Autograph Letter Signed. Sacramento, Calif., May 3, 1852. 1pg.+ original mailing envelope. To his cousin, Robert R. Carrington, San Francisco
“...I am practicing Law in this place in Company with C. Cole…I should be very happy to hear from you…Do you intend locating in San F. In some respects this City is a more favorable location especially to one who does not desire to lay out a large capital. Any business which I can do here, either for yourself or friends, I shall be happy to attend to…”
The son of a clergyman and Andrew Jackson intimate, the 23 year-old Ely, later a prominent California legislator, already had two unusual accomplishments behind him when he began practicing law in turbulent Gold Rush Sacramento: Landing in San Francisco in the spring of 1850, he had sold paintings to gambling saloons and whore-houses, thus claiming to have the first “art gallery” in the new state of California. More remarkably, at age 16, he had gone to sea aboard a whaling vessel – the same year, incidentally, that Herman Melville returned from a similar voyage. But in 1849, two years before the appearance of Melville’s fictional “Moby Dick”, Ely published “There She Blows”, his own account of his whaling adventures – a rare book, no copy appearing at auction in the past fifty years. Ely made no mark at all as a Sacramento attorney – future US Senator Cornelius Cole does not even mention him as a partner in his memoirs – and we can locate no other letter written by him at this early point in his amazing life.