stefansson-wrangel-09-13-031-001

New York, Sept. 6, 1923.

My dear Stef.:

I enclose copy of a letter addressed to Mrs. David
Maurer in accordance with your request. Similar letters have been
sent to the others, that is to say: Mrs. F. W. Maurer, Mrs. Harry
Galle and J. I. Knight.

I hesitated to write to the Crawfords as I thought they should
be consulted about the proposal before bluntly announcing it to them.
This may already have been done, but of this I have no information.
It may be that they have some other plan for the publication of Allan’s
diary. You may have secured control of it before Allan sailed but of
this I have also no information. So I thought it better to write
fully to Taylor, enclosing a copy of the letter I am sending to the
others and asking him to take the matter up personally (if he had not
already done so) with the Crawfords. I hope this will meet with your
approval.

The cable between Seattle and Sitka has been put out of commission
and I have had only the one cable from Noice--the delayed one part
of which I relayed to you yesterday. Therefore I do not know whether
he has received an offer from Alber or not, I wired Alber as you
suggested but have received no reply from him, although, of course,
my message did not call for a reply.

Until I hear from Noice I cannot close with the Alliance for
Crawford's story. When I do I shall have a contract drawn up, signed
by Pickering and sent to Taylor for his signature.

The Alliance have been somwhat peeved because the Canadian Press
had a story on Saturday from Nome containing the gist of the Wrangel
story while they obly got Noice's story late Sunday night. It my be,
of course, that the cables were entirely to blame. They received about
3,000 from Noice which was immediately skeletonized and forwarded to
London, Melbourne and Buenos Aires. Monday being a holiday, they
decided to hold the story for Tuesday and asked me to make three takes
of it of about 2,000 words each. In other words I had to pad it out.
I hope Npice will not shoot me when he sees me for some of the thinks I
found it necessary to put into his mouth. I think I improved some
points of it with respect to its publicity value from the stand*point
of the cause, although with the exception of the part you criticized in
your cable yesterday it was a pretty good story--at least from the stand-
point of the newspapers.

Yours-