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A Remarkable Bamboozler

March 2023
1min read

I note on page 112 of the December 1963 AMERICAN HERITAGE a broadside referring to Bishop Talbot’s visit to Wallace, Idaho. Regrettably I must inform you that you have been taken in by a forgery committed by that remarkable old bamboozler and pioneer printer, Thomas J. Easterwood of Dundee, Oregon, whose papers it has fallen my lot to administer until they are made available for public use in 1970.

If you will examine page 87 of Bishop Talbot’s My People of the Plains , you will find that the broadsides were printed on green paper. The two copies extant, one at the University of Oregon and one in the Easterwood papers, are printed on white stock of casein content which was not manufactured until some time after the Bishop’s visit. On the margin of page 88 of Easterwood’s personal copy of this book is a phrase in his handwriting, “set and print.” … [He] discovered that collectors paid well for Western … broadsides. …

We had noted the reference to green paper in My People of the Plains; unfortunately the photostat we worked with, obtained from the University of Oregon, showed no color, so we missed this clue to the forgery.

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