ABSTRACT
The Thomas Stephens family letters of 1865 and 1866 were written by Cornish immigrants in the lead region of the upper Mississippi River Valley. They begin in Platteville, and end from Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Stephens was not very literate. He complains about the cuts in wages. References to trouble with the ‘endiens’ (Indians), with three being killed and scalped, give some sense of the undeveloped nature of the region. Stephens asks for money, which shows his difficulties in adjusting to America. But by the time he writes the letter of 26 November 1865, to his wife, he is working at the St Claire Mining Company and is able to send her $42 – though confusion with the post offices delays the money. Apparently Stephens is working to support his family back in England. The letter of 13 July 1866 is written by Jane, who obviously had joined her husband, and in it she seems in low spirits, and admits ‘I want to come home’. She refers to the death of her sister’s husband, who served in the war, and may have died of wounds: ‘I have cride every day pretty neer since I hird he was dead’. She is clearly miserable, is relying on God, and so far is not a successful migrant. The many corrections in punctuation and spelling in brackets were made in the original typescript of 1941, and most of them have been retained to assist the reader’s comprehension. There were also a number of annotations made in the typescript, which have been given here as footnotes.
