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Yankee Jim’s, Placer County, California, 13 April 1852. 2 pp. in ink on a single leaf, 10.25” x 8”. CONDITION: Leaf separated in half with some loss, the 2 halves rejoined with transparent Japanese tissue, toning and chipping along margins, a few minor punctures, multiple losses to the text which are indicated (by omissions and question marks) in the cited passages below.

A vivid letter by a doctor from Missouri who immigrated to gold rush California, describing his medical practice and a startling case of vigilante justice involving a serial violent criminal who killed a man in a whorehouse.

Writing to his relative Thomas B. Nesbit (1822–1890), who was a circuit judge in Missouri for eighteen years and a state senator for five, Wilkerson expresses his fear that Nesbit has “probably see[n] in the newspapers something of the present malady prevailing in our town which may be falsely reported” and offers a more accurate and detailed account:

The small pox is at this time prevailing here but o[f]…mild type generally and particularly so with those who h[ave been]…vaccinated a few of whom have…and in excellent health & should I be attack[ed]…it will be a mild form of varioloid as I was vaccinated [a] few years since that worked well.

On its first appearance here I was called in to see the patient[s at] a boarding house who (on its developing itself) stated they had contrac[ted] the disease from a mild case of varioloid that was sick here in a house of ill fame which case its seems was not generally known of bu[t] now the vigilance committee went to work and build a ‘Pest House’ into which they take all the patients except those who refuse to go there. They close the house they are in and all allow no one to go in but their attendant & physician at this time there and seven in the Pest Hou[se] and two in one boarding house to eight of whom I am attending D[r] Jewell attends the other one. A few others have got about. None have died y[et] but I have one I think will soon…At this time in addition to small pox the measles & mumps both are prevailing here so I am now kept tolerably busy so I hope you will not expect much news but will pardon the shortness of my letter. 

He briefly touches on “one of my claims”—noting he thinks he will “loose some money, about the first one as yet I cannot say what will be done but think I may make a little.” He then returns to describing his medical work, commenting that “at this time I do not visit my patients for fear of giving them the small pox from my clothes and boarding.” After stating that “the Callaway boys are all well,” he describes the circumstances which led to the hanging of one James Edison by a mob of miners after Edison killed a man in a whorehouse and courts failed to speedily deliver justice:

A man by the name of Jas. Edison (ugly Jim) was hung a short time since in this place for killing a man (Chamberlain) in an affray in that house of ill fame. After the affray E. went to his boarding house. The Constable summoned a posse of men and went to take him on looking in through [?] window saw E. with his pistol & double barrelled shot gun in hand. A part…at the same time th[e] Constable went…about this time some one [?] came in & plu[nged] [a] knife into E’s back into the cavity of the thorax hig[h] up producing a desperate wound. E’s trial was therefore deferred til the sixth day following at which time C had died of the stab E inflicted. E in appearance was better. 

The trial proceeded—the mob of 5 or 600 miners gathered after the trial for committing E. The Constable at the door announced to the crowd that according to the statutes the magistrate could not give the decision under 6 hours. The cry then seemed nearly general, ‘he will not be living then’ then the cry hang him! hang him! Across from all parts of the crow[d] (they had prepared the rope already). They immediately rushed in to the house where E. was lying on his bed picked him up rushed off to the tree that had been selected, laid him down under the rope—asked if he had any thing to say he answered only to be buried decently. Out on the rope & drew him up—he was a bad man having cut several others before. 

Born in Montgomery County, Kentucky, Dr. Achilles Wilkerson (1820–1893) began studying medicine in 1840 at Missouri Medical College, and in 1842, at the age of twenty-two, he was listed as a doctor in Callaway, Missouri. He continued studying at Missouri Medical College until the end of the session of 1848–49. As one of his obituaries notes, “About the time the California gold excitement broke out…Dr. Wilkerson, like thousands of other young men in Missouri, and all over the country, was attracted to the Pacific coast by the reports of the almost Aladdin-like fortune to be made there. Early in 1850 he went to California…He was engaged in the practice of medicine during the whole time of his absence from this country” (The Missouri Telegraph). While in California, he variously lived in El Dorado, Yankee Jim’s Mining Camp, and the small settlement of San Jose. 

Returning to Kentucky in 1860, he enrolled in the University of Louisville’s medical college in 1861, and graduated as part of the class of 1861–62. He soon opened an office in Fulton, Missouri, and in 1865 married Laurinda Jane Baker, with whom he had two children. After Baker died in 1871, he married Martha Hockaday in 1873. In 1881, he became first assistant physician to the State Insane Asylum at Fulton, a position he held until 1889. Wilkerson died in 1893 in Callaway, Missouri and was buried in Fulton.  

A remarkable gold rush letter covering disease, the state of law and order, and vigilante justice, as seen through the eyes of a practicing doctor and miner.  

REFERENCES: Hyatt, Harry Middleton. The Millers of Millersburg Kentucky (Vienna: Adolf Holzhausen’s Successors, printers to the University Vienna, 1929), p. 69; “Achilles Wilkerson, Dr.” at Albemarle Callaway online; “Dr. Achilles Wilkerson” at Family Search online; The Missouri Telegraph, Dec. 14, 1893, p. 6; The Leavenworth Times (Leavenworth, Kansas), 28 June, 1890, p. 1.

Item #9363

Price: $2,500.00