22 May 1866 • Honolulu, Sandwich Islands (MS: NPV, UCCL 00101)
I have just got back fo from Ⓐemendationa sea voyage—from the beautiful island of Maui. I have spent 5 weeks there, riding backwards & forwards among the sugar plantations—looking up the splendid scenery & visiting the lofty crater of Haleakala. It has been a perfect jubilee to me in the way of pleasure. I have not written a single line, & have not once thought of business, or care, or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness. Few such months come in a lifetime.
I set sail again, a week hence, for the island of M HawaiiⒶemendation, to see the great active volcano of KileauaⒶemendation. I shall not get back here for 4 or 5 weeks, & shall not reach San Francisco before the latter part of July. So it is no use to wait for me to go home. Go on yourselves.1explanatory note It is Orion’s duty to attend to that land, & after shutting me out of my attempt to sell it (for which I shall never entirely forgive him,) if he lets it be sold for taxes, all his religion will not wipe out the sin.2explanatory note It is no use to quote Scripture to me, Mollie, with—I am in poverty & exile now because of Orion’s religious scruples. Religion & poverty cannot go together. I am satisfied Orion will eventually save himself, but in doing it he will damm damn Ⓐemendationthe balance of the family. I want no such religion. He has got a duty to perform by us—will he perform it?
I have crept into the old subject again, & opened the old sore afresh that cankers within me. It has got into many letters to you & I have burned them. But it is no use disguising it—I always feel bitter & malignant when I think of that Ma Ⓐemendation& Pamela grieving at our absence & the land going to the dogs when I could have sold it & been at home now, instead of drifting about the outskirts of the world, battling for bread. If I were in the east, now, I could stop the publication of a piratical book which has stolen some of my sketches.3explanatory note
I saw the American Minister today & he says Edwin McCook, of Colorado Ter. has been appointed to fill his place—so there is an end to that project.4explanatory note
It is late—good-bye, Mollie.
In 1906 Clemens gave this account of Orion and Mollie’s return to Keokuk, Iowa:
I came East in January, 1867. Orion remained in Carson City perhaps a year longer. Then he sold his twelve-thousand-dollar house and its furniture for thirty-five hundred in greenbacks at about 30 per cent discount. He and his wife took first-class passage in the steamer for New York. In New York they stopped at an expensive hotel; explored the city in an expensive way; then fled to Keokuk, and arrived there about as nearly penniless as they were when they had migrated thence in July, ’61. (AD, 5 Apr 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:322)
In fact, Orion and Mollie left Carson City on 13 March 1866 and, after a stopover in Virginia City, arrived at Heaton’s Station (in Placer County, just inside the California border) on the seventeenth of the month. There they separated, Mollie going on an extended excursion to Sacramento, San Francisco, and other points, while Orion settled in at Meadow Lake, in the Excelsior mining district of Nevada County, California. When Mollie joined him on 16 June, he had still not been able to sell their house in Carson City. Through most of that summer Orion tried to raise money for their journey home. Under the pen names “Noiro” and “Snow Shoe” he wrote articles about local mines for the Meadow Lake Morning Sun and corresponded with the San Francisco Morning Flag (see OC 1866a–n), while simultaneously attempting to practice law and prospect. He tried to liquidate part of his holdings in the Mount Blanc Gold and Silver Consolidated Mining Company, explaining that he intended to use the capital “to go to the States on the next Steamer, with my wife, to attend to our Tennessee land” (OC to J. A. Byers, 12 July 66, CU-MARK). He and Mollie finally left for San Francisco on 26 July, presumably having disposed of the Mount Blanc stock or the Carson City house, or both. They sailed from San Francisco on 30 August aboard the steamer Golden City, which made connections in Panama for New York (OC to JLC and PAM, 19 and 20 Mar 66, ViU; MEC, 15–17; OC to MEC, 7 June 66, 12 June 66, and 13 June 66, CU-MARK; “Sailing of the ‘Golden City,’” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 29 Aug 66, 5).
The reference is to Orion’s rejection of Herman Camp’s proposal for the Tennessee land (see 13 Dec 65 to OC and MEC, n. 2click to open link).
Beadle’s Dime Book of Fun No. 3, copyrighted on 19 April 1866 by Beadle and Company of New York, had reprinted a condensed and edited version of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” all of “Fitz Smythe’s Horse,” and part of “‘Mark Twain’ on the Launch of the Steamer ‘Capital’” (see ET&S2 , 282–88, 343–46, 359–66).
Edward M. McCook (1833–1909) was commissioned on 21 March 1866 to replace James McBride as United States minister resident to Hawaii. McCook, a distinguished Union general, was governor of Colorado Territory from 1869 to 1875 (U.S. Department of State, 46). Clemens’s frustrated “project” probably was a scheme to secure the ministerial office for Orion.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 341–343; MTL , 1:105–6, with omissions; MTBus , 87–88, with omissions; MTH , 42, excerpt.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.