Special Collections at The University of Tulsa is pleased to announce more additions to our digital collections website. We added the following items during the month of October:
- Correspondence from A.W. Greely to J.C. Van Duzen. This letter is part of the Indians of North America collection, which is currently being reprocessed with help from a grant provided to us by the Oklahoma Department of Libraries. The letter itself is about Cheyennes being hunted by portions of the United States Army for crossing into certain areas in Kansas and Missouri. A.W. Greely was a Major General in the Union Army during the Civil War, but is also notable for having led an expedition of men to the North Pole from 1881-1884. The mission was to set up a meteorological station and track weather patterns. Out of the nearly 50 men who went on the expedition, only 6 survived.
- Correspondence from William Tecumseh Sherman. This letter is also part of the Indians of North America collection, and is a handwritten letter from General Sherman concerning the number of Indian scouts allowed under a United States Act intended to restrict that number. Sherman is of course the Union Army General who used intense, “scorched earth” policies during the Civil War, and burned Atlanta as part of his military strategy to force the Confederacy to surrender.
- The Lisle and Grace Billington WWI correspondence collection, Coll. No. 2002-012. This is a collection of personal letters between a married couple (with some additions from family and friends). Lisle was stationed in Florida with the Air Service of the United States Army, which would in later years become the United States Air Force. The bulk of the collection dates between spring 1918 to February 1919, when Lisle was released from duty and went home to his wife near Salt Lake City, Utah. The letters are a good example of the normal fears and loneliness for people who had never spent time away from home, let alone in the midst of an international war.
- Finally, the Charles Alfred Bredin WWI papers, Coll. No. 2001-020 now includes Bredin’s diary from his time as a Private in Company D of the 317th Machine Gun Battalion of the United States Army.
