Descripción
[4]pp., on a single folio sheet. Accompanied by a contemporary blank envelope. Noticeable wear and staining, with considerable fold separations, especially along the center horizontal fold. Good. An early James W. Denver letter written by him to his two sisters in Ohio, Mary Caroline and Jane Campbell Denver, while he was working as a lawyer and actor in Missouri in 1846. This was a year before James Denver (1817-92) raised a unit to fight during the Mexican-American War, and before he had served in any of the varied and famous roles during his long and distinguished career. After the Mexican-American War, Denver served in the California state government, the United States House of Representatives as a Congressman from California, as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Territorial Governor of "Bleeding Kansas," and as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, among other positions. Denver first moved to Missouri in 1841 to teach school and returned there in 1845 to practice law. In the present letter Denver discusses the merits and faults of recently-published literature, particularly his "severe criticism" of a poem entitled "The Hunter on the Hills." He also relates the news that he gave a collection of his own poems to the "Platte Argus" for publication. Almost two pages of the letter are taken up with an incident of spurned love that Denver describes in detail, in which a jilted husband experiences "running off with his ladies love - of getting married - of losing his wife - of having a fight - of seeing a man murdered and of going home very much frightened and in a bad humor all in the same night. He has since stuck up notices warning all persons not to trust his wife on his account." Denver then spends most of the last page writing about the local unmarried women in neighboring Clay County. He claims to "not care a straw about any of them," but writes a paragraph detailing a few of the women. In the penultimate paragraph, Denver touches upon his legal career in Missouri, reporting that no murder charges were filed for the "Estill affair." As Denver writes of Missouri law: "In this country we have by law five degrees of murder and it was necessary that at least twelve of the Grand jurors should agree on some one of the degrees which they could not do. He was therefore discharged but may be indicted at any future time." Denver concludes his letter with a quote from his friend and Missouri legal colleague Bela Metcalf Hughes, who would in the coming decades himself become a prominent resident of Denver, Colorado. An early and informative letter from Denver to his sisters while he was working as a lawyer in frontier Missouri. N° de ref. del artículo WRCAM56819
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