ShareThisElizabeth Everingham's 1851 letter is brown with age and tattered along the folds. But the black ink has barely faded.
You can imagine the weary 28-year-old mother of four, alone in a cabin near Dubuque, Iowa. Perhaps it is night, and her four children -- all under the age of 6 -- are sleeping. She sits at the table in a circle of candlelight, staring at a blank sheet of paper and wondering what to write to her husband, who is panning for gold in California.
Finally, she dips her pen into an inkwell.
"May the 21 1851," she begins.
"Dear husband I now take my pen in hand to let you know that we are all well at present ..."
No one knows if William Everingham ever received his wife's letter. But 160 years later, after Rolf Engstrom of Edina, Minn., bought the letter at an auction, he tracked down Everingham's descendants.
Turns out one of them lives just a mile from Engstrom in Edina.
Susan Jacobson grew up with a father who was fascinated by genealogy and was always talking about what he'd found out about long-gone relatives. For Jacobson, the letter helps bring those relatives to life.
Forty-niner William Everingham was her great-great-great-uncle.
"This is a real person with real feelings," she said. "It's very cool. Life was terrible then. It makes me a little more curious about them."
Her father, Grant Hayes of Duluth, Minn., has spent decades researching the history of his wife Marjorie's family. Her family's mixed English, Scottish and German heritage is far more interesting to an investigator than his solidly Finnish background, he said. He was thrilled when Engstrom found him via the Internet and sent him a copy of the letter.
"I was moved and touched by (Elizabeth's) loyalty to her husband," Hayes said.
Engstrom bought the letter online during last month's New York auction of maps, documents and books from the estate of Floyd Risvold, an Edina man who was fascinated with stamps and postal history and the settlement of the American West. Engstrom, who has dabbled in collecting before and is interested in Minnesota history, won the Everingham letter bidding for $325.
He learned that Risvold had bought the letter in 1979 because it is the only known example bearing the name of an express company called "WJ & Co.," which probably picked up mail in San Francisco to deliver to miners near Sacramento, Calif.
Elizabeth's letter conveys little news but much anxiety over her husband's absence. She says she had gotten home at the start of May to find "things destroyed considerable" but doesn't explain. She frets that she had written William five times but may not have mailed the letters properly. And she says she hopes to see him the next winter or spring.
"I can do very well without gold as you are as dear to me without it," she writes. She folded the letter to make an envelope and addressed it to "Sac City Upper California, William Everingham."
If the scrawled date on the letter's outside is correct, it took about four months for Elizabeth's missive to reach California. The letter likely traveled down the Mississippi River by boat, crossed Panama and then went by boat to San Francisco. Engstrom said express companies alerted miners that they had received letters by printing their names in newspapers.
As soon as Engstrom won the letter, he began trying to find out more about William and Elizabeth Everingham and discovered Internet genealogical sites created by family descendants. One of the first pages he visited had a portrait of William in his later years, with thick white hair and an impressive mustache and beard.
William, who had gone to California with his father, returned to Iowa after two or three years, Hayes said. He was born in Canada, the grandson of an Englishman who had emigrated to the United States but fought for the king during the American Revolution and fled north afterward to farm on 250 acres of land he received free as a crown loyalist.
Hayes said the 1850 census confirms that William and his father panned for gold as independent prospectors in Placerville, Calif., which at the time had the more sinister name of "Hangtown." Government records, which tracked how much prospectors netted, showed the two each made about $2.25 a day -- about $64 in 2008 dollars.
Elizabeth, Hayes said, "was running the farm."
Eventually, the couple had 13 children. Three of them died in infancy. Records posted on the Everingham Family Archives Record Web site show William fought in the Civil War before being honorably discharged in 1862 for "diabetes, general debility, broken down constitution and general unfitness for service."
But he outlived Elizabeth, who died at age 62 in 1885. William died at age 74 in 1897. Both are buried in Little Turkey Cemetery in Chickasaw County, Iowa.
Now, their story lives on in Elizabeth's letter.
On the paper's reverse side, she scribbled some stanzas from a poem. Engstrom's detective work revealed it was written by Frances Elizabeth Swift, whose sentimental turns on grim realities of 19th-century life, such as death and loss, were printed in magazines and newspapers under the nom de plume "Fanny Fales."
The poem was titled "Come Home," Engstrom said. Perhaps because she had already begged William to return in her letter, Elizabeth omitted that repeated refrain, simply ending her message with an apt line that compared seeing a baby girl to finding "a vein of gold."
"I was very touched by it," Engstrom said. "I had no idea the letter would be that wrenching. After all those months he was gone, and her not knowing if he was alive."
Eventually, Engstrom said, he may give the letter to a frontier museum in Chickasaw County. But his interest in things such as the Gold Rush and Western expansion has been piqued by the letter.
"Maybe I'll start my own collection," he said.
(E-mail smetan(at)startribune.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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