16 February 1863 • Virginia City, Nev. Terr. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00061)
I suppose I ought to write, but I hardly know what to write about. I am not in a very good humor, to-night. I wanted to rush down and take some comfort for a few days, in San Francisco, but there is no one here now, to take my place. They let me go, about the first of the month, to stay twenty-four hours in Carson, and I staid a week.1explanatory note Perhaps they haven’t much confidence in me now. If they have, I am proud to say it is misplaced. I am very well satisfied here. They pay me six dollars a day, and I make 50 per cent. profit by only dol doing Ⓐemendationthree dollars’ worth of work.
Well, I have no news to report, unless it will interest you to know that they “struck it rich” in the “Burnside” ledge last night. The stock was worth ten dollars a foot this morning. It sells at a hundred to-night.2explanatory note I don’t own it, m Madam., Ⓐemendationthough I might have owned several hundred feet of it yesterday, you know, & I assure you I would, if I had known they were going to “strike it.” None of us are prophets, though. However, I take an absorbing delight in the stock market. I love to watch the prices go up. My time will come after a while, & then I’ll rob somebody. I pick up a foot or two occasionally for lying about somebody’s mine. I shall sell out w one Ⓐemendationof these days, when I catch a susceptible emigrant. If Orion writes you a crazy letter about the “Emma Gold & Silver Mining Company,” pay no attention to it. It is rich, but he owns very little stock in it.3explanatory note If he gets an eighth share in the adjoining company, though let him blow. It will be all right. He may never get it, however.
What do you show my letters for? Can’t you let me tell a lie occasionally to keep my hand in for the public, without exposing me?
I advertised for Mrs. Hubbard’s brother4explanatory note & David Anderson’s son. Mr. Dreschler called on me two days afterward. He was in robust health; lives in Steamboat Valley, near here; I promised to visit him. He owns ranch & city property, & is well off. Mr. Ellison called on me the same day. He said John Anderson was on his ranch at the Sink of the Carson, 60 miles from here. Anderson will return to St. Louis in the Spring to go to the wars. I sent him some late St. LouisⒶemendation, Louisville and New Orleans papers, & promised to visit him some day. Remember me kindly to Mrs. Hubbard & Fannie.
Pamela, you do not say whether you are getting well or not? ⒶemendationI think you will have to spend next Summer at the Fountain of Youth—the fabled spring which the weary Spaniards sought with such a hopeful yearning, and never found. But I have found it, and it is Lake Bigler. No foul disease may hope to live in the presence of such beauty as that. I send the paper to Moffett & Scroter every day; you will find in it all that you do not find in my letters.
I inclose a picture for Margaret Sexton. Had your letter arrived a little sooner, I could have sent it to her myself, Ⓐemendationas a Valentine.
Remember me to all.
During his week in Carson City, Clemens sent of at least three letters to the Territorial Enterprise, including the first article he is known to have signed “Mark Twain,” which was probably written on 31 January and printed on 3 February 1863 (see MTEnt , 47–61, and ET&S1 , 192–209).
The Burnside Silver Mining Company, capitalized at $280,000 with 2,800 shares, was incorporated in San Francisco in late August 1862. Its claim was located on the western slope of Mount Davidson. In the first week of February 1863, the “Resident Correspondent” of the San Francisco Alta California credited the Burnside company with “doing wonders in developing their lead” and reported “quite an excitement . . . created by parties trying to buy up shares” (Quartz 1863, 1; Quartz 1863, 1). The price of the stock on the San Francisco market fluctuated during the next few months, reaching $69.50 a share in early May, but plunging to $19.00 a month later (“Mining and Other Corporations Formed in 1862,” Sacramento Union, 1 Jan 63, 1; San Francisco Evening Bulletin: “San Francisco Mining Companies,” 6 Jan 63, 3; “San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board,” Feb–June 63). The following December the Virginia City Evening Bulletin charged that the local editors of the Virginia City Union and Territorial Enterprise “were ‘sold’ by the owners of a ‘salted’ claim—the Burnside—less than a year ago” (“The Lady Bryan Claim,” 26 Dec 63, 2).
The subject of Orion’s “crazy letter” possibly was the Emma Frances mine, in the Silver Mountain district of Douglas County, about sixty-five miles south of Virginia City. Ore from the Emma Frances was sometimes, with scant reason, said to be “as rich as that of the ‘Ophir’” (“The Mines of the Silver Mountain District,” San Francisco Alta California, 3 Dec 62, 1). Clemens visited the Silver Mountain region in the final week of April 1864 (see ET&S1 , 358). By then it had become part of California, a consequence of the California-Nevada boundary settlement (Kelly 1863, 74; Carlson, 150, 216).
William H. C. Nash of Hannibal (b. 1829) was a childhood friend of Clemens’s and brother of Mary Nash Hubbard. Nash emigrated to the West in 1849 and remained twenty years, after which he returned to Hannibal and became a merchant; in later years he was city assessor and president of the board of education (Greene, 281; Hannibal Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 7B). None of the other people mentioned in this paragraph has been identified.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 241–244; MTBus , 77–78.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.