No letters are known to survive between 11 and 18 December 1871. After his successful Toledo lecture of 11 December, Clemens proceeded to a series of engagements in Michigan. In Ann Arbor, on 12 December, he kept the audience of college students “in a continual roar of laughter” with “Artemus Ward, Humorist,” but the next evening, in Jackson, his drawling delivery of the same lecture was thought “rather monotonous and tiresome.” In Lansing on 14 December he gave his revamped “Roughing It” lecture (entitled “Out West,” according to the Lansing lecture committee’s records), a full transcript of which was published on 21 December (“Ann Arbor—Lecture,” Detroit Post, 15 Dec 71, 1; “Mark Twain,” Jackson Citizen, 19 Dec 71, 7; Lansing State Republican, 21 Dec 71, reprinted in Lorch 1968, 305–21; Wallace, 33). Clemens was a moderate success in Grand Rapids on 15 December, probably giving “Roughing It” (Fatout 1960, 164–65). The press response to his 16 December Kalamazoo performance of “Roughing It,” was sharply divided, however. According to the Kalamazoo Telegraph, “no lecturer . . . ever more completely disappointed his hearers”:
The substitute for a lecture which Mr. Clemens foisted upon his audience was an insult to their intelligence and capacity. . . . Capable of furnishing a good lecture, Mr. Clemens had no right to impose upon his hearers any such desultory trash as they were subjected to. They had a right to expect something worth coming out to hear, and if he is too lazy or unmindful to do justice to himself or an audience he ought not to lecture at all. He should have given the lecture he contracted to deliver, or something equally good, in its stead, and not put us off with a rambling, disconnected talk about a hackneyed subject, sans wit, sans information, sans sense. It is the duty of the press to expose such impositions, and if other journals remain silent, we shall not. (“Mark Twain in Kalamazoo,” 18 Dec 71, no page)
The Kalamazoo Gazette, on the other hand, reported that Clemens alternately “enchanted” and convulsed his audience:
No man, without it be Gough, who has ever lectured before a Kalamazoo audience, had more perfect control of his subject, himself and his listeners. A single word sometimes, said in that slow, droll, calculating way, would be like the spark in a powder magazine.
The person who reads his writing, gets something of an idea of his humor, but to enjoy it to the fullest, requires one to see the man and hear him say the words. (“Mark Twain,” 22 Dec 71, 3)
Leaving Kalamazoo at 4 a.m. on Sunday, 17 December, Clemens started for Chicago, 140 miles away.