Nashville June 17th 49

Friend Douglass

I expect that you think by this time that I had either forgotten you or had died with the cholera, but no such thing. . . . I suppose that you have heard how dreadfully the cholera has been at work here, and I expect the good people of Lebanon are so frightened that they will be afraid to receive a letter from this place for fear that it (this letter) has that dreadful malady, and only waits, like Pandora's box, to be opened to spread the contagion far and wide. . . . There has been a great mortality here in our beautiful city of Rocks though now there are not many cases. I suppose not more than 12 or 15 in the whole town, but last Saturday and Friday and Sunday it was very bad, and on Friday to my certain knowledge there was 43 deaths and reports says fifty though I believe that if the whole amount was known there would have been more. I was at the graveyard Saturday and the grave diggers were completely wore down with toil, and under most every tree you could see a coffin waiting to be put in the ground, for graves could not be dug fast enough, and the drivers of the hearses would carry them out and then leave them to get more. . . . You can have no idea of the suffering unless you were to see it yourself for I cannot describe it. . . .

Your friend [Jason] Delaney