In the original document about two hundred words, printed in very small type below the company’s name, describe the “terms and conditions” for anyone relying on its services. This information, like other highly detailed verbiage printed on such telegram blanks or on letter stationery, is not transcribed as part of the letter text. In this case, the “terms and conditions” are reproduced in full in the textual apparatus.

Family records give the date of Henry Clemens’s death as 20 June 1858, but this telegram and a report in the Memphis Appeal of 22 June (“The Victims,” 2) indicate that he died on the twenty-first. Death came “about dawn,” Clemens later recalled, attributing it, possibly inaccurately (see Bates 1968, 87–91), to an overdose of morphine administered at midnight by Dr. Peyton’s assistants, “young fellows hardly out of the medical college,” after Peyton had declared Henry “out of danger” (AD, 13 Jan 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 1:311). Dazed and exhausted, Clemens rested for a few hours in a Memphis household before making arrangements to convey Henry’s body by steamer to the Moffett home in St. Louis. His niece Annie Moffett Webster remembered that the sympathetic people of Memphis “sent a young man up to St. Louis with Uncle Sam, who was so overcome with grief that they were afraid he would go insane” (MTBus, 36)—perhaps the unidentified individual whose kindness and financial assistance Orion Clemens acknowledged in 1858 (see MTB , 3:1592). On 18 June, the same day Clemens wrote the previous letter to Mollie Clemens (then in Keokuk), William Moffett telegraphed him in Memphis: “Will it be better for your mother to come down” (CU-MARK). Clemens must have discouraged such a course. Orion, who was in Jamestown, Tennessee, when the Pennsylvania exploded, hurried to Memphis, conceivably arriving in time to join Clemens in bringing Henry’s remains to St. Louis, but more probably joining him there ( MTB , 1:143; MEC, 7–8; OC to MEC, 9 Sept 61, CU-MARK). Henry’s body arrived in Hannibal on 25 June aboard the steamer Hannibal City, accompanied by “some of his relatives” (“Funereal,” Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger, 26 June 58, clipping in Scrapbook 1:8, CU-MARK). In addition to Sam and Orion, the cortege almost certainly included Jane Clemens and William and Pamela Moffett. Henry was buried that same day in Hannibal’s Baptist cemetery beside John Marshall Clemens. In 1876 both bodies were moved to the newer Mount Olivet Cemetery.