No letters are known to survive for the next four and a half months. This was a period of frequent movement and varied activity for Clemens. He returned to Virginia City from Steamboat Springs on 23 August 1863, his cold still uncured, but remained there less than two weeks. Dan De Quille’s arrival, on 5 September, after a nine-month visit to his Iowa home, freed Clemens from his Territorial Enterprise duties as local editor, enabling him to seek restored health in San Francisco. He left Virginia City that same day, evidently stopping over in Carson City and arriving in San Francisco on 8 September. During the next four weeks he enjoyed a pleasurable recuperation, attending balls and the theater and playing billiards with other residents of the luxurious Lick House. He described some of his experiences in contributions to the Enterprise and the San Francisco Golden Era (see ET&S1 , 291–319, and SLC 1863, 2:78).

Clemens departed San Francisco, probably around 9 October, to attend the First Annual Fair of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Society, held in Carson City from the twelfth through the seventeenth of the month. He had been made recording secretary of that society by the 19 December 1862 legislative act that created it, with a salary not to exceed “the sum of three hundred dollars per annum” ( Laws 1863, 97). He served until the conclusion of the fair, when the society elected its new officers and his friend William M. Gillespie was chosen to succeed him (“First Annual Fair of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Society,” Virginia City Union, 14 Oct 63, clipping in Scrap-book 2:90–91, CU-MARK; “The Territorial Fair,” Virginia City Evening Bulletin, 19 Oct 63, 1). Clemens reported the events of the fair in at least two letters to the Enterprise, one of which, written on 19 October, has survived (see SLC 1863, 2:99). Soon after that date he resumed his Enterprise post in Virginia City. At the end of October he and Dan De Quille rented rooms there together (see 17 Sept 64 to Wright, n. 3click to open link). A few days later, however, Clemens was again in Carson City, this time to collaborate in the Enterprise coverage of Nevada Territory’s first Constitutional Convention, which ran from 2 November through 11 December 1863 (see Marsh, Clemens, and Bowman, passim, and SLC 1863 [four references]). He was still in Carson City on 13 December, when he sent a dispatch to the Enterprise reporting the burlesque proceedings of the Third House of the Constitutional Convention (see SLC 1863, 3:55).

Clemens returned to Virginia City in time to enjoy an uproarious visit by Artemus Ward, which began on 18 December and apparently lasted until the twenty-ninth. On the evening of 29 December Clemens reported a Virginia City political meeting for the Enterprise (see SLC 1863, 3:60–61). In his capacity as political reporter he probably went to Carson City the following day—to be on hand for the opening, on 31 December, of the Union party convention to select candidates for Nevada’s first state election, scheduled for 19 January 1864. The convention was of personal, as well as professional, interest to Clemens: his brother Orion emerged as the party’s candidate for secretary of state, while Enterprise editor Joseph T. Goodman failed to win its nomination for state printer (Angel, 84,85). Following the convention, Clemens wrote the next letter.