22 February 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, correspondence card: OFH, UCCL 01533)
(SUPERSEDED)
P.S.—I suppose you got our letter about the March visit a week or two ago?
Here’s a shout for Hayes! The fact is I was afraid to shout by telegraph last Sunday, I have been fooled so often. I hope he will put Lt. Col. Richard Irwin Dodge (Author of “The Great Plains & their Inhabitants”) at the head of the Indian Department. There’s a man who knows all about Indians, & yet has some humanity in him——(knowledge of Indians, & humanity, & are seldom found in the same individual). Come!—it is high time we were fixing up this cabinet, my boy.
Look here—send postal to say you & the madam will be he here 2d or 3d of March—do, now, please. The play is done. We are plotting out another one.
Richardson 1942, no page; Davis 1950, 2.
Opened in 1916, OFH preserves President Rutherford B. Hayes’s “12,000 volume personal library along with archival material from his military and political career, particularly his presidency, 1877-1881.” Howells apparently enclosed this letter with his own of 24 February 1877, which is how it came to be among Hayes’s papers.