Mark Twain's Letters--1853-1866, by Mark Twain

     The Territorial Enterprise at Virginia City was at this time owned
     by Joseph T. Goodman, who had bought it on the eve of the great
     Comstock silver-mining boom, and from a struggling, starving sheet
     had converted it into one of the most important—certainly the most
     picturesque-papers on the coast. The sketches which the Esmeralda
     miner had written over the name of “Josh” fitted into it exactly,
     and when a young man named Barstow, in the business office, urged
     Goodman to invite “Josh” to join their staff, the Enterprise owner
     readily fell in with the idea. Among a lot of mining matters of no
     special interest, Clemens, July 30th, wrote his brother: “Barstow
     has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at $25
     a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail,
     if possible.”

     In Roughing It we are told that the miner eagerly accepted the
     proposition to come to Virginia City, but the letters tell a
     different story. Mark Twain was never one to abandon any
     undertaking easily. His unwillingness to surrender in a lost cause
     would cost him more than one fortune in the years to come. A week
     following the date of the foregoing he was still undecided.

ESMERALDA, Aug. 7, 1862.

MY DEAR BRO,—Barstow wrote that if I wanted the place I could have it. I wrote him that I guessed I would take it, and asked him how long before I must come up there. I have not heard from him since.

Now, I shall leave at mid-night tonight, alone and on foot for a walk of 60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely possible that mail facilities may prove infernally “slow” during the few weeks I expect to spend out there. But do you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and in case he should want me he must write me here, or let me know through you.

The Contractors say they will strike the Fresno next week. After fooling with those assayers a week, they concluded not to buy “Mr. Flower” at $50, although they would have given five times the sum for it four months ago. So I have made out a deed for one half of all Johnny's ground and acknowledged and left in judge F. K. Becktel's hands, and if judge Turner wants it he must write to Becktel and pay him his Notary fee of $1.50. I would have paid that fee myself, but I want money now as I leave town tonight. However, if you think it isn't right, you can pay the fee to judge Turner yourself.

See that you keep out of debt—to anybody. Bully for B.! Write him that I would write him myself, but I am to take a walk tonight and haven't time. Tell him to bring his family out with him. He can rely upon what I say—and I say the land has lost its ancient desolate appearance; the rose and the oleander have taken the place of the departed sage-bush; a rich black loam, garnished with moss, and flowers, and the greenest of grass, smiles to Heaven from the vanished sand-plains; the “endless snows” have all disappeared, and in their stead, or to repay us for their loss, the mountains rear their billowy heads aloft, crowned with a fadeless and eternal verdure; birds, and fountains, and trees-tropical bees—everywhere!—and the poet dreamt of Nevada when he wrote:

“and Sharon waves, in solemn praise,
Her silent groves of palm.”

and today the royal Raven listens in a dreamy stupor to the songs of the thrush and the nightingale and the canary—and shudders when the gaudy-plumaged birds of the distant South sweep by him to the orange groves of Carson. Tell him he wouldn't recognize the d—d country. He should bring his family by all means.

     In this letter we realize that he had gone into the wilderness to
     reflect—to get a perspective on the situation. He was a great
     walker in those days, and sometimes with Higbie, sometimes alone,
     made long excursions. One such is recorded in Roughing It, the trip
     to Mono Lake. We have no means of knowing where his seventy-mile
     tour led him now, but it is clear that he still had not reached a
     decision on his return. Indeed, we gather that he is inclined to
     keep up the battle among the barren Esmeralda hills.

ESMERALDA, CAL., Aug. 15, 1862.

MY DEAR SISTER,-I mailed a letter to you and Ma this morning, but since then I have received yours to Orion and me. Therefore, I must answer right away, else I may leave town without doing it at all. What in thunder are pilot's wages to me? which question, I beg humbly to observe, is of a general nature, and not discharged particularly at you. But it is singular, isn't it, that such a matter should interest Orion, when it is of no earthly consequence to me? I never have once thought of returning home to go on the river again, and I never expect to do any more piloting at any price. My livelihood must be made in this country—and if I have to wait longer than I expected, let it be so—I have no fear of failure. You know I have extravagant hopes, for Orion tells you everything which he ought to keep to himself—but it's his nature to do that sort of thing, and I let him alone. I did think for awhile of going home this fall—but when I found that that was and had been the cherished intention and the darling aspiration every year, of these old care-worn Californians for twelve weary years—I felt a little uncomfortable, but I stole a march on Disappointment and said I would not go home this fall. I will spend the winter in San Francisco, if possible. Do not tell any one that I had any idea of piloting again at present—for it is all a mistake. This country suits me, and—it shall suit me, whether or no....

Dan Twing and I and Dan's dog, “cabin” together—and will continue to do so for awhile—until I leave for—

The mansion is 10x12, with a “domestic” roof. Yesterday it rained—the first shower for five months. “Domestic,” it appears to me, is not water-proof. We went outside to keep from getting wet. Dan makes the bed when it is his turn to do it—and when it is my turn, I don't, you know. The dog is not a good hunter, and he isn't worth shucks to watch—but he scratches up the dirt floor of the cabin, and catches flies, and makes himself generally useful in the way of washing dishes. Dan gets up first in the morning and makes a fire—and I get up last and sit by it, while he cooks breakfast. We have a cold lunch at noon, and I cook supper—very much against my will. However, one must have one good meal a day, and if I were to live on Dan's abominable cookery, I should lose my appetite, you know. Dan attended Dr. Chorpenning's funeral yesterday, and he felt as though he ought to wear a white shirt—and we had a jolly good time finding such an article. We turned over all our traps, and he found one at last—but I shall always think it was suffering from yellow fever. He also found an old black coat, greasy, and wrinkled to that degree that it appeared to have been quilted at some time or other. In this gorgeous costume he attended the funeral. And when he returned, his own dog drove him away from the cabin, not recognizing him. This is true.

You would not like to live in a country where flour was $40 a barrel? Very well; then, I suppose you would not like to live here, where flour was $100 a barrel when I first came here. And shortly afterwards, it couldn't be had at any price—and for one month the people lived on barley, beans and beef—and nothing beside. Oh, no—we didn't luxuriate then! Perhaps not. But we said wise and severe things about the vanity and wickedness of high living. We preached our doctrine and practised it. Which course I respectfully recommend to the clergymen of St. Louis.

IV. LETTERS 1863-64. “MARK TWAIN.” COMSTOCK JOURNALISM. ARTEMUS WARD

     There is a long hiatus in the correspondence here. For a
     space of many months there is but one letter to continue the
     story. Others were written, of course, but for some reason
     they have not survived. It was about the end of August
     (1862) when the miner finally abandoned the struggle, and
     with his pack on his shoulders walked the one and thirty
     miles over the mountains to Virginia City, arriving dusty,
     lame, and travel-stained to claim at last his rightful
     inheritance. At the Enterprise office he was welcomed, and
     in a brief time entered into his own. Goodman, the
     proprietor, himself a man of great ability, had surrounded
     himself with a group of gay-hearted fellows, whose fresh,
     wild way of writing delighted the Comstock pioneers far more
     than any sober presentation of mere news. Samuel Clemens
     fitted exactly into this group. By the end of the year he
     had become a leader of it. When he asked to be allowed to
     report the coming Carson legislature, Goodman consented,
     realizing that while Clemens knew nothing of parliamentary
     procedure, he would at least make the letters picturesque.

     It was in the midst of this work that he adopted the name
     which he was to make famous throughout the world. The story
     of its adoption has been fully told elsewhere and need not
     be repeated here.—[See Mark Twain: A Biography, by the same
     author; Chapter XL.]

     “Mark Twain” was first signed to a Carson letter, February
     2, 1863, and from that time was attached to all of Samuel
     Clemens's work. The letters had already been widely copied,
     and the name now which gave them personality quickly
     obtained vogue. It was attached to himself as well as to
     the letters; heretofore he had been called Sam or Clemens,
     now he became almost universally Mark Twain and Mark.

     This early period of Mark Twain's journalism is full of
     delicious history, but we are permitted here to retell only
     such of it as will supply connection to the infrequent
     letters. He wrote home briefly in February, but the letter
     contained nothing worth preserving. Then two months later
     he gives us at least a hint of his employment.

VIRGINIA, April 11, 1863.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,—It is very late at night, and I am writing in my room, which is not quite as large or as nice as the one I had at home. My board, washing and lodging cost me seventy-five dollars a month.

I have just received your letter, Ma, from Carson—the one in which you doubt my veracity about the statements I made in a letter to you. That's right. I don't recollect what the statements were, but I suppose they were mining statistics. I have just finished writing up my report for the morning paper, and giving the Unreliable a column of advice about how to conduct himself in church, and now I will tell you a few more lies, while my hand is in. For instance, some of the boys made me a present of fifty feet in the East India G. and S. M. Company ten days ago. I was offered ninety-five dollars a foot for it, yesterday, in gold. I refused it—not because I think the claim is worth a cent for I don't but because I had a curiosity to see how high it would go, before people find out how worthless it is. Besides, what if one mining claim does fool me? I have got plenty more. I am not in a particular hurry to get rich. I suppose I couldn't well help getting rich here some time or other, whether I wanted to or not. You folks do not believe in Nevada, and I am glad you don't. Just keep on thinking so.

I was at the Gould and Curry mine, the other day, and they had two or three tons of choice rock piled up, which was valued at $20,000 a ton. I gathered up a hat-full of chunks, on account of their beauty as specimens—they don't let everybody supply themselves so liberally. I send Mr. Moffett a little specimen of it for his cabinet. If you don't know what the white stuff on it is, I must inform you that it is purer silver than the minted coin. There is about as much gold in it as there is silver, but it is not visible. I will explain to you some day how to detect it.

Pamela, you wouldn't do for a local reporter—because you don't appreciate the interest that attaches to names. An item is of no use unless it speaks of some person, and not then, unless that person's name is distinctly mentioned. The most interesting letter one can write, to an absent friend, is one that treats of persons he has been acquainted with rather than the public events of the day. Now you speak of a young lady who wrote to Hollie Benson that she had seen me; and you didn't mention her name. It was just a mere chance that I ever guessed who she was—but I did, finally, though I don't remember her name, now. I was introduced to her in San Francisco by Hon. A. B. Paul, and saw her afterwards in Gold Hill. They were a very pleasant lot of girls—she and her sisters.

P. S. I have just heard five pistol shots down street—as such things are in my line, I will go and see about it.

P. S. No 2—5 A.M.—The pistol did its work well—one man—a Jackson County Missourian, shot two of my friends, (police officers,) through the heart—both died within three minutes. Murderer's name is John Campbell.

     The “Unreliable” of this letter was a rival reporter on whom Mark
     Twain had conferred this name during the legislative session. His
     real name was Rice, and he had undertaken to criticize Clemens's
     reports. The brisk reply that Rice's letters concealed with a show
     of parliamentary knowledge a “festering mass of misstatements the
     author of whom should be properly termed the 'Unreliable,” fixed
     that name upon him for life. This burlesque warfare delighted the
     frontier and it did not interfere with friendship. Clemens and Rice
     were constant associates, though continually firing squibs at each
     other in their respective papers—a form of personal journalism much
     in vogue on the Comstock.

     In the next letter we find these two journalistic “blades” enjoying
     themselves together in the coast metropolis. This letter is labeled
     “No. 2,” meaning, probably, the second from San Francisco, but No. 1
     has disappeared, and even No, 2 is incomplete.

LICK HOUSE, S. F., June 1, '63.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,—The Unreliable and myself are still here, and still enjoying ourselves. I suppose I know at least a thousand people here—a great many of them citizens of San Francisco, but the majority belonging in Washoe—and when I go down Montgomery street, shaking hands with Tom, Dick and Harry, it is just like being in Main street in Hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces. I do hate to go back to Washoe. We fag ourselves completely out every day, and go to sleep without rocking, every night. We dine out and we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were. After breakfast, I don't often see the hotel again until midnight—or after. I am going to the Dickens mighty fast. I know a regular village of families here in the house, but I never have time to call on them. Thunder! we'll know a little more about this town, before we leave, than some of the people who live in it. We take trips across the Bay to Oakland, and down to San Leandro, and Alameda, and those places; and we go out to the Willows, and Hayes Park, and Fort Point, and up to Benicia; and yesterday we were invited out on a yachting excursion, and had a sail in the fastest yacht on the Pacific Coast. Rice says: “Oh, no—we are not having any fun, Mark—Oh, no, I reckon not—it's somebody else—it's probably the 'gentleman in the wagon'!” (popular slang phrase.) When I invite Rice to the Lick House to dinner, the proprietors send us champagne and claret, and then we do put on the most disgusting airs. Rice says our calibre is too light—we can't stand it to be noticed!

I rode down with a gentleman to the Ocean House, the other day, to see the sea horses, and also to listen to the roar of the surf, and watch the ships drifting about, here, and there, and far away at sea. When I stood on the beach and let the surf wet my feet, I recollected doing the same thing on the shores of the Atlantic—and then I had a proper appreciation of the vastness of this country—for I had traveled from ocean to ocean across it. (Remainder missing.)

     Not far from Virginia City there are some warm springs that
     constantly send up jets of steam through fissures in the
     mountainside. The place was a health resort, and Clemens, always
     subject to bronchial colds, now and again retired there for a cure.

     A letter written in the late summer—a gay, youthful document
     —belongs to one of these periods of convalescence.

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, August 19, '63.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,—Ma, you have given my vanity a deadly thrust. Behold, I am prone to boast of having the widest reputation, as a local editor, of any man on the Pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and tell me “if I work hard and attend closely to my business, I may aspire to a place on a big San Francisco daily, some day.” There's a comment on human vanity for you! Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it. But I don't want it. No paper in the United States can afford to pay me what my place on the “Enterprise” is worth. If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, I could make it pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't suppose I shall ever be any account. I lead an easy life, though, and I don't care a cent whether school keeps or not. Everybody knows me, and I fare like a prince wherever I go, be it on this side of the mountains or the other. And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory.

You think that picture looks old? Well, I can't help it—in reality I am not as old as I was when I was eighteen.

I took a desperate cold more than a week ago, and I seduced Wilson (a Missouri boy, reporter of the Daily Union,) from his labors, and we went over to Lake Bigler. But I failed to cure my cold. I found the “Lake House” crowded with the wealth and fashion of Virginia, and I could not resist the temptation to take a hand in all the fun going. Those Virginians—men and women both—are a stirring set, and I found if I went with them on all their eternal excursions, I should bring the consumption home with me—so I left, day before yesterday, and came back into the Territory again. A lot of them had purchased a site for a town on the Lake shore, and they gave me a lot. When you come out, I'll build you a house on it. The Lake seems more supernaturally beautiful now, than ever. It is the masterpiece of the Creation.

The hotel here at the Springs is not so much crowded as usual, and I am having a very comfortable time of it. The hot, white steam puffs up out of fissures in the earth like the jets that come from a steam-boat's 'scape pipes, and it makes a boiling, surging noise like a steam-boat, too-hence the name. We put eggs in a handkerchief and dip them in the springs—they “soft boil” in 2 Minutes, and boil as hard as a rock in 4 minutes. These fissures extend more than a quarter of a mile, and the long line of steam columns looks very pretty. A large bath house is built over one of the springs, and we go in it and steam ourselves as long as we can stand it, and then come out and take a cold shower bath. You get baths, board and lodging, all for $25 a week—cheaper than living in Virginia without baths.....

     It was now the autumn of 1863. Mark Twain was twenty-eight years
     old. On the Coast he had established a reputation as a gaily
     original newspaper writer. Thus far, however, he had absolutely no
     literary standing, nor is there any evidence that he had literary
     ambitions; his work was unformed, uncultivated—all of which seems
     strange, now, when we realize that somewhere behind lay the
     substance of immortality. Rudyard Kipling at twenty-eight had done
     his greatest work.

     Even Joseph Goodman, who had a fine literary perception and a deep
     knowledge of men, intimately associated with Mark Twain as he was,
     received at this time no hint of his greater powers. Another man on
     the staff of the Enterprise, William Wright, who called himself “Dan
     de Quille,” a graceful humorist, gave far more promise, Goodman
     thought, of future distinction.

     It was Artemus Ward who first suspected the value of Mark Twain's
     gifts, and urged him to some more important use of them. Artemus in
     the course of a transcontinental lecture tour, stopped in Virginia
     City, and naturally found congenial society on the Enterprise staff.
     He had intended remaining but a few days, but lingered three weeks,
     a period of continuous celebration, closing only with the holiday
     season. During one night of final festivities, Ward slipped away
     and gave a performance on his own account. His letter to Mark
     Twain, from Austin, Nevada, written a day or two later, is most
     characteristic.

AUSTIN, Jan. 1, '64.

MY DEAREST LOVE,—I arrived here yesterday a.m. at 2 o'clock. It is a wild, untamable place, full of lionhearted boys. I speak tonight. See small bills.

Why did you not go with me and save me that night?—I mean the night I left you after that dinner party. I went and got drunker, beating, I may say, Alexander the Great, in his most drinkinist days, and I blackened my face at the Melodeon, and made a gibbering, idiotic speech. God-dam it! I suppose the Union will have it. But let it go. I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as all others must or rather cannot be, as it were.

Love to Jo. Goodman and Dan. I shall write soon, a powerfully convincing note to my friends of “The Mercury.” Your notice, by the way, did much good here, as it doubtlessly will elsewhere. The miscreants of the Union will be batted in the snout if they ever dare pollute this rapidly rising city with their loathsome presence.

Do not, sir—do not flatter yourself that you are the only chastely-humorous writer onto the Pacific slopes.

Good-bye, old boy—and God bless you! The matter of which I spoke to you so earnestly shall be just as earnestly attended to—and again with very many warm regards for Jo. and Dan., and regards to many of the good friends we met.

I am Faithfully, gratefully yours,
ARTEMUS WARD.

     The Union which Ward mentions was the rival Virginia. City paper;
     the Mercury was the New York Sunday Mercury, to which he had urged
     Mark Twain to contribute. Ward wrote a second letter, after a siege
     of illness at Salt Lake City. He was a frail creature, and three
     years later, in London, died of consumption. His genius and
     encouragement undoubtedly exerted an influence upon Mark Twain.
     Ward's second letter here follows.

SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 21, '64.

MY DEAR MARK,—I have been dangerously ill for the past two weeks here, of congestive fever. Very grave fears were for a time entertained of my recovery, but happily the malady is gone, though leaving me very, very weak. I hope to be able to resume my journey in a week or so. I think I shall speak in the Theater here, which is one of the finest establishments of the kind in America.

The Saints have been wonderfully kind to me, I could not have been better or more tenderly nursed at home—God bless them!

I am still exceedingly weak—can't write any more. Love to Jo and Dan, and all the rest. Write me at St. Louis.

Always yours,
ARTEMUS WARD.

     If one could only have Mark Twain's letters in reply to these! but
     they have vanished and are probably long since dust. A letter which
     he wrote to his mother assures us that he undertook to follow Ward's
     advice. He was not ready, however, for serious literary effort.
     The article, sent to the Mercury, was distinctly of the Comstock
     variety; it was accepted, but it apparently made no impression, and
     he did not follow it up.

     For one thing, he was just then too busy reporting the Legislature
     at Carson City and responding to social demands. From having been a
     scarcely considered unit during the early days of his arrival in
     Carson Mark Twain had attained a high degree of importance in the
     little Nevada capital. In the Legislature he was a power; as
     correspondent for the Enterprise he was feared and respected as well
     as admired. His humor, his satire, and his fearlessness were
     dreaded weapons.

     Also, he was of extraordinary popularity. Orion's wife, with her
     little daughter, Jennie, had come out from the States. The Governor
     of Nevada had no household in Carson City, and was generally absent.
     Orion Clemens reigned in his stead, and indeed was usually addressed
     as “Governor” Clemens. His home became the social center of the
     capital, and his brilliant brother its chief ornament. From the
     roughest of miners of a year before he had become, once more, almost
     a dandy in dress, and no occasion was complete without him. When
     the two Houses of the Legislature assembled, in January, 1864, a
     burlesque Third House was organized and proposed to hold a session,
     as a church benefit. After very brief consideration it was decided
     to select Mark Twain to preside at this Third House assembly under
     the title of “Governor,” and a letter of invitation was addressed to
     him. His reply to it follows:

CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864.

GENTLEMEN, Certainly. If the public can find anything in a grave state paper worth paying a dollar for, I am willing that they should pay that amount, or any other; and although I am not a very dusty Christian myself, I take an absorbing interest in religious affairs, and would willingly inflict my annual message upon the Church itself if it might derive benefit thereby. You can charge what you please; I promise the public no amusement, but I do promise a reasonable amount of instruction. I am responsible to the Third House only, and I hope to be permitted to make it exceedingly warm for that body, without caring whether the sympathies of the public and the Church be enlisted in their favor, and against myself, or not.

Respectfully,
MARK TWAIN.

     There is a quality in this letter more suggestive of the later Mark
     Twain than anything that has preceded it. His Third House address,
     unfortunately, has not been preserved, but those who heard it
     regarded it as a classic. It probably abounded in humor of the
     frontier sort-unsparing ridicule of the Governor, the Legislature,
     and individual citizens. It was all taken in good part, of course,
     and as a recognition of his success he received a gold watch, with
     the case properly inscribed to “The Governor of the Third House.”
      This was really his first public appearance in a field in which he
     was destined to achieve very great fame.

V. LETTERS 1864-66. SAN FRANCISCO AND HAWAII

     Life on the Comstock came to an end for Mark Twain in May, 1864. It
     was the time of The Flour Sack Sanitary Fund, the story of which he
     has told in Roughing It. He does not, however, refer to the
     troubles which this special fund brought upon himself. Coming into
     the Enterprise office one night, after a gay day of “Fund”
      celebration, Clemens wrote, for next day's paper, a paragraph
     intended to be merely playful, but which proved highly offending to
     certain ladies concerned with the flour-sack enterprise. No files
     of the paper exist today, so we cannot judge of the quality of humor
     that stirred up trouble.

     The trouble, however, was genuine enough, Virginia's rival paper
     seized upon the chance to humiliate its enemy, and presently words
     were passed back and forth until nothing was left to write but a
     challenge. The story of this duel, which did not come off, has been
     quite fully told elsewhere, both by Mark Twain and the present
     writer; but the following letter—a revelation of his inner feelings
     in the matter of his offense—has never before been published.

VIRGINIA, May 23rd, 1864.

MADAM,—I address a lady in every sense of the term. Mrs. Clemens has informed me of everything that has occurred in Carson in connection with that unfortunate item of mine about the Sanitary Funds accruing from the ball, and from what I can understand, you are almost the only lady in your city who has understood the circumstances under which my fault was committed, or who has shown any disposition to be lenient with me. Had the note of the ladies been properly worded, I would have published an ample apology instantly—and possibly I might even have done so anyhow, had that note arrived at any other time—but it came at a moment when I was in the midst of what ought to have been a deadly quarrel with the publishers of the Union, and I could not come out and make public apologies to any one at such a time. It is bad policy to do it even now (as challenges have already passed between myself and a proprietor of the Union, and the matter is still in abeyance,) but I suppose I had better say a word or two to show the ladies that I did not wilfully and maliciously do them a wrong.

But my chief object, Mrs. Cutler, in writing you this note (and you will pardon the liberty I have taken,) was to thank you very kindly and sincerely for the consideration you have shown me in this matter, and for your continued friendship for Mollie while others are disposed to withdraw theirs on account of a fault for which I alone am responsible.

Very truly yours,
SAM. L. CLEMENS.

     The matter did not end with the failure of the duel. A very strict
     law had just been passed, making it a felony even to send or accept
     a challenge. Clemens, on the whole, rather tired of Virginia City
     and Carson, thought it a good time to go across the mountains to San
     Francisco. With Steve Gillis, a printer, of whom he was very fond
     —an inveterate joker, who had been more than half responsible for
     the proposed duel, and was to have served as his second—he took the
     stage one morning, and in due time was in the California metropolis,
     at work on the Morning Call.

     Clemens had been several times in San Francisco, and loved the
     place. We have no letter of that summer, the first being dated
     several months after his arrival. He was still working on the Call
     when it was written, and contributing literary articles to the
     Californian, of which Bret Harte, unknown to fame, was editor.
     Harte had his office just above the rooms of the Call, and he and
     Clemens were good friends. San Francisco had a real literary group
     that, for a time at least, centered around the offices of the Golden
     Era. In a letter that follows Clemens would seem to have scorned
     this publication, but he was a frequent contributor to it at one
     period. Joaquin Miller was of this band of literary pioneers; also
     Prentice Mulford, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, and
     Orpheus C. Kerr.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,—You can see by my picture that this superb climate agrees with me. And it ought, after living where I was never out of sight of snow peaks twenty-four hours during three years. Here we have neither snow nor cold weather; fires are never lighted, and yet summer clothes are never worn—you wear spring clothing the year round.

Steve Gillis, who has been my comrade for two years, and who came down here with me, is to be married, in a week or two, to a very pretty girl worth $130,000 in her own right—and then I shall be alone again, until they build a house, which they will do shortly.

We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times, and our hotel twice. We are very comfortably fixed where we are, now, and have no fault to find with the rooms or with the people—we are the only lodgers in a well-to-do private family, with one grown daughter and a piano in the parlor adjoining our room. But I need a change, and must move again. I have taken rooms further down the street. I shall stay in this little quiet street, because it is full of gardens and shrubbery, and there are none but dwelling houses in it.

I am taking life easy, now, and I mean to keep it up for awhile. I don't work at night any more. I told the “Call” folks to pay me $25 a week and let me work only in daylight. So I get up at ten every morning, and quit work at five or six in the afternoon. You ask if I work for greenbacks? Hardly. What do you suppose I could do with greenbacks here?

I have engaged to write for the new literary paper—the “Californian”—same pay I used to receive on the “Golden Era”—one article a week, fifty dollars a month. I quit the “Era,” long ago. It wasn't high-toned enough. The “Californian” circulates among the highest class of the community, and is the best weekly literary paper in the United States—and I suppose I ought to know.

I work as I always did—by fits and starts. I wrote two articles last night for the Californian, so that lets me out for two weeks. That would be about seventy-five dollars, in greenbacks, wouldn't it?

Been down to San Jose (generally pronounced Sannozay—emphasis on last syllable)—today fifty miles from here, by railroad. Town of 6,000 inhabitants, buried in flowers and shrubbery. The climate is finer than ours here, because it is not so close to the ocean, and is protected from the winds by the coast range.

I had an invitation today, to go down on an excursion to San Luis Obispo, and from thence to the city of Mexico, to be gone six or eight weeks, or possibly longer, but I could not accept, on account of my contract to act as chief mourner or groomsman at Steve's wedding.

I have triumphed. They refused me and other reporters some information at a branch of the Coroner's office—Massey's undertaker establishment, a few weeks ago. I published the wickedest article on them I ever wrote in my life, and you can rest assured we got all the information we wanted after that.

By the new census, San Francisco has a population of 130,000. They don't count the hordes of Chinamen.

I send a picture for Annie, and one for Aunt Ella—that is, if she will have it.

     Relations with the Call ceased before the end of the year, though
     not in the manner described in Roughing It. Mark Twain loved to
     make fiction of his mishaps, and to show himself always in a bad
     light. As a matter of fact, he left the Call with great
     willingness, and began immediately contributing a daily letter to
     the Enterprise, which brought him a satisfactory financial return.

     In the biographical sketch with which this volume opens, and more
     extendedly elsewhere, has been told the story of the trouble growing
     out of the Enterprise letters, and of Mark Twain's sojourn with
     James Gillis in the Tuolumne Hills. Also how, in the frowsy hotel
     at Angel's Camp, he heard the frog anecdote that would become the
     corner-stone of his fame. There are no letters of this period—only
     some note-book entries. It is probable that he did not write home,
     believing, no doubt, that he had very little to say.

     For more than a year there is not a line that has survived. Yet it
     had been an important year; the jumping frog story, published in New
     York, had been reprinted East and West, and laughed over in at least
     a million homes. Fame had not come to him, but it was on the way.

     Yet his outlook seems not to have been a hopeful one.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 20, 1866.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,—I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.

To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.

But no matter. His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers.