26 January 1870 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS facsimile: CU-MARK, UCCL 00416)
I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere among my relics I have your remembrancer stored away.2explanatory note It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Ⓐemendation Still, it shouldn’t—for right in the Ⓐemendation depths of their poverty & their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good-fortune. You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain & mud of Angel’s Camp—I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove & heard that chap tell about the frog & how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn & laughed over it, out there on the hillside while you & dear old Stoker panned & washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, & would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up. I published that story, & it became widely known in America, India, China, England,—& the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands & thousands of dollars since.3explanatory note Four or five months ago I bought into that Express (have ordered it sent to you as long as you live—& if the bookkeeper bill sends you any bills, you let me hear of it) & went heavily in debt4explanatory note—never could have dared to do that, Jim, if we hadn’t heard the Jumping Frog story that day.
And wouldn’t I love to take old Stoker by the hand, & wouldn’t I love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of “Rinaldo” in the “Burning Shame!” Where is Dick, & what is he doing? Give him my fervent love & warm old remembrances.5explanatory note
A week from to-day I shall be married—to a girl even better than Mahala,6explanatory note & lovelier than the peerless “Chapparal Quails.”7explanatory note You can’t come so far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come, anyhow—& I invite Dick, too. And if you two boys were to land here on that pleasant occasion, we would make you right royally welcome.
The young lady is Miss Olivia L. Langdon—( for you would naturally like to know her name.)
Remember me to the boys—& recollect, Jim, Ⓐemendation that whenever you or Dick shall chance to stumble into Buffalo, we shall always have a knife & fork for you, & an honest welcome.
P. S. California plums are good, Jim—particularly when they are stewed.8explanatory note
Do they continue to name all the young Injuns after me—when you pay them for the compliment?
James Norman Gillis (1830–1907) was a native of Georgia. In 1848 he received a diploma from the Botanico-Medical College in Memphis, Tennessee, which trained practitioners of herbal medicine. The following year he arrived in San Francisco and set off for the gold mines of Calaveras County. After two years of mining, he began ranching near Sacramento, continuing at that for most of the succeeding eleven years. In 1862 he moved to Tuolumne County, where he settled in a cabin on Jackass Hill, near Tuttletown, and resumed mining. He spent the rest of his life in the area, except for occasional visits to San Francisco, where his parents lived and in the mid-1860s were acquainted with Clemens. According to Dan De Quille (William Wright), Jim Gillis was the “Thoreau of the Sierras,” a devoted naturalist who was “not only a thorough English scholar, but also well versed in Greek and Latin.” He was, in addition,
acknowledged to be the most expert and successful pocket miner in California—indeed he is the father of all the pocket mines. He was the first to discover the laws that govern that kind of mining and reduce the business to a science. He now has eight mines running in California and every one paying. (William Wright 1891)
It was while visiting San Francisco late in 1864 that Gillis met Clemens, who already knew his younger brother Steve (1838–1918). In financial straits, Clemens was anxious to avoid having to honor a $500 bail bond he had posted for Steve, who had been arrested for injuring a bartender in a fight and had fled to Nevada to avoid prosecution. He therefore accompanied Jim Gillis to his cabin on Jackass Hill. Joined also by Gillis’s partner, Dick Stoker, and the youngest Gillis brother, William (1840–1929), he spent much of the next three months there and in nearby Angel’s Camp (“James N. Gillis—His Life and Death,” Sonora [Calif.] Sierra Times, 14 Apr 1907, clipping in CU-MARK; Fulton, 54–55; Gillis, 53–58; De Ferrari 1964, 107–8; Evans et al.; Norwood, 416–19; L1 , 313–14 n. 3). Clemens described his visit to the region in chapters 60 and 61 of Roughing It, making one character, a miner “who had had a university education,” a loose amalgam of Gillis and Stoker, and recreating Gillis’s tall tale about Dick Baker and his cat, Tom Quartz ( RI 1993 , 412–20, 703–5).
Clemens probably recalled the following occasion, described in his notebook for 1865: “New Years night 1865, at Vallecito, magnificent lunar rainbow, first appearing at 8PM—moon at first quarter—very light drizzling rain” ( N&J1 , 69). The same notebook may identify the “remembrancer”: “(New Year 1865 (watch-ykey to be returned to James N. Gillis, care Major A Gillis, 12 m apres date” ( N&J1 , 68).
For Clemens’s Jumping Frog note, see N&J1 , 80. For an account of the writing and reception of the story, see ET&S2 , 262–72.
See L3 , 294 n. 2.
Jacob Richard Stoker (1820–98), Gillis’s partner and cabinmate, was originally from Kentucky. In 1849, after fighting in the Mexican War, he joined the gold rush, settling on Jackass Hill, where he spent the rest of his life as a pocket miner ( RI 1993 , 704–5). Stoker was Clemens’s prototype for Dick Baker, owner of the cat Tom Quartz, in chapter 61 of Roughing It. He was also a willing foil for Gillis, whom Clemens later called “a born humorist and a very competent one”:
Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration, and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie—a fairy-tale, an extravagant romance, —with Dick Stoker as the hero of it, as a general thing. Jim always soberly pretended that what he was relating was strictly history—veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a sweet gentle serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest. In one of my books—“Huckleberry Finn,” I think—I have used one of Jim’s impromptu tales, which Jim he called “The Tragedy of the Burning Shame.” I had to modify it considerably to make it proper for print, and this was a great damage. As Jim told it—inventing it as he went along— I think it was one of the most outrageously funny things I have ever listened to. How mild it is in the book, and how pale; how extravagant and how gorgeous in its unprintable form! I used another of Jim’s impromptus in a book of mine called “The Tramp Abroad,” a tale of how the poor innocent and ignorant woodpeckers tried to fill up a house with acorns. . . . I used another of Jim’s inventions in one of my books—the story of Jim [i.e., Dick] Baker’s cat, the remarkable Tom Quartz. Jim Baker was Dick Stoker, of course; Tom Quartz had never existed; there was no such cat—at least outside of Jim Gillis’s imagination. (AD, 26 May 1907, in MTE , 360–62)
See chapters 22 and 23 of Huckleberry Finn and chapter 3 of A Tramp Abroad.
Unidentified. Possibly a nickname, mahala, meaning “squaw,” deriving from the Yokut word for “women.” The Yokuts lived in the San Joaquin Valley and the adjacent Sierra Nevada, near Gillis’s haunts.
Phenila (or Phenelia; Nellie) and Mary (Mollie) Griswold were eighteen and fifteen, respectively, when Clemens knew them. They lived with their mother, Margaret Griswold, and her second husband, Nehemiah John Daniels, on a ranch near Mormon Creek, close to Jackass Hill, and so were commonly called “the Daniels girls,” although they never formally adopted that surname (Hood, 23; Carlo M. De Ferrari, personal communication; De Ferrari 1984). Because their home was adjacent to a dense growth of chaparral and because, as William R. Gillis explained in 1924, they were “so pretty and plump,” the sisters were known as the “Chaparral Quails.” Gillis recalled an occasion when Clemens accompanied him on a visit to them:
When we got there Sam suggested that we take a walk, and so we started out. We knew of some late clingstone peaches growing on Black Creek, two miles away, so we walked over and got some. When he started back Mol[lie] said, “I know a trail through the chemisal that will cut off half the distance.” So we took it, and went a long way before we discovered that we were lost. We had to get down on our hands and knees and crawl through the chaparral. Then we decided to give up and go back and around the long way.
It was nearly midnight when we got home, and Mrs. Daniels was furious. She gave us a good tongue lashing, and she directed most of it at Sam. He said: “Mrs. Daniels, it wasn’t my fault, it was Billie’s fault.” She said:
“Mr. Clemens, Mr. Gillis has been walking with the girls a hundred times, and this never happened before. Besides, you are older and ought to have better sense.”
“I’m very sorry,” Sam said, “and I promise you it won’t happen again. But now we are tired and hungry. We are almost starved.”
“Well, you’ll get nothing to eat in this house tonight!” said Mrs. Daniels.
Just then Sam saw Miss Nellie’s guitar in a corner of the room. He picked it up and began playing, and presently he sang “Fly Away Moth” and then “Araby’s Daughter.” He sang very softly. Mrs. Daniels listened, and presently her face softened. When he was through she left the room and went out in the kitchen. In a few minutes we heard a chicken squawk, and a little later we fell to on hot biscuit and fried chicken and coffee.
As we were walking home Sam said to me: “Billie, you’ve read the old saying, ‘music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.’ You’ve seen how it soothed that savage old lady. If you have any talent for music, cultivate it.” (West, 18)
Clemens himself remembered the sisters in “The Innocents Adrift,” written in 1891:
. . . “Chapparal Quails.” That was their pet name in the mountains where they lived. They were sisters, seventeen & eighteen years old, respectively; beautiful creatures, clean-minded, good-hearted, well meaning, favorites with old & young; yet they could outswear Satan. It was the common speech of that remote & thinly settled region, they had come by it naturally, & if there was any harm in it they were not aware of it. (SLC 1891, 106–7)
For an example of their swearing, see N&J1 , 69.
In 1907 Clemens described an instance when Gillis’s “energetic imagination got him into trouble.” A squaw offered to sell him “some wild fruit that looked like large green gages.” Dick Stoker, who “knew that that product was worthless and inedible,” nevertheless “heedlessly, and without purpose” remarked that “he had never heard of it before”:
That was enough for Jim. He launched out with fervent praises of that devilish fruit, and the more he talked about it the warmer and stronger his admiration of it grew. He said that he had eaten it a thousand times; that all one needed to do was to boil it with a little sugar and there was nothing on the American continent that could compare with it for deliciousness. He was only talking to hear himself talk; and so he was brought up standing, and for just one moment, or maybe two moments, smitten dumb, when Dick interrupted him with the remark that what he was saying was all a lie, and that if the fruit was so delicious why didn’t he invest in it on the spot?
Trapped, Gillis bought the fruit and proceeded to boil it for two hours, adding “handful after handful of sugar” while Clemens and Stoker stood by
laughing at him, ridiculing him, deriding him, blackguarding him all the while, and he retaining his serenity unruffled. At last he said the manufacture had reached the right stage, the stage of perfection. He dipped his spoon, tasted, smacked his lips, and broke into enthusiasms of contentment; grateful joy; then he gave us a taste apiece. From all that we could discover, those tons of sugar had not affected that fruit’s malignant sharpness in the least degree. Acid? It was all acid, vindictive acid, uncompromising acid. . . . We stopped with that one taste, but that great-hearted Jim, that dauntless martyr, went on sipping and sipping, and sipping, and praising and praising, and praising, and praising, until his teeth and tongue were raw, and Stoker and I nearly dead with gratitude and delight. During the next two days neither food nor drink passed Jim’s teeth; so sore were they that they could not endure the touch of anything; even his breath passing over them made him wince; nevertheless he went steadily on voicing his adulations of that brutal mess and praising God. It was an astonishing exhibition of grit, but Jim was like all the other Gillises, he was made of grit. (AD, 26 May 1907, in MTE , 362–64)
Two MS facsimiles, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK). Copy-text for MS pages one and four (35.1–36.5 and 36.26–36, ‘ l . . . they’ and ‘The . . . compliment?’) is a photocopy of unknown origin; copy-text for MS pages two and three (36.5–25, ‘filled . . . welcome.’) is a photocopy of a photostat formerly at the Doheny Collection, St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo, Calif. The MS facsimile of pages one and four shows that the MS, a folder, was evidently separating, or had separated, on the folds and was silked to hold it together.
L4 , 35–39; “The Insider,” San Francisco Call, 7 Dec 1908, 6, excerpt; MTB , 1:393, with omissions; MTL , 1:170–71; West, 18; Hood, 25, excerpt; Buckbee, 336–37; “Letter from Twain,” Oakland Tribune, 2 Oct 1949, C-1, with omissions; Chester L. Davis 1956, 2.
The present location of the MS is not known. In 1907, the letter may have belonged to James N. Gillis’s brother, Stephen E. Gillis, who sent a copy to Albert Bigelow Paine. In 1924, Stephen’s son James Gillis apparently owned it. By 1942, when the Willard S. Morse Collection was given to Yale, someone—probably Morse—made a negative photostat of the letter, which in turn probably served as the source for positive photostats in several other collections, including the Doheny.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.