Autograph Letter, signed. 2 pp. + integral stampless address leaf.

With pencil notes on address leaf detailing the letter’s route, on a Pacific Mail Steamship Co. vessel to Panama, then via Chagres and Havana to New York. To Andrew Carney, Boston: “ ....a paper of today…contains intelligence from Sacramento City…the citizens and Squatters have had a terrible conflict, the mayor reported wounded, is dead. I believe Mayor Bigelow is from Boston,. When the Steamer left they were preparing for a great battle. The Squatters are men that came overland from the Western States and are most desperate characters. It is generally believed… that the whole of Sacramento City is in ashes…troops have been ordered from Benicia and there is no knowing where this matter will stop. The ring-leader of the Squatters was shot dead, the ball entering his eye. All the parties engaged are Americans, people are about equally divided as to which side is right -- I hope law and order will prevail. It has created quite a panic in this city, as many here have stores in the above city…Business here is good and growing better every day…” Since the start of the Gold Rush, “Squatters” had ignored the land ownership claims of John Sutter and other Sacramento pioneers. Conflict with City officials escalated until violence erupted when armed squatting settlers, marching through downtown Sacramento, confronted citizens led by Mayor Harding Bigelow, who received four bullet wounds in the ensuing melee, surviving but later dying of cholera. The City Assessor was killed on the spot, while the leader of the Squatters was in turn killed by the City Recorder. Observing this chaos from a distance, William Badger was a 29 year-old Bostonian who had come to San Francisco just two months before he wrote this letter to Andrew Carney, a successful Irish-born tailor who would later found a Civil War hospital for the poor. Badger himself would become one of San Francisco’s most successful commission merchants, using his wealth to feed the unemployed and to start the city’s first Sunday School.