17 September 1864 • San Francisco, Calif. (MS facsimile: Mack 1947, facing 256, UCCL 00086)
Dear Dan—
If you will buy my furniture at $55, I’ll send you a bill of sale, & then you can sell it to somebody who will suit your better as a bedfellow Ⓐemendationthan Dawson.1explanatory note
If you consent, go to Paxton & Thornburgh, Bankers, & assume a debt I owe them of $55, (provided Harry Blodgett has not already paid it,) & write me word & the bill of sale shall go up by return mail.2explanatory note T Mr ⒶemendationDaggett cannot prove that I owe him a cent, & of course he cannot hold my furniture.3explanatory note
Put. has gone back to Sac. Say, look in Cohen’s notary book, & tell me how much money he has received from the first beginning. His book is open to inspection by anybody. All well. Give our love to old Joe & Dennis.4explanatory note I don’t work after 6 in the evening, now on the “Call.” I got disgusted with night work. 5explanatory note
Apparently George F. Dawson of the Territorial Enterprise was now sharing the lodgings that De Quille had shared with Clemens from late October 1863 through the end of May 1864 (see note 3). De Quille recalled that these quarters consisted of “a large bedroom and a room somewhat smaller for use as a parlor or sitting room” and that Joseph T. Goodman
bossed the job of furnishing these rooms, and piled into them several hundred dollars’ worth of stuff. Mark said that as Goodman had been “so keen to do the ordering” of the things we’d “just let him foot the bill.” So, whenever the furniture man—good old Moses Goldman—came after us with his bill, we laughed at him, and referred him to Goodman. But one day old Moses sued us and we had to square up with him. Mark said we might have known better than to try such a trick with “a man whose front name was Moses and whose rear name was Goldman.”
However, we had a huge double bed, piles of bedding, splendid carpets and fine fittings of all kinds. This, in comparison with the bunks in which we roosted in an old tumble-down shed when I first began work on the Enterprise, was quite palatial.
Mark and I agreed well as room-mates. Both wanted to read and smoke about the same length of time after getting into bed, and when one got hungry and got up to go down town for oysters the other also became hungry and turned out. (William Wright 1893, 13)
Henry L. Blodgett was a Virginia City deputy sheriff and notary public with whom Clemens briefly shared an office in the spring of 1864 (see 18 Mar 64 to PAMclick to open link, n. 9). Most of Clemens’s indebtedness to John A. Paxton and W. B. Thornburgh, Virginia City banking partners (Kelly 1863, 175, 270, 287), may have been an obligation he incurred in assisting his old friend, Neil Moss, “the Prodigal” of chapters 55 and 59 of Roughing It (see 18? May 63 to JLC and PAMclick to open link, n. 2). That debt still remained unpaid late in 1864, for, according to chapter 59 of Roughing It, Clemens was haunted at the time by a collector “who had in his hands the Virginia banker’s bill for the forty-six dollars which I had loaned my schoolmate, the ‘Prodigal.’ . . . But he never collected that bill, at last nor any part of it. I lived to pay it to the banker myself.”
Originally from New York, Rollin M. Daggett (1831–1901) had spent several years as a San Francisco journalist, founding the Golden Era (1852) and the daily Evening Mirror (1860). In 1862 he moved to Virginia City and, in partnership with Warren F. Myers, established a brokerage house (Myers and Daggett) specializing in mining stock. That same year Daggett became a part-time reporter for the Territorial Enterprise. In 1864 he joined the paper’s editorial staff and in 1874 he succeeded Joseph T. Goodman as editor-in-chief. Later he was a Republican congressman from Nevada (1879–81) and United States minister resident to Hawaii (1882–85). Myers and Daggett owned the building at 25 North B Street that housed their offices, the Virginia City Library and Reading Rooms, and Clemens and De Quille’s apartment. The two Enterprise reporters had made an agreement to rent their quarters, at $30 a month, from 28 October 1863 to 28 November 1864. When Clemens left Virginia City on 29 May 1864 they had paid only $135 of the $210 due to that point. Clemens had paid an additional $25 on 31 August “pr, Sale of Mining Stock” (statement of rental account, 13 Dec 64, NvHi, photofacsimile in Mack 1947, 246), leaving him owing $12.50 of his share of the rent through May. Possibly Myers and Daggett maintained that he was also responsible for half the rent through 28 November, particularly since De Quille seems to have had trouble finding a satisfactory roommate to replace him (Weisenburger, 2, 5, 52–53, 61; Angel, 317, 322; Daggett 1893, 15; William Wright 1893, 13; Kelly 1863, 203, 253, 265; BDAC , 771).
Joseph T. Goodman and Denis E. McCarthy. Also mentioned in this paragraph are Enterprise assistant editor Charles A. V. Putnam, who returned to Virginia City by early October, and the paper’s bookkeeper, Henry P. Cohen (Doten 1973, 1:807). Cohen had been appointed “Notary Public for Storey county vice Mark Twain, resigned” (“Still Another,” Virginia City Evening Bulletin, 22 Apr 64, 3).
Clemens made his arrangments for a shorter work day with George E. Barnes (d. 1897), proprietor of the San Francisco Morning Call. As the next letter indicates, their agreement also called for a reduction in Clemens’s salary (see also CofC, 16–19).
photographic facsimile of MS, Mack 1947, facing 256.
L1 , 309–311; none known except the copy-text.
unknown.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.