Jefferson letter to French geologist to be auctioned

ST. LOUIS -- Thomas Jefferson's strong suit wasn't spelling, it turns out.

But that shouldn't hurt the sale of a letter he wrote in 1804 of the excitement about the coming adventure of Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lt. William Clark, who were about to embark on their expedition exploring the West after the Louisiana Purchase.

Jefferson's misspelled letter to a prominent French geologist on Jan. 31, 1804, will be offered for public auction at Sotheby's in New York on Friday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday. It was a thank-you note for the gift of the geologist's latest book.

Sotheby's is hoping the three-page letter will fetch as much as $700,000. It rates the letter the most valuable of six presidential items that a collector in suburban Detroit is offering for sale.

"It will give me great pleasure if these enterprises should produce materials for extending the bounds of knoledge . . ." the letter said.

Almost all of Jefferson's papers are in the Library of Congress and other public institutions, including the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, which has the fifth-largest Jefferson collection.

"The letter doesn't add significantly to our knowledge of Lewis and Clark, but it would be a pretty cool Christmas gift for someone with $500,000 to spare," said Carolyn Gilman, Lewis and Clark specialist at the Missouri society. "Jefferson wrote a lot of letters. They don't come up for sale very often."

Thank-you letter

Jefferson wrote the letter to Barthelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond as a thank-you note for the gift of Saint-Fond's book, "Essai de geologie." The letter thanks Saint-Fond for his "excellent volume," then discusses at length several fossil discoveries in the United States, including the Megalonx, Jefferson's name for an extinct Ice Age creature that eventually became known as the giant ground sloth.

The last page concerns the expedition.

"A journey of discovery undertaken here will probably produce some further information as to the Megalonx & other animals, lost as well as living," he wrote. "It's (sic) immediate object is to explore the Missouri River to it's source, proceed thence to the nearest river leading westward, & descend that to the Pacific Ocean; so as to give us with accuracy the geography of this interesting channel of communication across our continent."

Jefferson wrote the letter one month after the United States took possession of the Louisiana Purchase from France.

Frederick Nederlander, the collector who is selling the Jefferson letter, bought it at a Sotheby's auction in 1979. Among the other items Nederlander is selling are three pages of a draft of George Washington's first inaugural address (which he then condensed before delivery), a letter from Benjamin Franklin and a bronze casting of Abraham Lincoln's face and hands. A Sotheby's spokesman estimated that the six would bring as much as $3 million.