This is a Western Union Telegraph Company Half Rate Message form dated November 16, 1870, bearing the original handwritten business communication from Hayden, Wilson & Allen in St. Louis, Missouri, to J.C. Howell & Co. at 17 Beekman Street in New York City. The form, designated as No. 44, features the printed corporate boilerplate of the Western Union Telegraph Company, including the names of President William Orton and Secretary O. H. Palmer, which legally bound the sender to the company's transmission conditions. This artifact exemplifies the standardized business ephemera and contractual formalia that underpinned the rapid commercial communication networks of the Gilded Age. The handwritten dispatch, Ship one. Leather at once, is a concise example of period mercantile telegraphy, conveying an urgent inventory request with the telegraphic brevity demanded by per-word pricing. The document is further annotated with receiving marks, including a circular date stamp from T.P. HOWELL & CO. SEP 17 1870 N.Y., indicating its processing at the recipient's New York office, and operational notes such as opr thinks that may be OUR. but written one in St Louis, which reveals the on-the-ground clerical verification processes used to ensure message accuracy. The item serves as a primary source document for the study of 19th-century business logistics, telegraphic shorthand, and the material culture of communication. Its value lies in its complete integrity, presenting both the pristine corporate lithography of the Western Union form and the faded but legible iron gall ink manuscript, offering a tangible link to the daily operations of postbellum American commerce. The specific addresses—17 Beekman St. in the financial district of Manhattan and the originating city of St. Louis, a major mercantile hub in St. Louis County, Missouri—anchor this transaction in the real geography of national trade. As a surviving piece of telegraphic flimsy, it documents the critical intersection of information technology and supply-chain management during a period of intense industrialization, making it a significant collectible for enthusiasts of philately, postal history, railroadiana, and business ephemera.