Archive of letters

SPEARS, Raymond Smiley (1876-1950). Award-winning author, woodsman, trapper, journalist, traveler, president of the American Trappers' Association. An archive of TLS's and retained copies of TLS's, mostly 4to, 114pp., comprising correspondence between Spears (his letters are lengthy) and his literary agent, William Gerard Chapman, International Press Bureau, Chicago, entirely about Spears' prolific literary endeavors, and wildlife conservation. Principally from Little Falls, New York and Inglewood, California, 1921-1941

A fascinating collection of letters by a fascinating man. Spears tells Chapman that "I've written, had published, millions of words in fiction, a million or two on regional and local political matters, and hundreds of articles on general and political and wildcrafting and touring-travel, strange region tripping and seeing and experiencing..." His eleven published books include an account of a trip on the Great Lakes by skiff; how to be a fur trapper; camping on the great rivers; safe hiking; gun safety, etc. Included is a 3pp. typed autobiography with manuscript corrections and deletions in which he says "When it was obvious city life was impossible for him, Ray Spears left New York city, and notebook in hand began to range the back regions of the United States..." "Thus the boy became a woodsman, hunting, fishing, trapping--his education based on his father's specialty library of Northern New York history, Indian documents and lore,..he walked from Utica, N. Y., into southwestern Virginia, and in a $5 skiff went down the Holston river into the Tennessee and down to Mussel Shoals before the Wilson Dam, the TVA were thought of. He went down the Mississippi in a 16-foot skiff, rowed along the North Shore of Lake Superior in a skiff, rode 50,000 miles on a bicycle, further on a motorcycle and then 150,000 miles in automobiles...He spent a month in the last rendezvous of the 'Hole-in-the-Wall' gang in Missouri Basin Bad Lands..."

The collection contains 30 letters from Spears to Chapman, 29 of them TLS's, one ALS in pencil, 35pp., mostly 4to; 36 retained copies of TLS's from Chapman to Spears; 24 retained copies of TLS's from Chapman to officials of Mississippi riverboat companies about an article Spears published about the Mississippi in Successful Farming (circulation 1,200,000), with 6 of their responses to Chapman; Spears typed autobiography; and two typed copies of a synopsis of his short story Frogs in their Puddle.Spears was prolific, and his articles and short stories were published in a number of magazines including, Adventure (for which he wrote 83), Saturday Evening Post; Argosy; West; Zane Grey's Western Magazine; Field and Stream; Texas Ranger; The Popular Magazine; Collier's, and many more. For most of his life Spears was a conservationist, writing here about himself: "Timber and land thieves devastated the Adirondack wilds, to which Spears owed his life as a boy. Hotly he attacked the raiders...the cause of Conservation and Wild Life grew on Spears, but the surprise of his life came when the American Trappers' Association asked him to become Conservation Director of their organization..." In addition to his books and magazine contributions he wrote two motion pictures, Hoarded Assets," (Scribner's June 1918), and "Janie of the Waning Glories." (All-Story Weekly, May-June 1920).