DALLAS, TX.- Heritage’s Nov. 16 Historical Documents Including Texana Signature® Auction is a trip through time, with stops at some of the most consequential and fascinating turning points in history. The auction includes letters and documents signed by Texas founding fathers and European royalty, a legendary Western artist’s annotated textbook from his only period of formal art training, crucial founding documents from the U.S. Coinage System, revised manuscripts from literary giants, charts and logbooks from pioneers of aviation and exploration, and much more.

A historic tour contract guaranteeing George Herman “Babe” Ruth $10,000 for 10 exhibition games in Cuba between Oct. 31–Nov. 14, 1920, is linked to some of the most storied achievements of the most famous baseball player to ever play the game. After his explosive first year on the team with which he is most closely associated, Ruth joined manager John McGraw’s Giants against Cuban squads comprising the era’s leading Black and Latino players.

“This contract captures Babe Ruth as he was becoming an international sports attraction,” says Heritage Historical Manuscripts Consignment Director Doug Dreier. “The $10,000 agreement for his Cuban tour documents the scale of that rise, while placing Ruth in a larger baseball story that included competition with Cuban stars such as Christobal Torriente at a time when Black and Latino players were excluded from organized baseball in the United States.”

In the tour’s most celebrated event, Cuban star Christobal Torriente hit three home runs, including one off the Bambino on the mound, strengthening his reputation as the “Babe Ruth of Cuba.” Ruth hit .345 during the tour but only two homers. The tour paid Ruth nearly twice the per-game rate of the highest salary he ever earned in the majors. But legend has it Ruth left Cuba with less than he earned after heavy gambling at the casinos, racetracks and jai alai frontons of Havana.

Another relic from that era is tied to the most famous achievement in aviation history, which is approaching its 100th anniversary. This remarkable group of navigational notes handwritten by Charles A. Lindbergh show his preparations for the historic nonstop solo flight in the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris, which he completed May 20–21, 1927, to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize.

“These notes bring us close to the work behind Lindbergh’s historic flight,” Dreier says. “They preserve his route calculations from San Diego to St. Louis, St. Louis to New York, and finally New York to Paris. They show the careful, hand-calculated navigation behind a journey that became one of aviation’s defining achievements.”

Other relics related to aviation and exploration include:

• Amelia Earhart signatures (on her personal company letterhead and a PSA-encapsulated clipped example)

• Francis Skead’s logbook of the HMS Enterprise through the Strait of Magellan

• Whaling journal of the ship Maria of Nantucket, with an account of the Republic of Texas

• Polar exploration signed group lot featuring Richard E. Byrd, Robert E. Peary, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sir Vivian Fuchs, 1919–1995

• Richard Byrd-signed copy of Little America

Texas history buffs will be excited by an eight-page 1853 autograph letter from Sam Houston to his brother, John “Jack,” in which he denounces the administration of U.S. President Franklin Pierce and warns of abolitionist “disunionism,” and a rare 1820 document from Stephen F. Austin’s time as a judge in Arkansas in which he argues on behalf of a formerly enslaved woman seeking freedom — a striking counterexample to his later record in Texas.

Art lovers will appreciate Frederic Remington’s heavily annotated copy of Water Color Painting by H.W. Herrick, full of Remington’s notes and observations. And numismatic hobbyists and historians will bid on an important pair of documents from the formative years of the U.S. Coinage System: a Charles Thomson manuscript Congressional Resolution and a circular letter signed to the Governor of Connecticut.

A variety of treasures from around the globe trace to crucial events in European and world history. Highlights from those include:

• A signed letter from Mary, Queen of Scots, summoning the Earl Marischal to Parliament weeks after the murder of Lord Darnley

• A signed royal warrant from King Charles I

• A letter from Second Earl of Sunderland Robert Spencer announcing the death of Charles II and the ascension of James II

• A signed autograph letter from Napoleon Bonaparte rallying the Army of Italy

• A signed Napoleon disciplinary order on the fate of 16 deserters on Elba

• A typed, signed Winston Churchill letter addressed to Louis J. Alber, manager of his American lecture tour

• Five signed photos of the Japanese Imperial family personally presented to Brazilian ambassador Júlio Augusto Barboza Carneiro upon the conclusion of his diplomatic posting in Japan in 1955