2 July 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS facsimile: CU-MARK, UCCL 00631)
I am here for a months visit, from Buffalo.1explanatory note I have only a minute to write in, but I can ask what I want to ask & say what I want to say in that time—to wit:
1. How are you?
2. How is splendid old Dick.?2explanatory note
3. I have long ago sold out of the Express & so I suppose that worthless sheet has ceased to go to you3explanatory note—but I am here, close to bookstores & newspapers, & you & Dick ain’t; & if you will send me your address (in case you have moved & this reaches you,) I’ll be proud & happy to send you any book or paper your solitude needs—for I am under large obligations to you & Dick for some pleasant old times.4explanatory note Indeed, I am under a Indeed, a suspicion comes over me that I owe you either $25 or $50. It was in this way. When I went up to your camp, I took $300 with me. We spent that for hash, & for expenses at Angels—which was correct; it about paid my board with you & old Dick. But when I went back to the Bay I was not able to pay all that I owed your Mother. 5explanatory note
4. ⒶemendationSay, old philosopher, would you like to read Darwin? If you would, let me know, & I will get the books & forward them to you.6explanatory note
How many more New Year’s are going to roll round to us, in this life, & remind us of the night at Vallecito, Jim?7explanatory note
Love to old Dick!
James N. Gillis Esq | Sonora | California postmarked: elmira n.y. jul Ⓐemendation 5
That is, a month more. Clemens had already been in Elmira for more than three months.
Stoker.
See 3 Mar 71 to Riley, n. 3click to open link, and 18 Apr 71 to Fairbanks, n. 1click to open link.
For the best record of Clemens’s December 1864–February 1865 sojourn with Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker in Jackass Hill and Angel’s Camp, see his notebook for the period ( N&J1 , 63–90). He was obliged to Gillis for a number of stories and tall tales that found their way into Roughing It and other works (26 Jan 70 to Gillis, n. 5click to open link).
Margaret Alston Gillis (1810–76) had run a boarding house in San Francisco on Brannan Street in 1864, and then at 44 Minna Street with her husband, Angus, in 1865. Although the 1864 San Francisco directory, published in October, does not show Clemens living with the Gillis family, he moved frequently during 1864 and must have moved in with them before his departure for Jackass Hill in early December. The 1865 directory shows Clemens at the Minna Street address, and Margaret Gillis was almost certainly the “generous landlady” he recalled in chapter 59 of Roughing It, which he had just completed (William R. Gillis to Harry A. Williams, 31 May 1924, PH in CU-MARK; Langley: 1864, 106, 174; 1865, 121, 195; L1 , 313–14 n. 3; RI 1993 , 404).
Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man was published in the United States in two volumes in February and March 1871 (New York: D. Appleton and Co.). Clemens, who bought his own copy of at least the first volume, had certainly read it by this time, and had probably done so by early April when he was revising chapter 19 of Roughing It, which alludes to Darwin’s theory ( RI 1993 , 127, 606).
MS facsimile, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L4 , 428–429.
see Tufts Collection in Description of Provenance. Although the present location of the MS is not known, two other facsimiles are known to exist—one at CtY-BR, and one sold at auction in 1989, formerly in the Estelle Doheny Collection at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California (Christie 1989, lot 1752).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.