This collection is made up of 278 letters written by Avery Gilleo to his fiancée Eleanore Alten, daughter of Grand Rapids, Michigan artist Mathias Alten. The letters were written while Gilleo was at Camp Grayling, on border patrol in El Paso, Texas, training in Waco, Texas, awaiting overseas deployment from New Jersey, and in France while fighting. The collection provides a glimpse at courtship by mail and the popular culture of the early 1900s. Issues like women's suffrage, temperance, newspaper coverage of World War I and illiteracy are among those addressed in the letters. Some letters also describe Gilleo's duties as an officer in the National Guard during World War I. Letters written near the end of the war describe Gilleo's two month stay in a hospital in France due to a leg injury.