The Travis letter was one of four items pulled from a private collection just minutes before a June 18 auction when a retired Texana dealer, W. Thomas Taylor, questioned whether they had been stolen from the state library some 40 years earlier. It and a letter announcing the loss of the Alamo battle were recently returned to Sotheby’s for sale, while the remaining two lots—an 1835 letter written by Alamo defender James Bowie and a printed account of the siege—will likely go back to the archives because the library has better evidence of ownership, the Associated Press reported December 3.
“There’s been almost a proliferation of collections coming to auction in the last year or tow,” State Archivist Chris LaPlante said in the December 2 San Antonio Express-News. “It’s a great concern. They were created as public records; they belong to the people. Yet trying to prove ownership beyond the shadow of a doubt is very difficult.”
Posted December 10, 2004.