Two Letters from Soldiers Stationed at Camp Carling, Wyoming Territory, Inviting A Local Socialite Out for a Date

Camp Carling, Wyoming Territory, 1875. Two letters totalling three 5 x 8 inch pages, with envelopes. Folded with a few very small tears at folds; fine.. Two letters, written from Camp Carling in June of 1874 and February of 1875, from “Mr. Moore” and W. L. “Jack” Oakley, likely soldiers stationed at the camp. Oakley asks “Miss Annie” to “our next Hop” and Moore asks “Miss Kilbourne to accompany him to the Theatre this evening”. Camp Carling was a supply depot for Fort Russell, located about halfway between the Fort and Wyoming’s territorial and current capital of Cheyenne. The Camp handled supplies that came in over the newly-constructed railroad and wagon transportation for a number of military outposts across the west, and soon became the second largest depot in the country. By the mid-1870s, Cheyenne was a bustling, if somewhat rough-and-tumble, city. Military outposts in the west like Camp Carling and Fort Russell also protected the Euro-American residents of cities like Cheyenne from attacks by the Indigenous populations which they were displacing. These letters are likely to Annie Kilbourne, a young Cheyenne socialite. She moved to the area in 1873 at the age of 17 and lived with her aunt, suffragette Amalia Post, who had travelled to Washington, D.C. as a delegate to the 1871 National Woman Suffrage Association Conference.[1]

[1] D. Claudia Thompson, “Amalia and Annie: A Case Study in Women’s Suffrage,” Women’s History Magazine 50 (2005): 4–8.