Archives West Finding Aid

The collection consists of materials gathered by Professor Merrill G. Burlingame and Montana State University library personnel from documents gathered independently or found laid in the various books donated by Wallis Huidekoper in 1957. These materials include a selection of letters exchanged between Dr. Merrill G. Burlingame and Wallis Huidekoper regarding the editing of an oral history interview conducted in 1954, a 1929 letter from Edward Douglas Branch thanking Huidekoper for his favorable comments on The Hunting of the Buffalo (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1929) and a 1938 letter from Martin S. Garretson, again thanking Huidekoper for favorable comments on his book, The American Bison (New York: New York Zoological Society, 1938). Of interest in the Garretson letter is an anecdote concerning the observation of a bison herd in the Oklahoma panhandle during the summer of 1884. The collection also includes three consecutively edited versions of an oral history interview with Huidekoper conducted by Elizabeth DeFrate and Merrill G. Burlingame on July 26, 1954 and transcribed from an audio tape which appears to have been lost. A typed bibliography of Huidekoper's articles, along with two original manuscripts he wrote concerning artist Charles M. Russell has been placed in a separate folder. Three folders of printed material consist of brochures and pamphlets written by or pertaining to Huidekoper' father, Henry Shippen Huidekoper and newspaper clippings pertaining to historic sites in the Germantown, Pennsylvania area, Wallis Huidekoper, Theodore Roosevelt, and ranching in North Dakota and Montana. Six photographs of North Dakota badlands residents circa 1880s and the Huidekoper ranch near Big Timber, Montana, circa 1956, complete the collection.