(CALIFORNIA.) Archive of California journalist George Washington Barter. Approximately 75 documents and manuscripts,...

(CALIFORNIA.) Archive of California journalist George Washington Barter. Approximately 75 documents and manuscripts, two photographs; condition variable, but generally goodoverall. Vp, 1863-99

The papers of George Washington Barter (1841-1891), who served as a lieutenant in the 20th Wisconsin Infantry before embarking on a career as a newspaperman. Following the Civil War, he moved to California, where he founded the Anaheim Gazette in 1870, later working as editor of the Los Angeles Star and as a reporter for the Seattle Post Intelligencer. This lot includes several documents relating to Barter's time working in the War Department at the end of the Civil War, and others from his efforts to secure a pension. There are also two photographs, one a portrait of Barter and the other a large group shot of soldiers, possibly the 20th Wisconsin, taken in Washington, DC. Other items of note include two drawings from California. The first shows a rough pictorial map labeled "Father's Claim" which shows the location of Barter's father's grave, with a note from a sibling on the verso. The other drawing is a rough pencil sketch by Barter of coastal Santa Monica dated 1870. About a third of the archive is poetry and other musings. Census records show that by 1890, Barter was an inmate at the Fort Steilacoom Hospital for the Insane near Tacoma, WA.