16 October 1871 • Bethlehem, Pa. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00662)
Livy darling, this is only a line, to say I am well & comfortable—& now I will go back to the study of my lecture. In rehearsing it now, it promises to be an hour & a half long—too long by 30 per cent. So I must trust to luck to shorten it. I shall burn the bridge behind me when I go on the platform—which is to say I shall not carry a shred of a note with me. If I break down I will try to scramble up again. My warm t Ⓐemendation love to you all,—my loving devotion to you, my darling wife. Kiss mother1explanatory note & the cubbie for me.
Disappointed—no letter here. But don’t ever write unless you are feeling well & have time to spare for it.
Burning of Michigan woods must hurt Spaulding & Sage.2explanatory note
in ink: Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor. Forest & Hawthorne | Hartford | Conn. return address: if not delivered within 10 days, to be returned to postmarked: bethlehem pa. octⒶemendation 17
Olivia Lewis Langdon had arrived in Hartford by 12 October, accompanied by her son, Charles. She remained with her pregnant daughter until 29 December (OC to MEC, 13 Oct 71, CU-MARK; 26 Dec 71 to OLC, n. 2click to open link).
Fires raging through the pine lands bordering Lake Michigan and Saginaw Bay in the second week of October had engulfed towns and left hundreds of inhabitants dead, thousands homeless, and destroyed many millions of feet of valuable timber. The first detailed newspaper reports of the disaster began appearing on 13 October. Among the lumbermen potentially affected were Henry C. Spaulding and Henry W. Sage. Spaulding, father of Olivia Clemens’s close friends Clara and Alice, was an Elmira dealer in lumber, coal, and building supplies. Sage (1814–97), was head of H. W. Sage and Company, which operated a large lumber mill on Saginaw Bay. In 1906 Clemens recalled that he had gotten Sage, “an old and warm friend and former business partner of Mr. Langdon,” to provide counsel and financial assistance to J. Langdon and Company when the firm was in temporary straits after Langdon’s death (AD, 23 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:137–38; New York Tribune: “Further Particulars of the Forest Fires in Michigan,” 13 Oct 71, 5; “The Forest Fires,” 19 Oct 71, 1; L3 , 182 n. 6; Boyd and Boyd, 2, 197).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L4 , 473–474; LLMT , 361, brief paraphrase.
see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.