8 and 9 March 1862 • Carson City, Nev. Terr. (MS: ViU, UCCL 00039)
As a good opportunity offers, I have embraced it to send you some legal and letter paper, and a copy of the laws.1explanatory note I send the pencils, pens, &c., because I don’t know whether you have run out of such things or not. If you have got plenty of stationery, maybe Sam and Tom2explanatory note have not. I also send you some more envelops. The Colonel3explanatory note proposes to start to-morrow Ⓐemendationor next day.
I hunted up Fall, but he would not sell me his ground for Sam. Then I told him he had better go to Unionville and “nurse” Ⓐemendationa good thing while he had it. He said he would.
John Kinney has gone to the States, via San Francisco.
Your Father has purchased the Keokuk “Journal,”—so he will hardly come out here this year—hey?4explanatory note
I have heard from several reliable sources that Sewall will be here shortly, and has sworn to whip me on sight. Now what would you advise a fellow to do?—take a thrashing fo from Ⓐemendationthe son-of-a-bitch, or bind him over to keep the peace? I don’t see why he should dislike me. He is a yankee,—and I naturaly Ⓐemendationlove a yankee.5explanatory note
I stole a bully dog the other day—but he escaped again. Look out for one. That other dog, over whose fate a dark mystery hangs, has not revisited the glimpses of the moon yet, in this vicinity, although he has been seen in a certain locality—whereof it would be Treason to speak. D—n the beast—does he intend to haunt us like a nightmare for the balance of his days?
The Governor’s Cavalcade left for California the other day. Some of the retainers I will name: the Governor and Gov. Roop, Boundary-line Commissioners; accompanied by Mr. Gillson, Mr. Kinkead and others—and followed by Bob Howland, Chief Valet de Chambre to His Excellency, and Bob Haslan, Principal Second Assistant ditto ditto.6explanatory note What do you make of thatⒶemendation, for instance? There were quite a number in the Cavalcade, and Haslan brought up the rear on a mule. Bob Howland expects to sell some ground in San Francisco.
You say the “Annie Moffett Company”—isn’t that the name of the ledge, too? I hope so.
I would like to write you some news, Billy, but unfortunately, I haven’t got any to write. I couldn’t write it, though, if I had, for I am in a bad humor, and am only writing anyhow, because I hate to lose the opportunity. You see I have been playing cards with Bunker, and the d—d old Puritan wouldn’t play fairly—and I made injurious remarks and jumped the game.
I send a St. Louis Republican for Tom. There is something in it from “Ethan Spike.”7explanatory note
Enclosed please find Mr. Cox’s Speech.8explanatory note
If you and Dad intend coming down, Billy, with the wagon, don’t fail to write and say about what time you will be here. I leave for Esmeralda next week some time, with Major General BBBunker, L.L.D., Esq—provided “nothing happens.” But this do Ⓐemendationhappen in this country, constantly. In fact, it is about the d—est country in the world for things to happen in. My calculations never come out right. However, as I said before, We May be Happy Yet.
Remember me kindly to the boys—not forgetting “the old man,” of course. I have labored hard to get a copy of “Fannie Hill”9explanatory note for him to read, but I have failed sadly.
Sunday.—I intended to finish this letter to-day, but I went to church—and busted! For a man who can listen for an hour to Mr. White, the whining, nasal, Whangdoodle preacher, and then sit down and write, without shedding melancholy from his pen as a ducks water slides Ⓐemendationfrom a duck’s back, is more than mortal. Or less. I fear I shall not feel cheerful again until the beans I had for dinner begin to operate.10explanatory note
Which reminds me of that afternoon in Sacramento cañon,11explanatory note when I gained such a brilliant victory of over ⒶemendationOliver and Mr. Tillou w Ⓐemendation, and drove them in confusion and dismay from behind my batteries.
We have not heard from home for some time, and I have only written two letters to St Louis since I arrived here.
John D. Winters has sold out his interest in the Ophir for a hundred thousand dollars.12explanatory note
J. L. G. and his father13explanatory note are still flourishing in Chinatown. Mr. Bunker saw them there the other day.
Tom Nye is down at Fort Churchill. Write, at your earliest convenience.
Wm. H. Clagett, Esq. | Unionville, | Humboldt Co. | N.T. no postage stamp
Laws of the Territory of Nevada, Passed at the First Regular Session of the Legislative Assembly (San Francisco: Valentine and Company, 1862).
Sam Montgomery and Tom Smith (or Messersmith).
John B. Onstine.
The Keokuk Journal ceased publication in November 1861 and reappeared the following month as the Keokuk Constitution (Winifred Gregory, 176). The Constitution, edited for many years by Judge Thomas W. Clagett, had a fiery history during the Civil War. Clagett, “aristocrat, capitalist, lawyer, politician, . . . published scurrilous articles that reflected on the bravery of the northern soldiers and the Union cause.” Finally, on 19 February 1863, a group of soldiers enraged at Clagett’s editorials marched on the newspaper office, dismantled the presses and type cases, and threw them into the Mississippi River. “Eventually the presses were fished out, and the Constitution resumed publication, its sentiments cooled for the duration of the war” (Writers’ Program, 61).
Clemens and G. T. Sewall presumably became acquainted while Clemens was prospecting in Humboldt County in December 1861 and January 1862, but the precise cause of their antagonism is unknown. Sewall had lived in the area for approximately eight years, was active in mining, and had been appointed county judge by Governor Nye in December 1861. In 1861 Sewall was briefly associated with two of Nevada’s three newspapers. According to Orion Clemens, writing in August of that year, the Silver City Washoe Times was “recently purchased by G. T. Sewall, who is now in partnership with Mr. John C. Lewis of the Carson City ‘Silver Age,’ in both papers, of which they will be editors” (OC to Elisha Whittlesey, 21 Aug 61, NvU-NSP). Lewis and Sewall were commissioned, with Orion Clemens’s endorsement, to print the journals and laws of the first Territorial Legislature. Then in November 1861, in the middle of the legislative session, they acrimoniously dissolved their partnership, aborting their printing contract and causing considerable embarrassment and aggravation to Orion (see 25 June 62 to OC, n. 2click to open link). It is possible that his brother then took up the cudgels in his behalf. A remark in Clemens’s 9 July 1862 letter to Orion suggests that he was irritated at Lewis as well as Sewall. Whatever the cause of the dispute, within a few months Clemens revenged himself by ridiculing Sewall in “Petrified Man” in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (see 21 Oct 62 to OC and MECclick to open link).
Governor Nye was on his way to Sacramento to confer with the California legislature in an effort to settle the dispute over Nevada’s western boundary. His cavalcade included: Isaac N. Roop (1822–69), head of the provisional government of Nevada Territory during 1859 and 1860 and currently a member of the territorial Council; George Gillson, Nye’s special assistant for Indian affairs; John H. Kinkead (1826–1904), a Carson City merchant with numerous mining, milling, and real-estate interests, who was appointed territorial treasurer by Nye in February 1862, later served in the state constitutional conventions, and became Nevada’s third governor (1879–82); Clemens’s Aurora cohort Robert M. Howland, who enjoyed Nye’s patronage as a result of their mutual friendship with Secretary of State William H. Seward; and Robert T. Haslan, page of the territorial House. Nye’s mission was a failure. California refused to make concessions, and the boundary conflict continued (Andrew J. Marsh, 27, 666 n. 13, 690 n. 253; Mack 1936, 394–97; Mack 1961, 30; Kelly 1862, 11).
The Ethan Spike letters, a series of humorous dialect sketches that repeatedly condemned slavery and its supporters, were published in the Portland (Maine) Transcript between 1846 and 1863 and were widely reprinted in newspapers across the country. They were written by Matthew F. Whittier (1812–83), younger brother of John Greenleaf Whittier. His creation, Ethan Spike, was a New England backwoodsman whose letters, like the writings of Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, were marked by cacography and malapropisms (Griffin, 646–63). On 3 February 1862 the St. Louis Missouri Republican (4) printed the following excerpt:
A DOWN EAST JURYMAN.
[“Ethan Spike” contributes to the Portland Transcript a sketch of his experience as a juryman. The first cases he was called to try were capital ones—the criminals being a German and a “nigger” respectively.”
“Hev you formed any opinion for or agin the prisoners?” said the judge.
“Not perticular agin the Jermin,” says I, “but I hate niggers as a general principle, and shall go for hanging this here old white wooled cuss, whether he killed Mr. Cooper or not,” says I.
“Do you know the nature of an oath?” the clark axed me.
“I orter,” says I. “I’ve used enough of’em. I begun to swear when I was only about—”
“That’ll do,” says the clark. “You kin go bum,” says he, “you won’t be wanted in this ere case,” says the clark, says he.
“What?” says I, “aint I to try this nigger at all?”
“No,” says the clark.
“But I’m a jewryman,” says I, “and you can’t hang the nigger onless I’ve sot on him,” says I.
“Pass on,” says the clark, speaking rather cross.
“But,” says I, “you mister, you don’t mean as you say; I’m a regular jewryman, you know. Drawed aout of the box by the seelick man,” says I. “I’ve ollers had a hankering to hang a nigger, and now, when a merciful dispensatory seems to have provided one for me, you say I shan’t sit on him! Ar this your free institutions? Is this the nineteenth centry? And is this our boasted”— Here somebody hollored “Silence in Court.”
“The Court be—!” I didn’t finish the remark fore a couple of constables had holt of me, and in the twinkling of a bed post I was hustled down stairs into the street.
“Naow, Mr. Editor, let me ask, what are we comin’ to, when jewrymen—legal, lawful jewrymen, kin be tossed about in this way? Talk about Cancers, Mormons, Spiritualism, free love and panics—whar are they in comparison? Here’s a principle upsot. As an individual, perhaps, I’m of no great account; t’an’t fur me to say; but when as an enlightened jewryman, I was tuk and carried down stairs by profane hands, just for assertin my right to sit on a nigger—why it seems to me the pillows of society were shook; that in my sacred person the hull State itself was, figgeratively speakin, kicked down stairs! If thar’s law in the land I’ll have this case brought under a writ of habeus Corpus or icksey Dicksit.
The 3 February Republican, presumably sent by Jane Clemens and Pamela Moffett, probably was Clemens’s enclosure. It is conceivable that he enclosed a weekly Republican containing both the Ethan Spike excerpt and the speech discussed in note 8, but no copy of such a paper has been located. In chapter 6 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Clemens was to have the disreputable Pap Finn deliver an antigovernment, antiblack harangue similar to Ethan Spike’s.
On 31 January 1862, Ohio Democrat Samuel S. Cox (1824–89) delivered an address in the House of Representatives in defense of General George B. McClellan’s handling of the war effort, and in favor of a Northern accommodation with slavery. Cox’s speech was a rebuttal to remarks made the day before by Congressman John A. Gurley (1813–63), also of Ohio, who was a radical Republican and abolitionist. In an attempt to discredit Gurley’s pro-Union sympathies, Cox in part berated him for “rehearsing again his contempt for the Union, which he expressed in his printed speech made at Cleveland on the day of John Brown’s obsequies, when he said that no purer spirit than John Brown’s had ever entered Paradise for the past thousand years; and that he would rend the Union to destroy slavery.” Clemens probably enclosed the text of Cox’s speech that filled more than four columns in the St. Louis Missouri Republican of 5 February 1862 (“Ohio vs. Ohio,” 2). The speech soon issued in pamphlet form (Cox).
The erotic novel by John Cleland. It appeared originally as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) and then, abridged by the author, as Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1750).
The Reverend A. F. White arrived in Carson City from Gilroy, California, in September 1861 to act as pastor of the newly formed First Presbyterian Church, of which Orion Clemens was a member. White secured a series of political posts: chaplain of the territorial House of Representatives during the October–November 1861 session; superintendent of Ormsby County schools, 1862–63; superintendent of public instruction for the territory and then the state of Nevada, 1863–66; and later, state mineralogist (Andrew J. Marsh, 670–71 n. 46). His nomination to the post of chaplain of the legislative Council in October 1861 sparked a comical controversy over the necessity for his services (see Roughing It, chapter 25, and Mack 1947, 89–90). White was widely known for his series of sermons on the pecuniary advantages of observing the gospel (for Clemens’s jibes at White’s worldliness, see SLC 1864, 4:3, and SLC 1864, 3). No doubt Clemens associated White’s pulpit style with that of the “Hard-shell Baptist” preacher whose sermon, “Where the Lion Roareth and the Wang-Doodle Mourneth,” was a staple of frontier humor (see N&J2 , 362 n. 22). The “Whangdoodle,” a “mysterious animal, like the ‘gyascutis’ of circus fame, has never been beheld of man and its attributes and habits are entirely unknown” (Maitland, 300).
Located in the West Humboldt mountain range not far from the Buena Vista district, which Clemens had explored in December 1861 and January 1862.
John D. Winters (1830–1900), a Carson City resident and a member of the 1861 territorial House of Representatives, had gone from Illinois to California in 1848 and then migrated to Nevada in 1857. He was the only one of the original discoverers of the Comstock lode to retain an interest after 1860. Winters owned quartz mills at Dayton and Aurora and held a one-eighteenth interest in the Ophir Silver Mining Company, which he had helped to organize (Andrew J. Marsh, 667 n. 19; Kelly 1862, 218; Ratay, 293). The day before Clemens wrote this letter, the Carson City Silver Age reported Winters’s sale of his Ophir stock for “the snug sum of one hundred thousand dollars” (“Large Sale,” San Francisco Alta California, 13 Mar 62, 1, reprinting the Silver Age of 7 Mar 62).
Unidentified.
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia (ViU).
L1 , 169–174.
deposited at ViU on 23 Apr 1960.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.