29 October 1861 • Carson City, Nev. Terr. (MS: TxU, UCCL 00032)
Bob2explanatory note showed me your letter yesterday, in which you say that the “Averill Mill” is crushing our “Black Warrior” rock for its contents.3explanatory note All success to the “Black Warrior” and Horatio G. Phillips! Amen. This looks like business—and hath an encouraging sound to it. I wish they would “strike it rich” shortly, for I want to send a fine “Black Warrior” specimen to the London World’s Fair when by the ⒶemendationNevada commissioner, when he is appointed.4explanatory note From a despatch received by Tom Nye to-day from his father, the Captain, we are led to hope that that noisy old youth will arrive here about next Saturday. I have no doubt the “Cap.” would be very much pleased to receive a slice of the “Black Warrior.”
My brother is very particularly delighted with the “Black Warrior”—and I have told him that some day I’ll give him a foot! He is looking for money every day, now, from Washington.5explanatory note And when it comes, I shall expect to take you by the hand again in Aurora.
Bob has got such a jolly long tongue, and keeps it wagging so comfortably, that I have not been able to ask him yet, whether he succeeded in selling your “Fresno” or not. Did he?—and have you saved your mother’s place?—because I would like to know these things, as I have a mother at home myself, and naturally feel interested. I was sorry, though, that you were obliged to sell sacrifice Ⓐemendation a Ⓐemendation feet in that claim, for I am told that it is very fine. Since it had to go, though, I was sorry I was not able to buy it myself.6explanatory note
I told Bob that you ought to come up here y Ⓐemendation and see about getting the county clerkship down there, and I explained to him why you ought to come up. I was talking to my brother, though, a while ago, and he says the Governor will make no appointments down there until the California Legislature adjourns, so that he may have the sense of that body upon the boundary question.7explanatory note One thing I have thought of often, but have not spoken of—and that is, that the Governor may be absent when those appointments are made, and then my brother will have to make them himself. (Burn this letter, Ratio.)
Verily, it is raining—the first specimen of that kind that has fallen under my notice since I have been in Carson. It is pleasant to the sight, and refreshing to the senses—yea, “even as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”8explanatory note
The wings of Death overshadow us to-day—for this clouded sun is the last that one of our boys will ever look upon in life. Wagner, the civil engineer. I believe you do not know him. He surveyed with Lander’s party for two years.9explanatory note He is one of the few at whom the shafts of s Slander Ⓐemendationwere never aimed, and in whose presence against whom Ⓐemendationthe hand of Malifce Ⓐemendationwas never lifted. The fact of his dying here among comparative strangers, with no relative within thousands of miles of him and no woman to lay the blessing of her hand upon his aching head; and soothe his weary heart to its last sleep with the music of her woman’s voice, will shed a gloom over us all, when the sad event is consummated. May you die at home, Ratio, is the aspiration of
Write me often—and I will reply promptly.
Horatio G. Phillips, a former resident of Nevada City, California, had probably arrived in Aurora, in the Esmeralda mining district, early in 1861. There he located numerous claims and worked several mines. He and Clemens probably first met in Carson City during the last week of August 1861, while Phillips was serving as a delegate from Esmeralda to the Union Convention called to nominate a candidate for territorial delegate to the United States Congress. Early the next month Clemens may have accompanied Phillips to Aurora where, on 8 September, Phillips sold him fifty feet in the Black Warrior claim for $500. Clemens later purchased feet in at least five other Aurora ledges from Phillips. The two men also owned jointly in several claims, including the Horatio and Derby ledge and an extension of the Wide West (Angel, 402; deeds in CU-MARK).
Clemens first met Robert Muir Howland (1838–90), a native of New York State who had settled in Aurora in the summer of 1861, late that August when Howland, like Horatio Phillips, was in Carson City as a delegate to the Union Convention. At the time, Howland and Phillips were sharing a cabin. In Aurora, during the next few years, Howland was superintendent of the Federal Union, Union Star, and Magdalena mines, and co-owner of the Pride of Esmeralda Gold and Silver Mining Company and the Miners’ Foundry. He served as marshal of Aurora and in 1864 was appointed warden of the territorial prison at Carson City. In 1883 he was appointed United States deputy marshal for California (Howland, 1–5; San Francisco Alta California: “Letter from Esmeralda—No. 6,” 10 Nov 62, 1; “The Pride of Esmeralda,” 18 Feb 63, 1; Dale, 3; Howland deputy-marshal appointment, 18 June 83, PH in CU-MARK; Colcord, 117; “Deaths,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 18 Jan 90, 3). Clemens remained friendly with Howland until the latter’s death, recalling him in 1906 as “a slender, good-natured, amiable, gentle, kindly little skeleton of a man, with a sweet blue eye that would win your heart when it smiled upon you, or turn cold and freeze it, according to the nature of the occasion” (AD, 19 Jan 1906, in MTA , 1:352–53). Presumably the “sweet blue eye” turned cold on the occasion when, while serving as prison warden, Howland heated a steel bar “on one end to a red heat” and used it to subdue a defiant prisoner (Angel, 546).
Anson Averill was a resident of Aurora. The Averill Mill was in Esmeralda ravine, about two miles below the town (Kelly 1862, 245; San Francisco Evening Bulletin: “The Esmeralda Mines,” mistakenly listing the mill as the “Avery,” 28 Oct 61, 2; “From the Esmeralda Mines,” 1 Nov 61, 3, reprinting the Carson City Silver Age of unknown date; “The Mining Roll Continued,” 16 Mar 63, 3).
On 21 October Governor Nye informed the first Territorial Legislature that California had already appointed commissioners to represent the western states and territories in London at the International Exhibition of 1862. He urged the legislature to name an independent Nevada commissioner and to appropriate funds for a specimen collection of Nevada minerals. The legislature completed passage of the necessary bill on 29 November, the last day of the legislative session, and Nye signed it immediately, but no evidence has been found to indicate that a commissioner was actually sent. Nevada was impressively represented, nevertheless: Joseph Mosheimer, a San Francisco chemist and assayer, won a medal in the category of “mining, quarrying, metallurgy and mineral products” for a “collection illustrating the newly-explored mineral wealth of the Territory of Nevada” (“The Great Exhibition: Award of the Jurors,” New York Times, 26 July 62, 5; Journal of the Council, 83–84, 106, 251; Journal of the House, 92, 124, 329, 332; Lord, 59).
Orion Clemens finally received $925, his salary for the period 27 March–30 September 1861, in late November (OC to Elisha Whittlesey, 20 Nov 61, NvU-NSP).
The Fresno was a claim on Martinez Hill, Aurora. On 22 December Phillips wrote to Orion Clemens: “We are expecting to strike the Ledge in our Fresno soon & when we do if it is as rich as we all have every reason to believe I will let you know if we strike it as rich in the Tunnel as the top indicates it will be worth a few Hundred Dollars a foot. J. D. Kinney has been buying all he can get He got fifty feet at six dollars” (NPV). Samuel Clemens paid Kinney $1,000 on 1 March 1862 for Kinney’s holdings of over 1,400 feet in sixteen claims, including 100 feet in the Fresno and 200 feet in the first north extension of the Fresno (deed in CU-MARK). Clemens’s letter of 23 July 1862 to Orion suggests that his faith in the Fresno’s potential richness remained undiminished until the end of his Aurora residence.
Although Nevada’s limits had been roughly laid out by Congress in March 1861, the new territory was expected to establish its western border by arbitration with California. At the time of the present letter, that boundary, both north and south of Lake Bigler, was in dispute, and mineral-rich Aurora was claimed by both Mono County, California, and Esmeralda County, Nevada. Four days before Clemens wrote this letter, Governor Nye requested the Territorial Legislature to appoint a commission to ask the California legislature to “grant unto this Territory all that portion of her State lying east of the summit of the Sierra Nevada mountains” (Andrew J. Marsh, 158). Meanwhile, Nye preferred to leave the administration of Esmeralda County business in the hands of the already elected Mono County officers, with the exception of a county surveyor and a district attorney whom he appointed. The commission he requested was never created, and the boundary dispute continued, sometimes violently, for almost two years (Chalfant, 77–78; Angel, 100). Clemens’s letters for the period comment repeatedly on the conflict.
Isaiah 32:2.
Will H. Wagner was a member of John Nye and Company (Wagner to John Nye, 7 Sept 61, PH in CU-MARK, courtesy of Michael H. Marleau; see 18–21 Sept 61 to JLC and PAM, n. 5click to open link). Frederick West Lander (1821–62), engineer, explorer, and soldier, led or participated in five transcontinental survey expeditions in the 1850s, most notably those for the Northern Pacific Railroad route and for the overland wagon road north of Carson City (Angel, 164).
MS, Harry G. Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin (TxU).
L1 , 140–143; Sotheby and Co., London, Catalogue of a Selected Portion of the Well-Known Library of the Late John Francis Neylan of San Francisco, sale of 28 May 1962, lot 112, brief excerpts.
see Previous publication.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.