CLAPPE, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith ("Dame Shirley").
The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851–52.
ZAMORANO EIGHTY — FIRST EDITION IN BOOK FORM, ONE OF 450 NUMBERED COPIES, THIS NO. 121 OF 200 ON EXETER BOOK-PAPER. San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, at his Private Press, 1922.
The first appearance in book form of the celebrated Dame Shirley letters — twenty-three letters written between September 1851 and November 1852 from the gold-mining camps of Rich Bar and Indian Bar on the Feather River, addressed to her sister in Massachusetts and first published serially in The Pioneer magazine of San Francisco in 1854–55 under the pseudonym Dame Shirley. One of 450 numbered copies signed by the publisher; this is No. 121 of the first 200 printed on Exeter book-paper, the balance of the edition on buff California bond.
Octavo (9¼ × 6¼ inches). [l], 350 pp. Printed by hand by Thomas C. Russell at his private press in San Francisco, with eight full-page hand-colored plates by M. Buehler (including the frontispiece), each protected by an original tissue guard, and with decorative chapter headings, initials, and ornamental friezes in deep blue. Original tan linen spine over blue-grey paper-covered boards, a gilt vignette of a miner with pickaxe beneath a sunburst to the upper board, printed paper spine label; in the publisher's blue-grey dust jacket with gilt lettering. A spare duplicate spine label is tipped to the rear interior — Russell's customary provision for his limited editions, intact here. Fine in the original dust jacket; boards clean, square, and bright, the gilt fresh, the spine label crisp, the interior fresh with all eight plates and tissue guards present and intact. The jacket — a fragile pictorial wrapper that rarely survives on the 1922 issue — is unusually well preserved.
Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (1819–1906) was a New England–educated woman who sailed around Cape Horn to California in 1849 with her physician husband, Fayette, and followed him into the diggings in 1851. Her letters are now regarded as among the most vivid and accomplished firsthand records of Gold Rush life — valued both for a rare woman's view of a masculine frontier and for the precision and warmth of the observation. A handsome copy of the foundational book form of one of the great Gold Rush narratives. Zamorano Eighty No. 69; Wright-Howes C427; Kurutz 133b; Graff 727; Wheat, Gold Rush Books, 39.
SKU TO-2026-020
