2? January 1864 • Carson City, Nev. Terr. (MS: NPV and CU-MARK, UCCL 00072)
first two MS pages (about 300 words) missing
ment.1explanatory note It was reported back from the Committee with a whole lot of blanks in it, (for dates—apportionment & number of members, amount of money appropriated to pay expenses of the Convention, &c.) The Council passed it without filling those blanks—the House did the same thing—it was duly enrolled, brought back & signed by the President of the Council & the Speaker of the House2explanatory note—& then transmitted, a worthless, meaningless, p Ⓐemendation & intentionally powerless instrument, to the Governor, for his signature—at night. And behold, a miracle! When the bill reached the Governor, there was not a solitary blank in it! Who filled them, th nobody Ⓐemendationcan tell.—Ⓐemendationbut the e Enrolling ⒶemendationClerk3explanatory note didn’t, anyhow, as the enrolled bill in this office will show. Therefore, the bill was a fraud—the Constitutional Convention was a fraud—the Constitution is born of fraud—a State erected under Ⓐemendationit would be a fraudulent & impotent institution, & we should ultimately be kicked back into a Territorial status again, on account of it. Wherefore, when men say “let the Constitution slide,” I say Amen.4explanatory note
The reason why I haven’t sent you any money lately, Ma, is because I have been in debt on mining account. But I shall be out again before long.
When Artemus Ward gets to St Louis, invite him up to the house & treat him well, for behold, he is a good fellow. But don’t ask him too many questions about me & Christmas Eve, because he might tell tales out of school.5explanatory note At his suggestion, I mean to write semi-occasionally Ⓐemendationfor the New York Sunday Mercury. Of his own accord he wrote a flattering letter about “Mark Twain” to the editors of that paper;6explanatory note & besides, I have promised to go with him to Europe in May or June (provided something Ⓐemendationdon’t turn up in the meantime to change my notion, you know.) 7explanatory note
I can’t write regularly for the Mercury, of course. I shan’t have time. But I sometimes throw a pearl before these swine here (there’s no self-conceit about that, I beg you to observe,) which ought, for the eternal welfare of my race, to have a more extended circulation than is afforded by a local daily paper.
And if Fitzhugh Ludlow, (author of the “Hasheesh Eater,”) comes your way, treat him well also. He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain, (the same being eminently just & truthful, I beseech you to believe,) in a San Francisco paper.8explanatory note Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself—leave sage-brush obscurity, & journey to New York with him, as he wanted me to do. But I preferred not to burst upon the New York publicly too suddenly & brilliantly, & so I concluded to remain here.
Well, Ma, I will tell you something now which will suit your taste for the marvellous. Eighteen months A short time ago, a woman, about 18 years old & very pretty, arrived here, alone. Or rather, she had a young child with w herⒶemendation. She took up her residence in the outskirts of the town, & although the gossips went to work to work worm Ⓐemendationher private history out of her, they failed entirely. She would answer no questions. She would not even tell her own name, or that of her child—she said it had none & never would have. She was weary & w care Ⓐemendation wornⒶemendation, sad & melancholy, & spent half her time in crying bitterly in solitude. A sinister looking man was occasionally seen prowling about her premises at dusk, & always with a gun. He was suspected of some villainous design, & the neighbors made up their minds that he was no better than he ought to be. One evening, just at sun Ⓐemendation at twilight, they were paralized to see him thrust his gun through the lonely woman’s back window, take deliberate aim, and illegible deletion, tornⒶemendation 9explanatory note—I guess it’s about time for me to go to bed, now.
“An Act to frame a Constitution and State Government for the State of Washoe,” which authorized a constitutional convention, had been approved by the Territorial Legislature on 20 December 1862 (Laws 1863, 128–30). The surviving part of this letter begins with Clemens’s remarks on the fraud involved in the passage of the act and the consequent invalidity of the convention, the constitution it produced, and any state government founded upon that constitution. Clemens concluded a 4 January letter from Carson City—published as “Doings in Nevada” by the New York Sunday Mercury (SLC 1864, 3)—with a similar, sometimes verbatim account that suggests some of what is missing here:
In the Legislature, last year, I was wielding the weapon which, under just such circumstances, is mightier than the sword, at the time that the Act authorizing the calling together of a Convention to form a State Constitution was passed; and I know the secret history of that document. It was reported back from the Committee with a lot of blanks in it (for dates, apportionment, and number of members, amount of money appropriated to defray expenses of the Convention, etc.). Both Houses passed the Bill without filling those blanks; it was duly enrolled, brought back, and signed by the presiding officers of the Legislature, and then transmitted, a worthless, meaningless, and intentionally powerless instrument— to Gov. Nye for his signature—at night. And lo! a miracle. When the bill reached the Governor, there was not a solitary blank in it! Who filled them, is—is a great moral question for instance; but the enrolling clerk did not do it at any rate, since the amendations are in an unknown and atrocious handwriting. Therefore, the bill was a fraud; the convention created by it was a fraud; the fruit of the convention was an illegitimate infant constitution and a dead one at that; a State reared upon such a responsibility would be a fraudulent and impotent institution, and the result would be that we should ultimately be kicked back into a territorial condition again on account of it. Wherefore, when men say; “Let our constitution slide for the present”, we say Amen.
Dr. John W. Pugh, of Aurora, was president of the Council of the second Territorial Legislature; John H. Mills, a Gold Hill miner, was Speaker of the House of Representatives (Laws 1863, xiii; Andrew J. Marsh, 412, 417–18, 667 n.22).
Unidentified.
The constitutional convention authorized by the fraudulent act met in Carson City from 2 November to 11 December 1863. From 31 December 1863 to 2 January 1864 the Union party held its convention there to nominate candidates for the 19 January election, at which the new constitution was to be ratified by the voters. It is likely that Clemens wrote the present letter to his mother on 2 January, the day the Union party convention concluded, to inform her immediately of Orion’s nomination for the position of secretary of state. In addition to that news, the missing portion of the letter may have contained other information in the following passage of “Doings in Nevada”:
We do not fool away much time in this country. As soon as the Constitution was duly framed and ready for ratification or rejection by the people, a convention to nominate candidates for State offices met at Carson. It finished its labors day before yesterday. The following nominations were made: For Governor, M. N. Mitchell; Lieutenant-Governor, M.S. Thompson; Secretary of State, Orion Clemens; Treasurer, Wm. B. Hickok; Member of Congress, John B. Winters; Superintendant Public Instruction, Rev. A. F. White. Now, that ticket will be elected, but the Constitution won’t.
As Clemens expected, the proposed state constitution was rejected on 19 January. Unfortunately, that meant that the election the same day of Orion and the other Union party candidates was nullified. A new constitution was approved on 7 September 1864, and on 31 October Nevada became the thirty-sixth state (Angel, 84–87; Mack 1936, 250–53). In 1866 Orion briefly served under the state government (see 18 Oct 64 to OC, n. 2click to open link).
Humorist Charles Farrar Browne (1834–67), better known as Artemus Ward, arrived in Virginia City on 18 December 1863 and four days later lectured at recently built Maguire’s Opera House (“Artemus Ward,” Virginia City Evening Bulletin, 19 Dec 63, 3; Angel, 572). According to Dan De Quille, Ward “remained on the Comstock several days, making the Enterprise his headquarters. Mark Twain and I had the pleasure of showing him the town, and a real pleasure it was—a sort of circus, in fact” (William Wright 1893, 14). Christmas Eve 1863, as Joseph T. Goodman recalled years later, was a typically raucous occasion:
About midnight, as usual, he [Ward] turned up in the Enterprise office and commanded the editorial slaves to have done with their work, as his royal highness proposed to treat them to an oyster supper. . . . Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Dan de Quille, Denis McCarthy, [Edward P.] Hingston [Ward’s manager] and myself sat about the table. . . . Then begun a flow and reflow of humor it would be presumptuous in me to attempt to even outline. It was on that occasion that Mark Twain fully demonstrated his right to rank above the world’s acknowledged foremost humorist. . . . Course succeeded course and wine followed wine, until day began to break. . . . The first streaks of dawn were brightening the east when we went into the streets.
“I cant walk on the earth,” said Artemus. “I feel like walking on the skies, but as I can’t I’ll walk on the roofs.”
And he clambered up a shed to the tops of the one-story houses, with Mark Twain after him, and commenced a wild scramble from roof to roof. Following them along the street we saw a policeman crouched low, with his pistol drawn and cocked.
“What are you doing?”
“S-s-s-h! Do you see those burglars up there?”
“Burglars! Why, they are Artemus Ward and Mark Twain.”
“Well, I’ll be d——d!” said the vigilant watchman. “But you can just tell them for me that they had the closest call they are ever likely to get in their lives.”
As the sun rose above the desert range and gilded the Sugar Loaf, Mount Davidson and Cedar Hill it shone likewise upon the porch of Fred Getzler’s saloon, where, astride a barrel, sat Mark Twain, whom Artemus Ward, with a spoon, was diligently doping with mustard, while he inquired of bystanders if they had ever seen a more perfect presentment of a subjugated idiot. (Goodman, 1)
Ward left Virginia City by stagecoach, probably on 29 December, bound for Salt Lake City. Reaching Austin, Nevada, some two hundred miles from Virginia City, on 31 December, he stopped to lecture. On 1 January 1864 he wrote to Clemens from Austin, “I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as all others must or rather cannot be, as it were” (CU-MARK, in MTL , 1:94). After lecturing in Utah, Ward performed in Colorado and then in several mid-western cities, including St. Louis. Illness prevented him from visiting the Moffett home, where Jane Clemens was living (Seitz, 128–62; MTBus, 81).
Before leaving Virginia City, Ward had presumably promised to intercede with the Mercury, a pledge he reiterated in his 1 January letter: “I shall write, soon, a powerfully convincing note to my friends of ‘The Mercury.’” Clemens did not receive Ward’s letter until 10 January because it had been “sloshing around between Virginia and Carson for awhile” (SLC 1864, 4:4). Evidently assuming that Ward had already contacted the New York paper, on 4 January 1864 Clemens wrote his “Doings in Nevada” letter to “Editor T.T.”—the editor of the Mercury’s “Sunday Table-Talk” column.
Ward went to England, but not until June 1866 (Seitz, 184). At that time Clemens was in the Sandwich Islands.
Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–70) was one of New York’s Bohemians. He achieved notoriety with The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean (1857), an account of his experience with drugs. He was an editor of Vanity Fair for two years (1858–60), and he contributed to several eastern journals. In the fall of 1863 he visited the West—including three days in Virginia City and a longer stay in San Francisco—and described his travels for the Atlantic Monthly in a series of articles published in 1864. Ludlow had been particularly welcomed by the Bohemian writers for the San Francisco Golden Era and became a contributor to that journal (Wilson and Fiske, 4:50–51; Walker 1969, 163–66). His “high encomium upon Mark Twain” appeared there on 22 November 1863: “In funny literature, that Irresistible Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position. He makes me laugh more than any Californian since poor Derby died. He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself” (Fitz Hugh Ludlow, 4).
The illegible deletion appears to be at most three characters long, and it is possible that Clemens also tore the paper at this point in order to further tantalize his mother with a deletion clearly not intended to be read.
MS, pages 3–4, ‘ment . . . know.’ (267.1–28), Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV); MS, pages 5–6, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK). Pages 1–2 of the MS are missing.
L1 , 267–270; MTB , 1:243–44, excerpt; MTBus, 79–80, excerpt not in MTB .
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61. The last two MS pages were probably acquired in the Moffett Collection; see p. 462.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.