18–30 September 1861 • Carson City, Nev. Terr. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00033)
Form for message, transmitting to the Council, House Bills for concurrence.
The House sends Ⓐemendation transmits for the concurr Ⓐemendation herewith for the concurrence of the Hon: the Council, the following Bills:
An act &c
An act &c
An act &c
— — — — — —
Clerk. 1explanatory note
From Hon. Chief Justice Turner2explanatory note—I send your book by Dorsey, Orion—why the devil didn’t Turner send it to you himself while he was in the States?3explanatory note
This “Form for message” is in the hand of William Martin Gillespie (1838–85), originally from New York, who was chief clerk of the House of Representatives of the first Territorial Legislature, in session from 1 October through 29 November 1861. He served in the same capacity for the second Territorial Legislature (11 November–20 December 1862) and subsequently held a succession of other offices. The fact that Gillespie left blanks for the name of the clerk suggests that he prepared the form before he was formally elected to the post on 1 October (Andrew J. Marsh, 12, 668–69 n. 29).
George Turner (d. 1885), an Ohio lawyer, had been appointed chief justice of Nevada Territory by Abraham Lincoln in March 1861. After arriving in Carson City in the second week of September of that year, Turner served until 1864 when he and the rest of the judiciary resigned following accusations of corruption made by the Nevada press (Andrew J. Marsh, 670 n. 41). He apparently devised the “Form for message” which Gillespie transcribed.
Clemens was Orion’s eight-dollar-a-day clerk throughout the legislative session (William C. Miller, 2–5). He presumably sent Orion this note after his return to Carson City from Lake Bigler and before the legislature convened on 1 October. During that two-week period, Orion frequently must have been occupied preparing the legislative headquarters, two rooms in “the Capitol that is to be. It is located in the upper story of a lonely stone building, nearly two miles east of Carson City and on the opposite side of the narrow alkali plain on which the city is built” (Andrew J. Marsh, 2). On 1 October both Orion and Turner were in the House of Representatives—the former to preside until the election of officers, the latter to administer the oath of office to the members. They then could have attended to the matter of the book, probably a volume containing handwritten model forms drafted by Turner and Gillespie, without Clemens’s intervention. The present “Form for message” was at one time pasted in a scrapbook (which Orion afterward used for clippings) facing a model form for recording House passage of a bill, also in Gillespie’s hand (Scrapbook 2, CU-MARK). It is likely that this scrapbook, which contains a number of House transmittal documents and receipts later penned by Gillespie, was the book Clemens sent “by Dorsey,” who remains unidentified. In any event, Turner could not have had such a book “while he was in the States,” since he could only have collaborated on it with Gillespie after arriving in Nevada Territory.
MS, Moffett Collection, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L1 , 128.
see Moffett Collection, p. 462. Clemens wrote this note on a handwritten form pasted in a scrapbook kept by Orion Clemens (see p. 129, n. 3). The paste caused the edge of the form to wrinkle. Slight variations in the weight of Clemens’s pencil line inscribing ‘—I send’ and ‘the devil’ (128.17 and 128.18) correspond to the wrinkles in the paper, indicating that the form was already pasted into the scrapbook when Clemens wrote his note. The leaf has never been folded and therefore can never have been mailed, in an ordinary envelope at any rate. No evidence survives to indicate when or why it was torn out of the scrapbook.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.