25 August 1866 • San Francisco, Calif. (MS, damage emended: TxU, UCCL 00106)
There has been a misunderstanding all around. You know I didn’t want to take your note, but you insisted on it. And when I started across the plains to be gone 3 months & have the recreation we all needed (thinking the war would be closed & the river open again by that time,) I turned over a lot of notes for money I had loaned (for I did not know what might happen,) & among to Ma, & among them yours—but I charged her earnestly never to call on you for a cent save in direst emergency, because, in all justice you could not be said to owe me a cent. And I told her that if the note remained in my possession I never would present it. I was under too many obligations (those of old & tried friendship included,) to you & Bart, to ever have anything like sordid business engagements with you.1explanatory note
Well, Mas don’t understand the case as we do, Bill, but she will when I go home in October. I know she don’t, because she has a larger soul that ⒶemendationGod usually gives to women.
I generally get up at eleven o’clock, because I am naturally lazy, as you well know, & because the pleasantest of my acquaintances at the hotel breakfast at that hour—but this morning I overslept myself & did not get down until a little after noon—just time enough to miss Ⓐemendationmy breakfast by a scratch.2explanatory note You know how d—d savage a man feels under such circumstancesⒶemendation, & so you will appreciate it when I say that when the clerk sent me your letter it answered for breakfast, restored my temper & made me comfortable & at peace with all the world. Thank you right heartily, my lad.
Bill, of course with so much rubbing against antagonistic natures, I have at last come to smothering my feelings & choking them down from showing on the surface—but the news about the Association “fetched” me. I don’t know when anything has made me feel so badly as the paragraph that told me the Association had fallen from its high estate—had lost its more than regal power. I say more than royal power, Bill, & I speak advisedly—for no king ever wil wielded Ⓐemendationso absolute a sway over subject & domain as did that old Association. I have compared its machinery with that of other governments—royal, republican & ecclesiastic—& did not find its match. These had their rotten places, their weak spots—but it was perfect. It was a beautiful system—beautiful—& I am sorry enough that its greatness hath departed from it.3explanatory note
I am sorry, too, that the instrument of its undoing was found among its own subjects.4explanatory note I am sorry to hear any harm of any pilot—for I hold those old river friends above all others, & I know that in genuine manliness they assay away above the common multitude. You know, yourself, Bill—or you ought to know it—that all men—kings & serfs alike—are slaves to cir other Ⓐemendationmen & to circumstances—save, alone, the pilot—who comes at no man’s beck or call, obeys no man’s orders & scorns all men’s suggestions. The king would do this thing, & he would do that: but a cramped treasury overmasters him in the one case & a seditious people in the other. The Senator must hob-nob with canaille whom he despises, & banker, priest & statesman trim their actions by the breeze of the world’s will & the world’s opinion. It is a strange study,—a singular phenomenon m Ⓐemendation, if you please, that the only real, independent & genuine gentlemen in the world go quietly up & down the Mississippi river, asking no homage of any one, seeking no popularity, no notoriety, & not caring a damn whether school keeps or not.5explanatory note
Beck Jolly is President—long may the distinguished travelerⒶemendation, the mighty hunter of lions, the brilliant Chinese linguist & the dreaded scourge of the nations of the Orient flourish! Amen. You ask Zeb6explanatory note if he believes there is anybody who can fence with pokers, or talk Chinese, or quell insurrections or eat tiger meat like Beck & me. But who is the Secretary?
“You “write me of the boats, thinking I may yet feel an interest in the old business.” You bet your life I do. It is about the only thing I do feel any interest in & yet I can hear least about it. If I were two years younger, I would come back & learn the river over g againⒶemendation. But it is too late now. I am too lazy for 14-day trips—too fond of running all night & sleeping all day—too fond of sloshing around, talking with people.
M Why Ⓐemendationin the mischief don’t O’Neil Ⓐemendation did dieⒶemendation? Is that d—d Fenian going to live forever? But he was a bully boy, if ever there was one. You ought to have seen him & me bring the (d—n the boat’s name, I can’t think of it now—Alonzo, or Child, or something like that,) up the river, through the ice, drawing all the water. He was the whitest Captain I ever sailed with, & in this stiff “earthquake cobbler” I drink present joy & final salvation to him!7explanatory note
Do you recollect the old hoss that died in the wilderness? I have made that famous in Washoe, & didn’t I make those solemn missionaries’ eyes bug out with it? I think so.8explanatory note While I was there, the American Ministers to China & Japan—Mr Burlinggame Ⓐemendation& Gen. Van Valkenburg Ⓐemendationcame along, & we just made Honolulu howl. I only got tight once, though. I know better than to get tight oftener than once in 3 months. It sets a man back in the esteem of people whose good opinions are worth having.
Didn’t have much fun coming up, because we had light winds & calms all the way & were at sea 25 days. on the voyage.
Why the devil didn’t you say something about Sam & Bart?9explanatory note
I am very, very sorry you cannot get well10explanatory note—but don’t despond—it is poison, rank poison to knuckle down to care & hardships. They must come to us all, albeit in different shapes—& we may not escape them—it is not possible—but we may swindle them out of half their puissance with a stiff upper lip.
Marry be d—d. I am too old to marry. I am nearly 31. I have got gray hairs in my head. Women appear to like me, but d—n them, they don’t love me.
Well, I have only been back a week, & I have got to stir around some & see the boys. Good bye, Bill. I hope to start to the States about the time you receive this letter—but I don’t knowⒶemendation—the world is an uncertain institutionⒶemendation.
Bowen had borrowed $200 from Clemens, apparently early in 1861. Jane Clemens had preserved Bowen’s note—in which he promised to repay her son “one day after” 25 February 1861 “on order”—in Clemens’s 1860–61 piloting notebook. On the back of the note she recorded $77.15 in interest, accrued at 10 percent per year by 4 January 1865, as well as the only reimbursement Bowen is known to have made: $100, paid to her on 7 March 1865 (see N&J1 , 61).
Clemens was probably again staying at the Occidental Hotel.
Chapter 15 of Life on the Mississippi summarizes the rise and fall of the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association, described there as “perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men.” Concurrent with the growth of railroad and river-tow commerce, the monopolistic power of this organization of St. Louis and New Orleans steamboat pilots, to which Clemens belonged, rapidly eroded after the end of the Civil War, although its demise did not come until July 1875.
William J. Kribben, secretary of the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association, absconded with the association’s funds. Clemens’s remarks here suggest that the defalcation was recent; clearly he had only recently learned of it from Bowen. He mentioned the treacherous act in 1883 in chapter 15 of Life on the Mississippi and in 1897 in “Villagers of 1840–3” (Inds , 97).
Chapter 14 of Life on the Mississippi opens with a restatement of the assertions in this paragraph. The entire chapter is devoted to the thesis that a pilot “was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.”
Zebulon Leavenworth.
Clemens had piloted the Alonzo Child under James O’Neal in early 1861 while its regular captain, David DeHaven, was ill.
Clemens had entertained with a song about an old horse he called both “Jerusalem” and “Methusalem” at least since his piloting days. Annie Moffett recalled the version he sang then:
When I think of Uncle Sam during those early years it is always as a singer. He would sit at the piano and play and sing by the hour, the same song over and over:—
There was an old horse And his name was Jerusalem. He went to Jerusalem, He came from Jerusalem. Ain’t I glad I’m out of the wilderness! Oh! Bang!(MTBus , 39)
Other, briefer descriptions of his performances, on the Mississippi and in Nevada, can be found in MTB , 1:129, 295–96; ET&S1 , 197; William Wright 1893, 14; and Doten 1973, 2:997. While in Hawaii, Clemens presumably had ample opportunity to make “eyes bug out” with this song since “as he went about the Islands” he “called on or stayed over night with many missionaries and their descendants” (MTH , 134). “Jerusalem/Methusalem” possibly derived from a song Clemens might have learned in his childhood—for example, the slave song “The Old Gray Mare Came Tearin’ out the Wilderness,” melodic source of the popular “Old Gray Mare” (Sandburg, 102).
Bowen’s pilot brothers.
In 1897 Clemens recalled in “Villagers of 1840–3” that Bowen was “Diseased” (Inds , 97). His ailment has not been identified.
For Captain Joseph E. Montgomery’s kindness to Clemens, see 27? June 60 to OC, n. 5click to open link. In “Captain Montgomery,” written for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in January 1866, Clemens had said that “whenever he commenced helping anybody, Captain Ed. Montgomery never relaxed his good offices as long as help was needed.” Clemens added the present remark about Montgomery on the back of the first page of the letter, possibly in reference to an enclosed copy of his Enterprise contribution.
MS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin (TxU). The corner of the last leaf is torn off, affecting three lines that are emended at 359.24, 24–25, and 27.
L1 , 357–362; MTLBowen , 12–15.
The University of Texas acquired the MS in the summer of 1940 from William Bowen’s daughter Mrs. Louis Knox, the former Eva Laura Bowen (MTLBowen , 7 n. 12, 10).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.