23 July 1862 • Aurora, Calif./Nev. Terr. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00055)
No, I don’t own a foot in the “Johnson” ledge1explanatory note—I will tell the story some day in a more intelligible manner than Tom has told it.2explanatory note You needn’t take the trouble to deny Tom’s version, though. I own 25 feet (1/16) of the 1st east ex. on it—and Johnson himself has contracted to find the ledge for 100 feet.3explanatory note Contract signed yesterday. But as the ledge will be difficult to find, he is allowed 6 months to find it in. An eighteenth of the Ophir was a fortune to John D. Winters—and the Ophir can’t beat the Johnson any. I have promised a man ten dollars if he will get one of the owners to give me 25 feet more. I am very much afraid he can’t manage it, though. Johnson has contracted to find the 1st W. ex. on the do do Ⓐemendation for 100 feet, and day before yesterday, when he thought he had struck it, one of the owners sold 25 feet of it for $600 cash. Johnson owns 400 ft in the discovery, and owns largely in the Pride of Utah, and also owns the Union Mill.
Well, I am willing Mollie should come, provided she brings John with her. John would do well here.4explanatory note Are you in the new office yet?
I have written Judge Turner—but I didn’t tell him Johnny5explanatory note had written me—don’t you. I have offered to sell all the my half the ground to him except the Fresno for $700—or $400, if he will give me his Fresno. I don’t want the d—d ground. I w If ⒶemendationJudge Turner is not there, and will not be there soon, take his letter out of the office and send it to him.
I have not your letter by me now, and I do not remember all that was in it. At any rate, with regard to Phillips, don’t depart from my instructions in my last. He is a d—d rascal, and I can get the signatures of 25 men to this sentiment whenever I want them. He shall not be paid out of the Record fund. Tell him if he can’t wait for the money, he can have his ground back, and welcome—that is, 12½ feet of it—or 25, for that matter., Ⓐemendationfor it isn’t worth a d—n, except that the work on it will hold it until the next great convulsion of nature injects gold and silver into it.6explanatory note
My debts are greater than I thought for. I bought $25 worth of clothing, and sent $20 $25 Ⓐemendationto Higbie, in the cement diggings. I owe about 45 or $50, and have got about $45 in my pocket. But how in the h—1 I am going to live on something over $100 until October or November, is singular.7explanatory note The fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too. I want that money to pay assessments with. And if Turner don’t accept my offer right away, I’ll make a sale of that ground d—d soon. I don’t want to sell any of it, though until the Fresno tunnel is in. Then I’ll sell the extension.
Now write to the Sacramento Union folks, or to Marsh,8explanatory note and tell them I’ll write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a week—my board must be paid. Tell them I have corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent,9explanatory note and other papers—and the Enterprise. California is full of people who have interests here, and it’s d—d seldom they hear from this country. I can’t write a specimen letter—now, at any rate—I’d rather undertake to write a Greek poem. Tell ’em the mail & express leave here three times a week, and it costs from 25 to 50 cents to send letters by that blasted express. If they want letters from here, who’ll run from morning till nights collecting materials cheaper. ⒶemendationI’ll write a short letter twice a week for the present for the “Age,” for $5 per week. Now it has been a long time since I couldn’t make my own living, and it shall be a long time before I loaf another year.
No, you needn’t pay Upton. I took all sorts of pains, and run after men every day for two weeks trying to fix up that business of his here, about his house, and d—n him, he has never even answered my letters on the subject. If I sell any of Johnny’s ground, he shall be paid.
I want to have a shaft sunk 100 feet on the Monitor, but I am afraid to try it, for want of money. Don’t send any money home.
If I can think of it I will enclose that scrap about the old scissors, and you can paste it in my scrap book. Who the devil was that James Clemens, I wonder? Pamela enters into no explanations.10explanatory note
We can’t decide what is to be done with the Fresno until DeKay gets back from Mono.
If I get the other 25 feet in the Johnson ex., I shan’t care a d—n. I’ll be willing to curse awhile and wait. And if I can’t move the bowels of these hills this fall, I will come up and clerk for you until I get money enough to go over the mountains for the winter.
Peter Johnson was a principal owner of the Pride of Utah mine and a proprietor of the Union Mill on the edge of Aurora. On 1 July 1862 he located and recorded the Johnson ledge, which was at the extremity of a drift that connected with the Pride of Utah tunnel (Kelly 1862, 243; deeds, Mono County Archives, Bridgeport, California, Book E:44, PH in CU-MARK, courtesy of Michael H. Marleau; “The Esmeralda Mines,” San Francisco Alta California, 27 Dec 62, 1, reprinting the Esmeralda Star of 20 Dec 62). The Esmeralda correspondent of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (almost certainly Clemens), writing on 13 July, correctly reported that the Johnson ledge was “a cross ledge running through the Pride of Utah and the Wide West, and is the one from which these two companies have been taking their wonderful rock” (SLC 1862, 2). The segment of the cross ledge belonging to the Wide West was known as the Dimes ledge (Veni, Vidi 1862, 3). In 1872, in Roughing It, Mark Twain identified the Johnson ledge as the rich blind lead that he, Calvin H. Higbie, and A. D. Allen planned to claim, but he inaccurately made it part of the Wide West mine instead of the Pride of Utah. He explained that he and his partners forfeited this great find (to Johnson) because, through miscommunication, they failed “to do a fair and reasonable amount of work on their new property within ten days after the date of the location” (chapters 40–41). Higbie, in his 1906 “recolections,” did not remember any miscommunication; rather he contended that Clemens vowed to him to be solely responsible for the required work, but forgot about it while nursing John Nye (see Phillips, 70). For a detailed analysis of the blind-lead episode in Roughing It, see Branch 1985, 234–48.
Thomas Nye was evidently spreading an account of how his father John’s illness had kept Clemens from securing title to the blind lead. For Clemens’s version of the story see chapters 40 and 41 of Roughing It.
A deed preserved by his family shows that on 21 July 1862 Clemens paid D. C. Crooker $500 for “an undivided interest of Twenty-five (25) feet in the First East Extension of the ‘Johnson’ Lode, situated on Last Chance Hill” (NPV). This deed was filed for record by Calvin H. Higbie on 3 October 1862. On 13 December the Esmeralda Star reported:
The owners of the First East Extension of the Johnson lode, on Last Chance Hill, have let a contract to Peter Johnson, the discoverer of the original claim, to sink a shaft one hundred feet on that lode. He has commenced the shaft, and has already reached the depth of twenty-five feet. The work is still progressing, and the company expect in the course of another month, to take out equally as rich rock as has been struck in the Johnson and Wide West claims. (“Mines in Aurora,” Sacramento Union, 20 Dec 62, 3, reprinting the Star)
John E. K. Stotts (b. 1828), Mollie Clemens’s older brother, was a wholesale dry-goods salesman and a merchant in Keokuk, Iowa. He had lived in Orion and Mollie’s home there in 1860 (MEC, 20; OC 1856, 99, 105; OC 1857, 67, 76; Keokuk Census [1860], 11).
John D. Kinney of Cincinnati.
On 16 January 1862, Orion had purchased 25 feet in the Horatio lode and the Horatio Company from Horatio G. Phillips. Apparently he still owed Phillips half the total price of $125. The day before writing this letter Clemens had purchased from Phillips, for $300, 274 feet distributed among five Aurora claims: the Dash-away, La Plata, Annapolitan, Flyaway, and Monitor (deeds in CU-MARK). The Monitor acquisition, 50 feet, was in addition to the “one-eighth” of this supposedly rich ledge that Clemens already owned (see 11 and 12 May 62 to OCclick to open link). Given Clemens’s current shortage of funds, as well as his distrust of Phillips, he presumably did not make full payment for his 22 July purchases.
Clemens was counting on employment as Orion’s clerk while the second Territorial Legislature was in session (11 November–20 December 1862). By then, however, he was local reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
Andrew J. Marsh was the Nevada legislative correspondent of the Sacramento Union. He and Clemens later reported the proceedings of the first Nevada Constitutional Convention (2 November–11 December 1863) for the Territorial Enterprise (see Marsh, Clemens, and Bowman, passim).
Two pieces by Clemens are known to have appeared in the New Orleans Crescent: the burlesque “River Intelligence” of 17 May 1859, satirizing Captain Isaiah Sellers (ET&S1 , 126–33), and “Soleather Cultivates His Taste for Music,” a comic sketch published on 21 July 1859 (see Branch 1982, 497–510).
Pamela A. Moffett’s letter and enclosure do not survive; nor does the scrap-book that Orion was keeping for Clemens at this time. The James Clemens mentioned by Pamela has not been identified.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 228–231; MTB , 1:202, brief excerpts; MTL , 1:81–82, with omissions.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.