Archive of 84 Autograph Letters Signed (and one printed circular), with integral stampless address leaves, most by agents of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company to company Secretary Guy Phelps, Hartford, Conn., about insuring the life of Gold Rush emigrants during their voyages and treks by land and sea to California, Jan. 15, 1849 to May 29, 1851, two-thirds before 1850. From Company agents in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Washington, D.C.
The letters vary in content from passing reference about California applicants to many questions about specific Company terms for California “risks” - whether “permits”, with steep surcharges, should be granted for those going “around the Horn”, across the Isthmus of Panama, or overland across the Plains. Many emigrant ships are named, as are the insured. Of these, preliminary research reveals that some would remain in California to become prominent citizens - the man who built the first bridge over the Sacramento River, the first homeopathic surgeon in the state, a newspaper editor turned prominent Republican politician, and the San Francisco hotelier who would lease to Captain Ulysses S. Grant a billiards club (which failed when the embezzling manager absconded).
The letters detail the Company’s constantly changing policies on California risks, from cautious optimism over looming profits early in 1849 (at the urging of Company agents who stressed “the unparalleled excitement…of Gold hunting in California which is taking to that country hundreds and thousands of our most industrious and best citizens”) to alarm over the high rate emigrant deaths en route - culminating in the printed March 1850 Company statement in this archive rejecting the “frequent applications” made for California journeys “via the plains, or overland”, or “by any route…other than by Chagres to Panama”, or “by sea around the Cape”.
A rich documentation of the historic Gold Rush emigration that also posed the greatest antebellum challenge to the burgeoning American insurance industry.