Biographical information is scant for Clemens’s next twelve months, a period for which no letters have been discovered. His visit to Washington, D.C., probably lasted only a long weekend, from 16 through 20 February (or possibly through Washington’s birthday) 1854. He himself called his stay a “flying trip,” and Paine said that it “was comparatively brief, and he did not work there” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:287; MTB , 1:101). No doubt relying upon information supplied by Clemens, Paine reported that he then returned to Philadelphia, where he “worked for a time on the Ledger and North American. Finally he went back to New York” ( MTB , 1:101).

Clemens’s removal to New York very likely occurred about two weeks after his return to Philadelphia. On 10 March and again on 17 March there were unclaimed letters for him in Philadelphia, an indication that by then he had left the city (“List of Letters Remaining in the Philadelphia Post Office,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 11 and 20 Mar 54, 4). Paine reported, “His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded, and in later years was only vaguely remembered”( MTB , 1:101–2). Perhaps Clemens erased this period from his memory because it was a time of financial distress and bruised pride. His former confidence in his ability to “take care of himself a few miles from home”(8 Oct 53 to PAMclick to open link) must have been shaken in the spring of 1854. Unemployment among New York printers was high, at least in part the result of the destruction by fire of two major publishing houses, Harper and Brothers and George F. Cooledge and Brothers, in December 1853 (“Destructive Fire,” New York Times, 12 Dec 53, 1). Forty-five years later Clemens acknowledged that he had been “obliged by financial stress” to return home (SLC 1899, 3).

In 1906 Clemens described this return trip: “I went back to the Mississippi Valley, sitting upright in the smoking-car two or three days and nights. When I reached St. Louis I was exhausted. I went to bed on board a steamboat that was bound for Muscatine. I fell asleep at once, with my clothes on, and didnt’ wake again for thirty-six hours” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:287–88). Paine wrote that Clemens stopped off in St. Louis “only a few hours to see Pamela. It was his mother [in Muscatine, Iowa] he was anxious for.” Paine also believed that Clemens had been away in the East for a year, from August 1853 to August 1854, and that “it was late in the summer of 1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West” ( MTB , 1:102).

In fact, given the hard times in New York, it is reasonable to speculate that Clemens’s return to the West came as early as April 1854. His appearance in Muscatine—a thriving town of about fifty-five hundred people located on the Mississippi River some three hundred and ten miles above St. Louis—occasioned a joyful reunion with his mother and brothers. Muscatine tradition contradicts Paine’s contention that, unable to “afford the luxury of working for Orion” on the Muscatine Journal, Clemens quickly returned to St. Louis and his former job on the Evening News ( MTB , 1:103). Local opinion holds that Clemens “remained in Muscatine several months before going to St. Louis, and that he worked for a time at the Journal office” (Lorch 1929, 414; see also “Famous Humorist Once Lived in Muscatine,” Muscatine Journal, 26 Apr 1910, 3; “Mark’ Twain’ in Muscatine,” Muscatine Weekly Journal, 26 May 82, 6; Richman, 1:391). Clemens’s own detailed recollections of Muscatine in chapter 57 of Life on the Mississippi support this notion of a stay of some duration. He did not, however, remain until “the late fall of 1854 or the winter of 1855” (Lorch 1929, 417). “S. A. Clemens,” almost certainly a misprint of his name, appears in a mail-to-be-claimed list in the St. Louis Missouri Republican for 8 July (“List of Letters,” 3), suggesting that someone expected him to be there. He may well have been in St. Louis at that point, working on the Evening News and perhaps other newspapers. Certainly he was settled in St. Louis by 7 August, the first day of the Know Nothing election riots in which he briefly participated as a citizen policeman (Life on the Mississippi, chapter 51). Misremembering the time as “1852 or 1853,” Clemens recalled that he boarded “with the Paveys [formerly of Hannibal], corner of 4th & Wash streets. It was a large, cheap place, & had in it a good many young fellows who were students at a Commercial college” (15 Dec 1900 to Frank E. Burrough, MoCgS). Very little else is known about his activities in St. Louis until mid-February 1855, when he wrote the next letter for the Muscatine Journal—now edited by Orion and Charles E. H. Wilson, successor to John Mahin, who had withdrawn from partnership in the paper at the end of December 1854 (“Valedictory,” Muscatine Tri-Weekly Journal, 29 Dec 54, 2).