5 January 1876 • Hartford, Conn. ( Pioneers 1876, p. 30, UCCL 01294)
(SUPERSEDED)
Your courteous invitation of Dec. 21st has been in my hands some little time now, but I have not been well enough to write letters, &Ⓐemendation am not yet well enough to do it without assistance. This must be my excuse for delaying to reply sooner.1explanatory note
I should be glad indeed, to meet with the Pioneers, &Ⓐemendation help them to celebrate the twenty-eighth Anniversary of the Gold discovery, &Ⓐemendation should be more than glad to take the veteran General Sutter by the hand again; but I am sorry to say that the loss of time consequent upon my illness has put my work back to such a degree, that I shall be obliged to remain at home for some time to come, in order to catch up.2explanatory note
Although I am debarred from being present on the pleasant occasion, I hope that the luckier ones will enjoy their happier opportunity to the full.
With many thanks, I am,
(Mark Twain.)Ⓐemendation
The invitation from Clark, the secretary and treasurer of the newly organized Associated Pioneers of the Territorial Days of California, does not survive. Clemens dictated this response, employing the same unidentified stenographer who transcribed his letter of 5 January to Dan De Quille click to open link. The illness that delayed it was dysentery, as indicated by his letter of 29 or 30 December 1875 to Joseph H. Twichell ( L6 , 606). On 3 January Clemens’s neighbor Lilly Warner wrote her husband, George: “Mr. Clemens is still miserable—wasn’t dressed yesterday when I ran in at noon. I should really think it might run into some serious trouble” ( UCLC 32256, CU-MARK). But the following day she was able to tell him: “Mr. Clemens is much better & out again” ( UCLC 32259, CU-MARK).
On the evening of 18 January 1876, the Associated Pioneers held its first annual meeting and banquet, at the Sturtevant House in New York, celebrating the discovery, on 24 January 1848, of gold in California. John A. Sutter (1803–80), California colonist and self-styled “General” on whose property the discovery was made, was himself ill and unable to attend. In Sutter’s absence, the “honored guest” was another old friend of Clemens’s, Joaquin Miller. Clemens’s letter was one of several read aloud. The details of his acquaintance with Sutter are not known ( Pioneers 1876, title page, 4, 24–25, 27; Hart 1987, 306, 508).