with a note to the Postmaster
27 April 1867 • New York, N.Y. (MS: CSmH and CU-BANC, UCCL 00125)
Friend Charles—Every now and then, since, I received your Album, four or five days ago, I have tried to think of some subject proper to be treated in its pages1explanatory note—one, I mean, which should be so simple that I might talk about it easily and comfortably, and not get myself stiffened out in the confounded straight-jacket language common to Album composition—one which should be learned without being pedantic, dignified without being overpowering, and unpretending without being entirely insignificant. If you have ever exercised your mind in the same direction, you know what the result was, without my telling you. I tried and rejected “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” “The Decline and Fall of Adam and Eve,” and “The Decline and Fall of Gould & Curry,” and then declined to pursue that style of subject any further, and fell to meditating the perpetration of a Poem.2explanatory note I dashed off the following felicitous line:
“How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood.”
I rather liked that, but I could not get rid of the impression that I had seen it before, somewhere.3explanatory note I have been too strictly raised by my parents to ever think of taking anything that does not belong to me, unless it is something I can eat, or trade off, or something of that kind, and so I scorned to use that line while there was a shadow of doubt in my mind as to whose property it was. Still, it occurred to me that I might borrow it for a model to build a great Poem on without wounding my morbid conscientiousness, and here follows the result:
How sick to my soul are the scenes of my beer-hood, When sad retrospection presents them to view:— The station-house, gin-mill and deep-tangled railroad, (Which never was straight when I walked it at 2— a.m. Ⓐemendation), With the old soaken bummer, the iron-lined bummer, The moss-covered bummer ¶ Ⓐemendation that hung to the Swell.*
After I had discharged this fine production from my system, I felt relieved, but not satisfied. I had to confess that I had seen better poems in my time. A conviction of this kind is death to flickering inspiration, and the light of my genius went out. I then went out myself, and took a drink. This latter species of inspiration is the safest to depend upon, after all. By its aid I saw (what I might have seen before, had I not been blinded by ambition,) that no profound essay, full of clattering syllables and sounding rhetoric—no venerable platitudes irreverently tricked out in the gew-gaws and flowers of fancy—no noble Song, fragrant with incense of the Eden-land Ⓐemendationof Poesy—were required of me, but only to stand up and answer “Here!” when my name was called. I do it with pleasure. I write no essay, no poem, no sermon, but instead, I heartily extend the right hand of fellowship, and say, with simple eloquence, “Here’s luck!”
My young friend—(this is only for form’s sake, you know—I Ⓐemendationmerely introduce it because an Album contribution is necessarily incomplete without a word of fatherly admonition)—My Young Friend, you stand now upon the threshold of the grand, mysterious Future, and you are about to take the most momentous step in the march of your life—let me hope that you will cast from you the vanities and follies and petty ambitions of the world, and endeavor so to conduct yourself as to merit the continued esteem and approbation of
Charles Warren Stoddard, Esq | “Californian” Office | San Francisco | Cal. postmarked: new-york apr 27Ⓐemendation
written above address: To Postmaster—Dr. Sir: Per Steamer—d—n the Overland— too many Injuns.5explanatory noteClemens probably received Stoddard’s autograph album and a covering letter on the same day (23 April). He answered the letter on the day he received it (see the previous letter), but waited “four or five days” before inscribing the album and returning it to Stoddard in San Francisco—probably on 27 April, the date of the postmark on the mailing label, which has been separately preserved. Stoddard was an incurable and unabashed autograph collector, having kept this album since at least 1863, the “earliest date in it” (Pourquoi 1880, 355).
It is not known whether Clemens had read Gibbon’s masterpiece this early; the only copy he is known to have owned was published in 1880. He had long been familiar with the Gould and Curry Silver Mining Company, which since 1860 had owned one of the most productive mines on the Comstock lode. For a variety of reasons, however, its value notably declined between 1862 and 1866. When Clemens returned to Virginia City in 1868 he noted, “The Gould & Curry, that ... sold at six thousand three hundred dollars a foot, is worth fifty less than six hundred now” (Angel, 613; Lord, 124–29, 226; SLC 1868).
The “felicitous line” is from “The Bucket” by Samuel Woodworth (1784–1842), originally published on 3 June 1818 in the New York Republican Chronicle:
Joshua A. Norton (1818–80) of San Francisco declared himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States” in 1857, and was henceforth a familiar and well-loved public figure who lived on the charity of that city (L1 , 324–25 n. 2).
Disruptive and sometimes violent clashes between settlers and troops posted to protect them (on the one hand) and various tribes of Cheyennes, Sioux, and Crows (on the other) had threatened overland travel increasingly since mid-1866, but on 25 April the New York Tribune reported that a “general war” was “imminent.” On the day of this letter, the newspaper reported that military orders had “been sent to each post on the Santa Fe and Smoky Hill routes . . . informing them that the Indian war had broken out at last, and that the savages intended to be true to the threats they issued during the Winter.” The immediate crisis was caused at least in part by General W. S. Hancock’s decision on 20 April to burn a village of about three hundred lodges of Cheyennes and Sioux near Fort Dodge, Kansas, after the occupants had fled in terror at the approach of his troops (New York Tribune: “The Indian War,” 25 Apr 67; “The Indian War,” 27 Apr 67, 4; “The Indians,” 4 May 67, 1; Annual Cyclopaedia 1868, 399–401).
MS of letter, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 35075); MS of mailing label or wrapping, Charles Warren Stoddard Collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-BANC). The letter was written in Stoddard’s autograph album on pages 204–5, 207, 209, and 211. The mailing label or wrapping has been trimmed to roughly the size of an envelope.
L2 , 35–38; Pourquoi 1880, 357, without the epigraph from “Confucius,” the salutation, or the mailing label.
Stoddard’s autograph album was acquired by CSmH in 1944; the mailing label was acquired by CU-BANC in 1954 as part of the T. W. Norris Collection, which in turn supplied most of the material for the Stoddard Collection.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.