2 Autograph Letters Signed to Guy Phelps, Conn. Life Insurance Co. Hartford, Conn from company agents: John B. Fay. Beardstown, Illinois. Feb. 20, 1850. 2pp. + stampless address leaf; and H.B.Tuttle. Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Feb. 20, 1850. 1pg.+ stampless address leaf. Both writing about California Gold Rush emigrants seeking insurance for travel to Oregon.
Fay writes about W. Chapman, “a first class risk…He intends going to Oregon and from there to California. Leaves for 2 or 3 years and starts 15th March...his Lady is not going. He is a carpenter by trade of sober and good industrious habits. He wishes to stay in Oregon if he is pleased and can do well if not will go to the Mines and return in 2 or 3 years. He goes by Land with a Co. of 50 or 60 going out from here, a Mr. Miller is getting it up who has lately retd. from Cal and Oregon and is taking out his family...about 40...young men going with Miller…” Tuttle asks, “Do you insure good lives which are going to Oregon at the latest rates, charging for the risk of the journey? If so, what are the charges, respectively, for the overland, Isthmus, and Cape Horn routes? If the party is putting into San Francisco at a healthy season of the year, desired to remain 2 or 3 months and then proceed to Oregon, would it be permitted?”
The Beardstown group may have been the “Linus Brooks Train” of some 30 travelers which left Illinois on March 28, their trip described by the Washington Genealogical Society in 1986. Brooks was an early Oregon pioneer who founded the town which still bears his name. His journey was apparently separate from that of William Winlock Miller, whose trek to Oregon is recounted at length in William 1996 Confederacy of Ambition, a biography of Miller who later became a political leader in Washington Territory.