19 August 1863 • Steamboat Springs, Nev. Terr. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00071)
No. 12—$20
Ma, you have given my vanity a deadly thrust. Behold, I am prone to boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor, of any Ⓐemendation man on the Pacific coast, & you gravely come forward & tell me “if I work hard & attend closely to my business, I c may Ⓐemendation aspire to a place on a big San Francisco daily, some day.” There’s Ⓐemendationa comment on human vanity for you! Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it. But I don’t want it. No paper in the United States can afford to pay me what my place on the “Enterprise” is worth. If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good for nothing vagabond, I could make it pay me $20,000 a year. But I don’t suppose I shall ever be any account. I lead an easy life, though, & I don’t care a cent whether school keeps or not. Everybody knows me, & I fare like a prince wherever I go, be it on this side of the mountains or the other. And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory.
You think that picture looks old? Well, I can’t help it—in reality I am not as old as I was when I was eighteen.
I took a desperate cold more than a week ago, & I seduced Wilson (a Missouri boy, reporter of the Daily Union,) from his labors, & we went over to Lake Bigler.2explanatory note But I failed to cure my cold. I found the “Lake House”3explanatory note crowded with the wealth & fashion of Virginia, & I had to could not resist the temptation to take a hand in all the fun going. Those Virginians—men & women both—are a stirring set, & I found if I went with them on all their eternal excursions, I should bring the consumption home with me—so I left, day before yesterday, & came back into the Territory again. A lot of them had purchased a site for a town on the Lake shore, & they gave me a lot. When you come out, I’ll build you a house on it. The Lake seems more supernaturally beautiful now than ever. It is the masterpiece of the Creator.
The hotel here at the Springs4explanatory note is not as much crowded as usual, & I am having a very comfortable time of it. The hot, white steam puffs up out of fissures in the earth like the jets that come from a steamboat’s Ⓐemendation’scape pipes, & it makes a boiling, surging noise like a steamboat, too—hence the name. We put eggs in a hankerchief & dip them in the Springs—they “soft boil” in 2 minutes, & boil as hard as a rock in 4 minutes. These fissures extend more than a quarter of a mile, & the long line of steam columns looks very pretty. A large bath house is built over one of the Springs, & we go in it & steam ourselves as long as we can stand it, & then come out & take a cold shower bath. You get baths, board & lodging, all for $25 a week—cheaper than living in Virginia without baths.
We shall bud out into a State before many months, which will relieve Orion of his office. If I have influence enough, I mean to get him nominated a candidate for some fat office under the State Government, so that you can come out and live with him.5explanatory note I am a pretty good hand at such things. I was a mighty heavy wire-puller at the last Legislature. I passed every bill I worked for, & on a bet, I killed a bill by a three-fourths vote in the House after it had passed the Council unanimously. Oh, I tell you a reporter in the Legislature can swing more votes than any member of the body. We’ll have rare times the coming session, & in the State convention.
These mineral springs, discovered in 1860, were located in Steamboat Valley in Washoe County, about nine miles northwest of Virginia City (Angel, 644–45). Clemens described his visit to Steamboat Springs in letters to the Territorial Enterprise, published on 25 August, and the San Francisco Morning Call, published on 30 August (see ET&S1 , 270–83).
Adair Wilson (b. 1841) was the junior local editor of the Virginia City Union. Before coming to Nevada, Wilson had practiced law for two years in San Francisco. He left the Union in October 1863 to edit the Reese River Reveille in Austin, Nevada, left that post in 1864 to resume his San Francisco law practice, and in 1865–66 was a reporter for the San Francisco American Flag. After moving to Colorado in 1872 he became a state senator and a judge (Portrait, 321–25; Hall, 4:610; Angel, 303–4; Langley 1865, 458). Wilson figured in Clemens’s Territorial Enterprise columns as “Young Wilson” and “the Unimportant.” Clemens described their experiences at Lake Bigler in “How to Cure a Cold,” published on 20 September 1863 in the San Francisco Golden Era (ET&S1 , 296–303).
Captain Augustus W. Pray’s luxurious Lake Shore House at Glenbrook on Bigler’s eastern shore had first opened earlier in the year (Scott, 265).
Steamboat Springs Hotel, kept by A. W. Stowe and John Holmes (ET&S1 , 281).
Although voters approved statehood by better than four to one in a plebiscite held on 2 September 1863, it was late 1864 before Nevada entered the Union (Angel, 81, 87). Clemens’s plans for Orion were never fully realized (see 2? Jan 64 to JLC, n. 4click to open link).
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV). A facsimile of the first MS page (through ‘life’ at 264.4) is in Branch 1950, facing 230.
L1 , 263–266; MTB , 1:238–39, excerpts; MTL , 1:91–93, with omissions.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.