6? February 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: CU-BANC, UCCL 00399)
enclosures of wedding cards 1explanatory note
on the inside envelope: Old Dan, my abused roommate Ⓐemendation—{but who stole old Mrs. Fitch’s pies, nevertheless—& Daggett’s wood.}2explanatory note on the flap: lc Ⓐemendation
The cards are not known to survive: see 6? Feb 70 to Barnesclick to open link.
On 19 May 1874, writing from Virginia City, Nevada, Wright enclosed this envelope and its contents in a letter to his sister in Cedar Falls, Iowa, Lou Wright Benjamin, who had asked for some specimens of Mark Twain’s handwriting. Wright explained:
In looking through my desk and trunk I found an I invitation to Mark’s wedding. I send you the cards and envelope just as it came, minus the outside envelope. You will observe that I carried it in my pocket till it became dirty and worn. What he refers to on the back of the envelope is a trick he played on me with an old lady, the mother-in-law of S Hon. Tom Fitch, Congressman from Nevada. Just across the hall from the rooms occupied by Mark and I lived Hon. Tom Fitch, wife, sister-in-law and mother-in-law. They were kind enough very frequently to place a pie and pitcher of milk in our room as a lunch for us when we came home at one or two o’clock in the morning. Mark found out where the pies were kept and stole a few during the day when he got a chance then when something was hinted about pies being lost by the Fitches he told them that he had sometimes seen me coming from the room where the pies were, but he had not the least idea that I touched them. All this I found out long afterwards and I raised a storm about it. Mrs Fitch had never said a word to me about the theft, till I mentioned it, when she said she “knew it was Sam from the way he drawled and stammered.” The wood stealing is of a piece with the above. He would go to the end of the hall and get an armful of Daggett’s wood (by the way Daggett is now editor in chief of this paper) then as soon as he opened the door backing out into our room he would call out: “Damn it, Dan, you haven’t been at Daggett’s wood again, have you? It’s too bad to take so much of his wood.” Then he would throw the wood on the floor and make a great racket, at the same time crying out: “Damn it, Dan, don’t make such a noise! Everybody in the house hears you!” All this when I was not in the house at all. It turned out that the greater part of the wood he nipped was the property of poor Tom Fitch—Tom was poor then. To this day Mark takes pride in the trick he played me about the pies and wood; but I got even and more than even. (William Wright Papers, CU-BANC)
These highjinks took place between 28 October 1863 and 29 May 1864, while Clemens and Wright were roommates in Virginia City. Their lodgings and those of Thomas and Anna M. Fitch and the latter’s mother and sister were in a building owned by stockbroker Warren F. Myers and his partner Rollin M. Daggett, who became editor-in-chief of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in 1874, after a decade on the editorial staff ( L1 , 310–11 nn. 1, 3). Wright first published a version of the wood theft episode in the San Francisco Golden Era in 1863, without naming Daggett and Fitch as the victims. Thirty years later he told about the wood and the pies in the San Francisco Examiner, virtually reproducing the account he gave to his sister in 1874 (William Wright: 1863, 5; 1893, 13). Although he described his enclosures to his sister as “an invitation to Mark’s wedding,” it is clear they were the same cards and announcement that Clemens sent to his other old friends after the wedding. No evidence has been found that Clemens personalized the wedding invitations. The invitations received by Pamela and Annie Moffett (CU-MARK) and by John and Alice Day (CtHSD), the only ones known to survive, were probably typical: sent by the Langdons, they were handwritten on their personal stationery. Like the preceding note to Stoddard, Clemens’s note to Wright appeared on the front (not the back) of the inside envelope.
MS, envelope only, Dan De Quille Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-BANC). The envelope, which now lacks a portion of its back and all of its back flap, otherwise exactly matches the 6? Feb 70 envelope to Stoddard, with its embossed monogram on the back flap.
L4 , 62–63.
donated to CU-BANC in 1953 by Henry L. Day.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.