The only piece of mail with a Jasper postmark the museum knows of. The letter it carried survives with it.
A two cent stamped envelope carrying a circular Jasper, Colo. datestamp reading DEC 21. The strike is light, but the town name, the state and the month are all legible. No other cover postmarked at Jasper is known to this museum. The post office that cancelled it is long gone, and this is what is left of it.
The address is in pencil, to Miss Josie Welsh on Champa Street in Denver. The house number is written clearly enough on the paper but does not survive the resolution of this scan, and it is left unread here rather than guessed at.
The sender's instruction runs up the left edge in ink, turned ninety degrees to the address, in a practised hand of the kind taught in schools at the time: If Not Delivered Return in a Week, Jasper, Colo. Whether it reached her is not known. There is no returned or undelivered marking on the front, and the instruction only says what was to happen if it failed. What is certain is that the envelope and the letter it carried stayed together and stayed in Jasper, which is the reason either one survived at all.
The letter itself has not been scanned yet. It was written by a resident of Jasper through a winter in the 1890s and it is an account of cold, isolation and distance from anyone else. It will be added to this record once it has been photographed and transcribed.