No letters are known to survive for the next five months. After spending a few days with his family in St. Louis at the end of April 1861, Clemens rejoined the Alonzo Child for its 2 May departure, arriving in New Orleans six days later. The Child’s flamboyantly secessionist captain, David DeHaven, decided not to return north, but to run the boat instead in the Memphis–New Orleans trade. The best evidence indicates that Clemens left the Child and went north as a passenger on the Nebraska, departing New Orleans on 14 May and arriving at St. Louis on 21 May. The Nebraska was the last boat to gain free passage to the upper Mississippi through the Union blockade at Memphis, which put a virtual end to commercial traffic on the river (see Mattson, 398–409). After a little more than two years as a licensed pilot, Clemens was forced to abandon his profession.

Annie Moffett Webster later recalled that in the weeks following his arrival in St. Louis, Clemens spent most of his time in the Moffett home, hiding for fear “that he might be arrested by government agents and forced to act as pilot on a government gunboat” ( MTBus , 60). In mid-June Clemens went to Hannibal and there joined the Marion Rangers, a desultory band of would-be Confederate volunteers. This connection with the Southern cause—depicted with humor and pathos in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (SLC 1885, 193–204)—ended after about two weeks. By early July Clemens was back in St. Louis. On the fourth of that month Orion Clemens, who was now ready to take up his post as secretary of Nevada Territory, came down from Keokuk, where he was leaving his family. Orion

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Receipt for Orion and Samuel Clemens’s stagecoach passage from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Carson City, Nevada Territory. Orion paid $300 the day before their 26 July departure, and promised to pay the balance within thirty days. Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library (CU-MARK).

Clemens gave his own account of the western journey in the first twenty chapters of Roughing It. (Some important corrections, particularly in regard to his financial arrangements with and employment by Orion, can be found in William C. Miller, 1–9; for Orion’s recollections of the trip see RI , supplement D, 546–50.) Early in September he made his first visit to Aurora, in the Esmeralda mining district, evidently remaining at least until the tenth of the month (see 25 Oct 61 to JLC and PAM, n. 4click to open link). Allowing time for travel he probably arrived back in Carson City on 12 September. There he wrote the next letter.