18? May 1863 • San Francisco, Calif. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00065)
two MS pages (about 400 words) missing
When I first came down here,1explanatory note I was with Neil Moss2explanatory note every day for about two weeks, but he has gone down to Coso3explanatory note now. He says he is about to realize something from those mines there, after roughing it & working hard for three years. He says he has had a very hard time ever since he has been in California—has done pretty much all kinds of work to make a living—keeping school in the country among other things. He looks just like his father be did Ⓐemendationeight or ten years ago—though a little rougher & more weather-beaten perhaps. The man whom I have heard people call the “handsomest & finest-looking man in California,” is Bill Briggs.4explanatory note I meet him on the str Montgomery Ⓐemendation street every day. He keeps a somewhat extensive gambling hell opposite the Russ House.5explanatory note I went up with him once to see it.
I shall remain here ten days or two weeks longer, & then return to Virginia.,Ⓐemendation, & go to work again.6explanatory note They want me to correspond with one of thes e dailies here, & if they will pay me Ⓐemendationenough, about nine words torn away Ⓐemendation I’ll do it.7explanatory note {The pay is only a “blind”—I’ll correspond anyhow. If I don’t know how to make such a thing pay me—if I don’t know how to levy black-mail on the mining companies,—who does, I should like to know?}8explanatory note If I had Mr. Ⓐemendation Moffett here, the position would be worth $20,000 a year. For instance: I black-mailed a company to the extent of 40 feet, two months ago. Since I have been here, the stock went to $10000 a foot, & the Mr. ⒶemendationMoffett or any other sensible man would have cleared it out at that figure; but I, and the rest of the fools went on pleasure-seeking, & let the opportunity go by. That stock will never breathe again for three months—Ⓐemendationmaybe six.
Ma, I have got five twenty-dollar greenbacks—the first of that kind of money I ever had. I’ll send them to you—one at a time, so that if one or two get lost, it will not amount to anything. I m have Ⓐemendationbeen mighty careless neglectful about remittances heretofore, Ma, but when I return to Virginia, I’ll do better. I’ll sell some wildcat every now & then, & send you some money. Enclosed you will find one of the rags I spoke of—it’s a ratty-looking animal, anyway. Love to all.
penciled notation by Jane Clemens on the first extant page: No 1—$20— 9explanatory note
Clemens was on his first visit to San Francisco. On 3 May 1863, in a column of verse and prose toasting his departure from Virginia City, the Territorial Enterprise playfully recognized that he had become a local celebrity:
Mark Twain has abdicated the local column of the Enterprise, where, by the grace of Cheek, he so long reigned Monarch of Mining Items, Detailer of Events, Prince of Platitudes, Chief of Biographers, Expounder of Unwritten Law, Puffer of Wildcat, Profaner of Divinity, Detractor of Merit, Flatterer of Power, Recorder of Stage Arrivals, Pack Trains, Hay Wagons, and Things in General. . . . He has gone to display his ugly person and disgusting manners and wildcat on Montgomery street. In all of which he will be assisted by his protegee, the Unreliable. (“Mark Twain,” clipping in Scrapbook 2:43, CU-MARK)
The son of Russell Moss, the proprietor of a large pork-packing firm in Hannibal in the 1850s and one of the wealthiest men in the town. Clemens recalled Neil Moss (b. 1835 or 1836) in “Villagers of 1840–3” as an “envied rich boy. . . . Spoiled and of small account,” who was sent to Yale and “came back in swell eastern clothes, and the young men dressed up the warped negro bell ringer in a travesty of him. . . . At 30 he was a graceless tramp in Nevada, living by mendicancy and borrowed money. Disappeared” (Inds, 94; Hannibal Census, 312). It was Moss whom Clemens nicknamed “the Prodigal” in chapter 55 of Roughing It:
The son of wealthy parents, here he was, in a strange land, hungry, bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket, roofed with a brimless hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated that he could have “taken the shine out of the Prodigal Son himself,” as he pleasantly remarked. He wanted to borrow forty-six dollars—twenty-six to take him to San Francisco, and twenty for something else; to buy some soap with, maybe, for he needed it.
Clemens loaned the money to Moss—after borrowing it himself from a Virginia City banker (see 17 Sept 64 to Wright, n. 2click to open link).
Around this time “the vast territory between Owens Lake [in California] and the Nevada line” was known as the Coso Diggings (Gudde, 72).
The eldest son (b. 1830 or 1831) of William Briggs of Hannibal, Missouri, and brother of Clemens’s childhood friend John Briggs (Hannibal Census, 316). In 1897 Clemens recalled Briggs in “Villagers of 1840–3”: “Drifted to California in ’50, and in ’65 was a handsome bachelor and had a woman. Kept a faro-table” (Inds, 95). Amelia Ransome Neville, a wealthy San Francisco socialite, sketched Briggs as he was in the 1880s:
We knew Bill Briggs, successful professional gambler of that later time who came to Shasta Springs for summer visits. Conservative guests avoided him, but others found him an engaging person, devoted to his small son and talking of everything but cards. His profession he left at home, and nothing could persuade him into a game while he sojourned among us. But he wore his mustache and wide-awake hat and the largest solitaire diamond I have ever seen in a ring. When he died, he left a fortune to the little son, then at a military school, and a reputation for square dealing. (Neville, 41)
One of San Francisco’s leading hotels, built in 1861-62 on a site occupying the entire block between Pine and Bush on Montgomery Street (Bancroft 1891–92, 6:540; Langley 1862, xxxvii, 26).
On 1 June Clemens wrote his mother and sister that he was “still” in San Francisco, suggesting that on that date, at the latest, they would have expected him to be in Virginia City. Hence, 18 May, exactly two weeks earlier, seems a likely date for the present letter. In fact Clemens remained in San Francisco through June and did not arrive back in Virginia City until 2 July (ET&S1 , 26).
Clemens reached an agreement with the San Francisco Morning Call and subsequently sent off a total of ten letters that appeared in the paper between 9 July and 19 November 1863.
The opportunity for such “black-mail” was virtually unlimited, since mine owners were willing to give stock to reporters in exchange for favorable newspaper notices of their mines. See 11 and 12 Apr 63 to JLC and PAM, n. 3click to open link.
Possibly a reproduction of a notation by Clemens on the missing first page of the letter. He sent at least twelve enclosures of greenbacks between May and August 1863. Only five additional letters bearing similar notations, in his hand, have been discovered (1 June 63click to open link, 4 June 63click to open link, 18 July 63click to open link, 5 Aug 63click to open link, and 19 Aug 63click to open link, all to JLC and PAM).
The surviving MS consists of a single leaf inscribed on both sides, the first of which is numbered ‘3’. Jane Clemens may have passed on the first two pages for someone else to read, retaining the second leaf so as not to expose her son’s predatory practices.
MS, Moffett Collection, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L1 , 252–254.
see Moffett Collection, p. 462.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.