Fourteen months and 10,000 miles with his team of seven dogs and wolves

[Eli A. Smith]

[Drop title] Eli A. Smith: Noted U.S. Mail Carrier and Musher [With Original Photograph]

Washington? s.i., 1907? Good. Item #25583

Washington? s.i., 1907. Presumed First Edition. Photo-illustrated broadsheet flyer (23x15.5cm) printed entirely in brown, text on verso in double columns; accompanied by original photograph (10x18cm) of Smith and his team. Old mail folds to flyer with bottom third entirely split, three small losses to right-hand margin from biopredation not affecting text or image, the whole rather dust-soiled. Good overall. Photograph in About Fine condition.

Promotional broadsheet recounting the sensational fourteen-month, 10,000-mile trek made by U.S. mail carrier Eli A. Smith from Nome, Alaska, to Washington, DC, with his team of seven "dogs and wolves," apparently made on a bet between the local Nome miners and mail carriers. The image in the flyer, of Smith and his team of dogs, is not quite the same as the image captured in the original photograph, which shows a snowy foreground with a lake just beyond and mountains beyond that. A newspaper article published a month later announced Smith's marriage to Dora Harbaugh, a "temporary resident" of Washington, DC. Perhaps the two events are not unrelated.

OCLC notes a single holding (U. Alaska) for an eight-page pamphlet with a similar title, for which this flyer may have been the prospectus. This item not separately catalogued.

Price: $250.00