20 January 1866 • San Francisco, Calif. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00094)
Ma’s last letter was sent me by Mollie to-day.
I don’t know what to write—my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up & down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting. To think that after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods Ⓐemendationsketch to compliment me on!—“Jim Smiley & His Jumping Frog”—a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, & then it reached New York too late to appear in his book. But no matter—his book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, & it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers. This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco Alta:2explanatory note
The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co gave the sketch to the “Saturday Press” when they found it was too late for the book.3explanatory note
Bret Harte & I have both quit the “Californian.” He will write for a Boston paper hereafter,4explanatory note and I for the “New York Weekly ⒶemendationReview”— the Saturday Ⓐemendation and possibly for the “Saturday Press” sometimes. I am too lazy to write oftener than once a month, though. I sent a sketch by yesterday’s steamer which will probably appear in the “Review” along about the middle or latter part of February. If it makes Annie mad I can’t help it. If it makes Ma mad I can’t help it. I don’t mean them any offence at all—I am only using them as types of a class—I am merely hitting other people over their shoulders. It The Aunt I mention is not Aunt Ella or Aunt Betsy Smith—& I think they will see that she bears no resemblance to them.5explanatory note
Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret Harte, I think (late editor of the “Californian”,) though he denies it, along with the rest. He wants me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, & publish a book together. I wouldn’t do it, only he agrees to take all the trouble. But I want to know whether we are going to make anything out of it, first, however. He has written to a New York publisher, & if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month’s labor, we will go to work & prepare the volume for the press. My labor will not occupy more than 24 hours, because I will only have to take the scissors & slash my old sketches out of the Enterprise & the Californian—I burned up a small cart-load of them lately—so they are forever ruled out of any book—but they were not worth republishing.6explanatory note
Understand—all this I am telling you is in confidence—we want it to go no further—however, it don’t make any difference where you are, I suppose, so far away.
And we have got another secret on hand. We are going to burlesque a book of poems which the publisher, Bancroft, p is to issue in the spring. We know all the tribe of California poets, & understand their different styles, & I think we can just make them get up & howl. If Bancroft prints his book in New York in the spring, ours shall be in press there at the same time, & come out promptly with his volume. Then you’ll y hear Ⓐemendationthese poetical asses here tear around worse than a pack of wildcatsⒶemendation. Bancroft’s book is to contain a poem by every poet in California. We shall only burlesque a few of the prominent ones, but we will introduce each burlesque poem with a blast of trumpets & some comments that will be eminently worth reading, no doubt. I am willing enough to go into this thing, because there will be fun in it.7explanatory note
The book referred to in that paragraph is a pet notion of mine—nobody knows what it is going to be about but just myself. Orion don’t know. I am slow & lazy, you know, & the bulk of it will not be finished under a year. I expect it to make about three hundred pages, and the last hundred will have to be written in St Louis, because the materials for them can only be got there. If I do not write it to suit me at first I will write it all over again, & so, who knows?—I may be an old man before I finish it. I have not written a line in it for three weeks, & may not for three more. I shall only write when the spirit moves me. I am the Genius of Indolence.8explanatory note
I still write Ⓐemendationa letter every day for the “Enterprise.” Give my love to everybody.
P. S. Give the enclosed Enterprise letter to Zeb Leavenworth, or send it to Bill Kribben, Secretary of the Pilot’s Association.9explanatory note
That Ajax is the finest Ocean Steamer in America, & one of the fastest. She will make this trip to the Sandwich Islands & back in a month, & it generally takes a sailing vessel three months. She had 52 invited guests aboard—the cream of the town—gentleman & ladies both, & a splendid band brass band. I know lots of the guests. I got an invitation, but I could not accept it, because there would be no one to write my correspondence while I was gone. But I am so sorry now. If the Ajax were back I would go—quick!—and throw up the correspondence. Where could a man catch such another crowd together?10explanatory note
Clemens mistook the year.
The clipping, glued to the manuscript letter, was from “Podgers’ Letter from New York,” dated 10 December 1865 (San Francisco Alta California, 10 Jan 66, 1). “Podgers” was Richard L. Ogden, the Alta’s New York correspondent.
Artemus Ward had written Clemens in November 1864 inviting him to contribute to the forthcoming Artemus Ward; His Travels (New York: Carleton, 1865). Clemens did not receive Ward’s letter until he returned to San Francisco from Jackass Hill and Angels Camp at the end of February 1865. He considered it too late to send a sketch, but when Ward renewed his request Clemens wrote “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and mailed it to New York on 18 October. It appeared in the New York Saturday Press on 18 November 1865. See ET&S2 , 262–72.
On 30 December 1865 the Californian had announced the withdrawal of Bret Harte from the editorship, a position he had probably held for the better part of the year (“With the close . . .,” Californian 4 [30 Dec 65]:8; see also ET&S2 , 144). Harte continued to write for the Californian until the late summer of 1866 (his contributions are collected in Howell, 1–102). That year he became the Pacific Coast correspondent of the Boston Christian Register and the Springfield (Mass.) Republican. Unlike Clemens, however, Harte did not depend on literary work for his livelihood: during this period he enjoyed a secure income, which reached $270 per month, from his undemanding post as secretary to Robert B. Swain, superintendent of the United States Branch Mint in San Francisco (Merwin, 33–34; O’Connor, 93; Walker 1969, 185; Langley 1865, 215, 593).
“An Open Letter to the American People” appeared in the New York Weekly Review on 17 February 1866. In it Clemens burlesqued the epistolary style of his mother and a fictitious “Aunt Nancy,” and he praised the “eminently readable and entertaining” style of thirteen-year-old Annie Moffett. He had already published “The Great Earthquake in San Francisco” in the Review (25 Nov 65, ET&S2 , 300–310) and he later published two additional sketches there—“How, for Instance?” and “Depart, Ye Accursed!” (29 Sept 66 and 15 Dec 66). He published “The Mysterious Bottle of Whiskey” and “A Strange Dream” in the New York Saturday Press (3 Mar 66 and 2 June 66). The aunts referred to were Ella Hunter Lampton and Elizabeth W. Smith.
Clemens and Harte never collaboratively produced a volume of sketches. Clemens, however, eventually did “club a lot of old sketches together” into The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches, published by Charles H. Webb in 1867 (see ET&S1 , 503–42).
Hubert H. Bancroft (1832–1918), the San Francisco publisher, book collector, and historian, did not publish an anthology of “all the tribe of California poets.” He may initially have been interested in publishing the collection that finally issued as Poetry of the Pacific (San Francisco: Pacific Publishing Company, 1867). That volume was edited by May Wentworth (pen name of Mary Richardson Newman), a contributor to the San Francisco Golden Era and an author of children’s books. Poetry of the Pacific was to some extent a rebuttal to Harte’s controversial collection Outcroppings: Being Selections of California Verse (San Francisco: A. Roman and Co., 1866), which had appeared in December 1865. Wentworth’s compilation included many poets who were disgruntled over their exclusion from Harte’s volume (see Walker 1969, 211–19). The idea for a parody of the forthcoming collection presumably was in part an outgrowth of Harte’s burlesque reviews of a supposed seventeen-volume anthology, Tailings: Being Rejections of California Verse, in the 23 and 30 December 1865 numbers of the Californian (Harte 1865, 9, and Harte 1865, 8). The appearance in late January or early February 1866 of Outcroppings, No. 2, a burlesque collection ostensibly published by “A Rum-Un and Co.” but actually sponsored as an advertising stunt by San Francisco shirt manufacturers S. W. H. Ward and Son, probably forestalled the Clemens-Harte parody (see Smith and Anderson, 65–68).
The Examiner report appeared on 12 January. The clipping, glued in place here, is from an unidentified newspaper (possibly the steamer edition of the Alta California). The book in progress was evidently about the Mississippi. On 4 March the San Francisco correspondent of the Unionville (Nev.) Humboldt Register reported, “Mark Twain told me last night he would leave, in a few days, for the Sandwich Islands, in the employ of The Sacramento Union. Will be gone about two months. Then will go to Montana for same paper, and next Fall down the Missouri river in a Mackinac boat—he’s an old Mississippi pilot—to New Orleans; where he intends writing a book” (“Letter from San Francisco,” 10 Mar 66, 1). Clemens did not go to Montana after his Sandwich Islands assignment for the Union; nor did he go to New Orleans. The Mississippi material had to wait until he began “Old Times on the Mississippi” in 1874 (see SLC 1875).
William J. Kribben, a friend of Clemens’s on the Mississippi, was a St. Louis–New Orleans pilot for nearly a quarter of a century before his death from yellow fever in 1878. He was an incorporator of the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association, discussed in chapter 15 of Life on the Mississippi, and for many years served as its secretary. Clemens’s enclosure may have included “Captain Montgomery,” his tribute to the kindliness and generosity of Joseph E. (Ed) Montgomery, who was captain of the City of Memphis in March 1860, while Clemens was its pilot. The sketch appeared in one of Clemens’s letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably in mid-January; it was reprinted in the San Francisco Golden Era on the twenty-eighth of the month.
The Ajax, owned by the California Steam Navigation Company, began its maiden voyage on the San Francisco to Honolulu run on 13 January, thereby initiating the first regular steamship service between the Sandwich Islands and the United States. The Territorial Enterprise letter Clemens enclosed for his family to read and pass on presumably contained remarks about the Ajax. These were omitted when the Golden Era reprinted the Enterprise text on 28 January. On 22 February, the day of the ship’s return, Clemens interviewed its passengers and the following day he wrote an account of their pioneer voyage for the Enterprise (“Voyage of the Ajax”). He himself was a passenger on the Ajax’s second trip in March 1866.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L1 , 327–332; MTB , 1:278–79, 280, 281, excerpts; MTL , 1:101–2, with omissions.
probably Moffett Collection; see p. 462.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.