKING AND MANUSCRIPT "6" MARKING, SIGNED BY GEORGE GIBBS, VERY FAMOUS MAN, DATED 10/16/1845, INTERESTING TEXT IN LETTER, SENT TO BOSTON MA, REGARDING LITHOGRAPH AND MORE, HE WAS AN ARTIST AS WELL, GIBBS IS ALSO KNOWN FOR BEING A SKETCH ARTIST AND TOPOGRAPHER... The excitement over the discovery of gold in California dislodged Gibbs, and in 1849 he left New York for St. Louis, Missouri. Joining a march of the Mounted Riflemen, he traveled overland from Fort Leavenworth to Oregon City. On the trip he made many drawings and kept a journal, portions of which were published in New York newspapers. His lively entries described the climate and landscape, life in camp, and encounters with Sioux Indians and emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Known for his expertise on Native American customs and languages, Gibbs participated in numerous treaty negotiations between the U.S. government and the native tribes. During the Civil War, he was one of the founders of the Union League Club of New York in 1863 and joined the Loyal National League. The letter is datelined at New York, October 16, 1845 & in very good condition! AN IMPORTANT ADDITION TO YOUR 19TH CENTURY SCIENCE & WESTERN POLITICAL HISTORY AUTOGRAPH & MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION! <<=>> BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF GEORGE GIBBS <<=>> Gibbs, George (17 July 1815-9 Apr. 1873), ethnographer, geologist, and historian, was born at "Sunswick Farms" near Astoria, Long Island, New York, the son of George Gibbs, a gentleman farmer and amateur geologist, and Laura Wolcott. Both of his parents descended from wealthy, old- stock colonial families. At the age of nine, George was sent to the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, which was directed by historian George Bancroft. Although his father had planned a military career for his oldest son, the family's staunch support for the Federalist party made an appointment to West Point impossible in Jacksonian America. Instead, in 1832 Gibbs went to Harvard to study law under Joseph Story. Gibbs's paternal grandmother and aunts lived in Boston, and through them and William Ellery Channing, his uncle by marriage, he was introduced to Boston society. In 1834 Gibbs published his first book, The Judicial Chronicle, a list of judges of the common law and chancery in the United States and England. Although he was close to finishing his studies at Harvard, he left for Europe with an aunt that spring and spent the next two years traveling. Upon his return, he settled in New York, where he was joined by his mother and siblings. His father had died while Gibbs was at Harvard. Instead of practicing law, Gibbs decided to write a biography of his maternal grandfather, former secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, a project that his former teacher Bancroft encouraged. However, the financial panic of 1837 forced Gibbs to take a more practical approach to life, and he returned to law. After receiving his J.D. from Harvard in 1838 without any further studies, Gibbs joined the law practice of Jonathan Prescott Hall. Gibbs continued to be less than fully committed to law, and he barely earned a living. He loved the outdoors and was interested in natural history and geology. He hunted and fished, mounted a large collection of birds, and collected mineral samples. The latter he donated to Yale College, where his collection joined his father's mineralogical collection. His love of history was nurtured at the New-York Historical Society, which Gibbs joined in 1839. In 1843 he became the society's librarian, cataloging the collection and steering it toward an emphasis on American subjects. Gibbs started a law practice with Henry Hall Ward, a friend from Hall's office, but his work for the historical society absorbed more and more of his time. He also recommenced work on his biography of Wolcott, which became Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams (1846). Working from his grandfather's papers, Gibbs decided to write a political history instead of a biography, but he made no secret of his own political loyalties. In that volume he wrote that he "felt himself not only the vindicator, but in some sort the avenger, of a by-gone party and a buried race" and ominously described the Jeffersonian Republicans as the root of the nation's "demoralization, and the efficient cause of our ruin" (p. ix). Gibbs's book is still an important source of material on the Federal party's ascendancy. The excitement over the discovery of gold in California finally dislodged Gibbs completely from his law practice, and in 1849 he left New York for St. Louis, Missouri. Joining a march of the Mounted Riflemen, he traveled overland from Fort Leavenworth to Oregon City. On the trip he made many drawings and kept a journal, portions of which were published in New York newspapers. His lively entries described the climate and landscape, life in camp, and encounters with Sioux Indians and emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Gibbs settled in Astoria, Oregon, near the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1850 he was appointed deputy collector for the port, but he resigned later that year in the aftermath of having embarrassed his superior by an overzealous prosecution of the customs laws. In 1851 he joined Redick McKee on an expedition to draw up land treaties with the Indian tribes west of the Sacramento Valley. In five months McKee's group met with nearly 10,000 Indians and concluded five treaties. Gibbs, who had already been interested in Indian languages, compiled vocabulary lists of fifteen indigenous tongues and worked on maps of the region. In 1852 he tried his hand at prospecting in northern California with less than impressive results. By the end of the year he was back in Astoria, again as a customs collector, but when Franklin Pierce took office in 1853, Gibbs lost this political appointment. Gibbs soon found other work. In 1853 George B. McClellan hired him as a geologist and ethnologist to help survey a railroad route to the Pacific. In 1854 Gibbs left Oregon for good, settling near Fort Steilacoom in the Washington Territory on a farm he called "Chetlah." He was rarely there, however, continuing his surveying and conducting ethnological research. Working for the Indian commission in the territory, Gibbs helped shape Indian policy. He argued for keeping Native Americans on their traditional homelands to preserve the cultural and linguistic diversity that he knew was dissolving quickly on reservations. He also campaigned for the use of Indian place names, which he often noted on the maps he made. Gibbs served briefly in 1854 as the acting governor of Washington Territory and was appointed brigadier general of the militia in 1855. In 1857 and 1858 Gibbs was again in the field, this time surveying the forty-ninth parallel between the United States and Canada for the Northwest Boundary Survey. Working for Archibald Campbell, he traversed the border from the Pacific to the Rockies. Gibbs took every opportunity to add to his knowledge of Indian languages and also collected animal, insect, and plant specimens, many of which he sent to scientists like Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray. In 1860 Gibbs finally returned East to write up his field research in Washington. Twelve years in the West had not made him a rich man as he had hoped, but he did have a large store of artifacts and information. Setting in Washington, D.C., in 1861, Gibbs continued his work on Native American linguistics, and the Smithsonian Institution published several volumes of his work. While Gibbs avoided politics and thought the Republicans had done little to avoid dividing the Union, he was not idle during the Civil War. He was one of the founders of the Union League Club of New York in 1863, joined the Loyal National League, and wrote for the Loyal Publication Society. In 1865 Gibbs was appointed clerk to a commission investigating British claims in the American Northwest, a position he held until 1869. He also published another book, Notes on the Tinneh or Chepewyan Indians of British and Russian America, in 1867. In 1871, at the age of fifty- six, Gibbs married his cousin Mary Kane Gibbs; they had no children. The couple moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Gibbs continued his research and writing despite ill health. He died, probably from a combination of rheumatic gout and a pulmonary illness, in New Haven. While Gibbs did not have the professional training to be able to analyze his discoveries, his meticulous observations and recording allowed others to do so. His work on Native Americans was useful to the next generation of anthropologists. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bibliography Many of Gibbs's papers, including sketches, are at the Smithsonian Institution. Works by Gibbs not mentioned above include Alphabetical Vocabularies of the Clallam and the Lummi (1863) and Instructions for Research Relative to the Ethnology and Philology of America (1863). See Osborne Cross, The March of the Mounted Riflemen (1940), in which Gibbs's 1849 diary entries are reproduced. Stephen Dow Beckham, "George Gibbs, 1815-1873: Historian and Ethnologist" (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1970), is a detailed account of Gibbs's life and work. I am a proud member of the Universal Autograph Collectors Club (UACC), The Ephemera Society of America, the Manuscript Society & the American Political Items Collectors (APIC) (member name: John Lissandrello). I subscribe to each organizations' code of ethics and authenticity is guaranteed. Place a Bid!