[Autograph Letter, Signed, by John H. Watson, a Settler in Bleeding Kansas, Reporting on the Beauty of the Territory's Landscape and the Fertility of Its Soil]

Emporia, Ks: March 12, 1859. Very good.. [4]pp. Original mailing folds, short separations along some folds, a couple of short closed tears, a few tiny nicks to edges. A rare correspondence from Kansas at the time of the free state - slave state tensions in the 1850s. Here, the most important early settler of Emporia, Kansas, John H. Watson sends a territorial paean to his father back home in Pennsylvania. In his densely-written letter, Watson ran out of room, and had to sign his name over previously written text along the right edge of its last page. Watson was a Quaker lawyer-physician from Pennsylvania, who moved his entire family west to Kansas in 1858 along with other abolitionists in an effort to ensure the territory entered the Union as a free state.

Watson does not mention the bloody political battles taking place at the time, but rather bemoans the state of his inheritance, the cost of his travel, and more, while also providing a firsthand report of the unsettled territory's beauty, fertility, and climate. A much-abbreviated version of Watson's long correspondence is as follows. "To get a home somewhere on these plains has been the object of my hopes for many years, but whether we will be able to accomplish it is not yet certain.... Manu privations is what we have made up our minds to.... It cost us about $300 to get out here & we have sunk about as much more in the loss of horses. Our Ohio horses can not stand the coarse prairie hay. I brought two fine large young mares from Ohio costing me there $150 each, & a large oilcloth covered spring wagon costing $175. One of my mares has died & the other rundown so as to be of little value. My wagon is not...in demand here...so I will sink in my moveing operation at least $700.... Our friends in Kansas were very much to blame that they did not advise us better. If we had brought money instead of horses & wagons, we would now have been at least a thousand dollars better off, but it can't be helped now. The country is beautiful beyond description. It does not present one vast waste of barren prairie affording a tiresome & monotonous view, as one might suppose, but on the contrary, it is ever varying every mile you travel there is a new & unexpected scene of lovely landscape bursting upon your view. Now you trace the green copse of woodland as it indicates serpentine course of some crystal stream winding its way through the rock-bound gorges of the high rolling prairie, and anon spreading over a place of unsurpassed fertility & unspeakable loveliness. You travel on and lo! the scene changes. You stand upon an eminence & look down upon a valley of almost unearthly beauty! Away beyond, the prairie shoots up like a pyramid, & then flattens out like a huge turtle, & then goes rolling & tumbling off to the right & left assuming as it recedes, the most fantastic shape & form. A spanking breeze from the southwest fans your cheek & it comes sweeping over the prairie freighted with the perfume of flowers of every shape & hue. You stand literly entranced. Your soul at last becomes surfeited with the gorgeousness of the beauty & wearied with vastness! Kansas presents the most sublime specimen of the poetry of nature; and everyone who has the least particle of this element in his soul, will be filled with extatic delight as he travels over it. The soil is as fertile as soil can be for it is a deposit of decomposed vegetable matter which has been accumulating for countless ages. On the high prairie the soil is a black loam from 2 to 3 feet deep in the vallies it is from 10 to 12 feet deep. The climate of Kansas constitutes its greatest attraction; it is most delightful.... You have no such wheather in Pennsylvania. It is something between Indian Summer & a soft May day...." Watson then discusses the work done in Kansas by carpenters and farmers, as well as the crops harvested by the latter.

According to his lengthy obituary in the August 23, 1883 issue of the Emporia Weekly Republican, Watson built the finest home in Emporia, a five-room stone house, where he entertained such political celebrities as John Brown and Susan B. Anthony. He was elected by an overwhelming majority to be the Chief Justice of the state's Supreme Court, however he was denied serving by political machinations of the governor. Later, Watson was instrumental in the establishment of Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railway. A unique and rather terrific description of unsettled mid-19th century Kansas.