TYPED LETTER SIGNED BY A CAPTAIN IN THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS
Quarto, single sheet: typed on Department of the Interior, U.S. Indian Service letterhead and signed by Major Joseph M. Kelley, 10th Cavalry, Fort Belknap Agency, Montana. Dated September 13, 1894, the letter requests more documentation about a recent purchase from the A.H. Holter Hardware Company in Helena. Holter was the "father of the lumber business in Montana", and his company sold not only lumber but other supplies for gold miners and military personnel. The Holter Company was the longest operating commercial business in Montana through 1958.
According to a synopsis of his papers at the Eastern Washington Historical Society, Joseph Morgan Kelley (1844-1911) "spent his military career first as Captain of the 10th Colored Cavalry, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, during the Indian Wars against the Apaches, Comanches, Southern Cheyennes, Arapahos and Kiowas" at various posts in the West from Texas to Washington State. He received the rank of Major in 1893 and served at Montana's Fort Belknap Agency. The agency moved from Chinook to Harlem in the northwest corner of the reservation in the 1880s, but ranchers who wanted more territory for cattle began to covet the land guaranteed to the Gros Ventre and Assoniboine tribes; at the same time, gold was discovered in the Little Rockies, bringing in more settlers who filed mining claims on reservation land.
Major Kelley served as the Indian Agent for Fort Belknap until 1898, when he became the Commandant over the Assiniboine, and is largely credited with keeping the peace while the area where gold was discovered was taken from the tribes and ceded to the U.S. government, opening up the territory for settlers and miners. Item #76855
Price: $200.00