Correspondence, to the Lewis Family, December 1890

This collection contains correspondence between Oscar Lewis and his family in Tioga County, Pennsylvania. The letters are primarily to his wife Ida and detail the difficulties Lewis faced while living in North Dakota. Among the letters is one incorrectly dated September 38, 1889, describing the lynching of a man named Will Lycan. The proported lynching happened after Lycan supposedly burned down his employer's barn. Lewis's narrative of the event, and the event itself, is called into question by the fact there are newspaper articles in the Grand Forks Herald, describing Lycan's comings and goings through Grand Forks well into the 1900s. Also, while there were several fires during September 1889, none of them match Lewis's description of events. In the instances of arson during that period, neither the victims nor the perpetrators in any of the cases mentioned by the Grand Forks Herald, matched those named by Oscar Lewis.