HARTE, Bret; BELLOWS, Henry W.
Fourteenth Anniversary of the Society of California Pioneers. Oration by Rev. Henry W. Bellows; Poem by Frank Bret Harte, Esq.
FIRST EDITION. San Francisco: Printed at the Alta California Book and Job Office, 1864.
Octavo. 31 pp. Original printed wrappers, housed in a quarter orange morocco slipcase. With the engraved bookplate of George Clinton Ward, a California utility executive. BAL 7237; Cowan II, p. 595. Very good: lower front hinge beginning to separate; chipping to the spine head; light soiling and minor damp staining to the lower covers; shadow of bookplate adhesive to the front cover. The pamphlet itself is sound, complete, and clean throughout.
A scarce early Bret Harte imprint — per BAL, his fourth appearance in print. On September 9, 1864, the Society of California Pioneers — founded in 1850 to gather the surviving men of the Gold Rush era — marked the fourteenth anniversary of California's admission to the Union. The visiting orator was Henry Whitney Bellows, the New York Unitarian minister who founded the U.S. Sanitary Commission to aid Civil War soldiers; Harte supplied the poem of the day. The Alta California Book and Job Office gathered both texts, with the newspaper's account of the celebration, into this pamphlet in printed wrappers. The George Clinton Ward bookplate lends the copy further California provenance.
SKU TO-2026-031
