[Tabor, Iowa, August
27, 1857]
Mr Dear Friend,
— Your most welcome letter of the 14th inst., from Au Sable Forks, is received.
I cannot express the gratitude I feel to all the kind friends who contributed
towards paying for the place at North Elba, after I had bought it, as I am
thereby relieved from a very great embarrassment both with Mr. Smith and the
young Thompsons, and also comforted with the feeling that my noble-hearted wife
and daughters will not be driven either to beg or become a burden to my poor
boys, who have nothing but their hands to begin with. I am under special
obligation to you for going to look after them and cheer them in their homely
condition. May God reward you all a thousandfold! No language I have can
express the satisfaction it affords me to feel that I have friends who will
take the trouble to look after them and know the real condition of my family,
while I am “far away,” perhaps never to return. I am still waiting here for company, additional
teams, and means of paying expenses,
or to know that I can make a diversion in favor of our friends, in case they
are involved again in trouble. Colonel Forbes has come on and has a small
school at Tabor. I wrote you some days ago, giving a few particulars in regard
to our movements; and I intend writing my friend Stearns, as soon as I have
anything to tell him that is worth a stamp. Please say to him, that, provided I
do not get into such a speculation as shall swallow up all the property I have
been furnished with, I intend to keep it all safe, so that he may be
remunerated in the end; but that I am wholly in the dark about it as yet, and
that I cannot natter him much now. Will direct where to write me when I know
how to do so.
Very respectfully your friend,
N. H.1
1 N. H. stands for "Nelson
Hawkins," one of the names by which Brown was known to his friends when in
an enemy's country.
SOURCE: Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of
John Brown, p. 113-4
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