Cath Clark & Bill Helbock

Editors of Frontier Cavalryman

About the Editors

Richard W. "Bill" Helbock and his wife Cath Clark are pulishers of La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History. Postal history is a branch of philately concerned with the history of towns and the times that people lived in through the letters they left behind.

Helbock, a Portland, Oregon native (B.S.,U.S. Military Academy, West Point, 1960; Ph.D., Geography, University of Pittsburgh, 1973) has been an enthusiastic postal historian since the 1950s. He founded La Posta in 1969, and has continued to publish it bi-monthly for the past thirty-seven years. Helbock has authored more than twenty books on subjects that include the postal history of the American West, U.S. post offices, and military censor markings.

Cath Clark is editorial assistant and advertising manager of La Posta, and enjoys transcribing old letters for the journal. Originally from New Mexico, she received a Masters in Urban Planning from Portland State University. She gained an appreciation of history as part of the staff to historic commissions in Tualatin and Lake Oswego, and through her hobby of postcard collecting.

Bill and Cath currently live on a rural property in New South Wales, Australia. You are invited to visit their website at www.la-posta.com. Subscriptions to La Posta are only $25 per year. For Oregon history buffs, La Posta offers a CD of outstanding pre-1920s real-photo postcard views, Oregon Historic Images, for $19.95 postpaid to La Posta Publications, PO Box 100, Chatsworth Island NSW 2469, Australia.

La Posta Publications: Publishing the finest in American postal history since 1969

Frontier Cavalryman Lt. William Carey Brown's Letters from Fort Klamath, Oregon, 1878-1880 Soon after graduating from West Point in 1877 and receiving his assignment to one of the far-flung corners of the West at Oregon's Fort Klamath, Second Lieutenant William Carey Brown began a lifetime of adventure and service in the U.S. Army. "This roving life suits me quite well just now," he wrote in an 1879 letter to his family. "I am seeing plenty of new country, people, and having plenty of 'experience' -- enough that if I were a writer I think I could get up an interesting book." Even though Lt. Brown never wrote that book, the numerous letters he left behind-more than fifty appear in this volume-serve much the same purpose, giving us a glimpse into what seems today to have been a long-ago time and a faraway land, a personal view of what it was to serve as a soldier on the Western frontier. While stationed at Fort Klamath from 1878-1880, a period that saw the end of the Indian wars in the Pacific Northwest, Lt. Brown wrote frequently to his mother, father, and sisters living in Denver, Colorado. Taken as a whole, this collection opens a door into the life and times of a man who devoted himself to the service of his country in a career that spanned four decades, stretching from the Indian campaigns throughWorld War I. Yet even more important, those letters also give us a human connection to a chapter in Northwest history as they convey a sense of what life was like for a frontier cavalryman. ISBN 1-930-111-65-7, 63 pages, 8.5x11 inches, trade paper, maps, historical photographs, bibliography, index. $14.00 cover price. Order this book

To order copies of Frontier Cavalryman

Call 541-426-3351

To contact Cath Clark or Bill Helbock

E-mail helbock@la-posta.com

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