11 July 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01109)
We have been waiting a long time in hoping es of to hear from you, supposing you would at least acknowledge the receipt of some of my letters by & by.1explanatory note Livy is getting along finely, but hardly gets out of doors, the weather is so rainy. Susie is in robust health. We came very near losing the new baby with cow’s milk last week, but she is fast recovering her strength, now, by the help of a neighboring colored woman.2explanatory note The new baby’s name is Clara. We had an anxious & sleepless time during some five months before she was born, trying to decide upon a name for her. We finally chose the name of Henry, & were at peace. Till she was born. Then of course we had the same old suffering all over again. {In truth, Susies was named Henry before she was born.}3explanatory note There wasn’t a female name in either the Clemens or the Langdon family that I thoroughly liked, except Jane;4explanatory note & I knew it was useless to go through the motions of giving her a name which every muggins would turn into some “Jennie” or some other exasperating diminutive.5explanatory note I finally settled upon Clara & stuck there. Livy agreed. It is risky to name a child after any but one’s own blood, but in this case the risk is modified, considering the relations which have existed between ourselves & Clara Spaulding for six years, & between Livy & Clara for twenty-five. But the chief virtue of this name is that it is essentially simple, & withal cannot be twisted or tortured out of its original shape me by any ingenuity of petting affection.
I ran over to Hartford 3 or 4 days ago & was astonished beyond expression by the im Ⓐemendation wonders which the architect & the landscape gardener have performed since we left. There is no other place in Hartford (or elsewhere) quite so lovely. It seems impossible that it is the same place that was looking so unkempt two months ago. There is nothing flashy about the grounds, but they are singularly shapely, & bright & fresh, & they fit the house & barn as if the house & barn grew out of them & were part of them.
Will you send this letter to Orion, for I can’t venture much time on letter-writing, there is so much to do. Trying to write briefly makes me write absruptly & apparently roughly, but I didn’t mean to be rough with Orion about his doiscovery in my last.6explanatory note I have been idle a year, by compulsion, & now I am making up. During the past 3 days I have written 157 pages of literature & 25 letters—which is 8 full days works Ⓐemendation crammed into 3—& I am still booming along, & you will pardon me for not being a very frequent correspondent.7explanatory note Love to all
on back of letter as folded:
We visit David Gray (by & by, when he says Come,) & then we go to Fredonia, leaving the babies here—for the idea of the trip is to give Livy a rest & change of scene.
and in pencil:Livy says, “One thing you said, you’ve left out.” I said, “What’s that?” Livy said: “You said you’d like it mighty well if you could name her Ma, but you hadn’t any associations with Jane.”
{M You see the Modoc’s marks through my writing. Said she was writing to grandma too.}8explanatory note
Only two recent letters to Jane Clemens are known to survive (27 Jan–16 Apr 74 and 10 May 74). Her gloss on this passage, at the end of her letter to Orion and Mollie Clemens (see note 8), suggests that there had been few, if any, others thus far in 1874. Clemens’s suggestion that he had written frequently was a teasing response to his mother’s most recent letter (CU-MARK):
The “dispatch” of “a month ago to morrow” was a telegram, no longer extant, notifying the Fredonia household of the birth of Clara. Clemens had met Louis McKinstry, and probably his father, Willard, co-publishers of the Fredonia Censor, when he lectured in Fredonia in January 1870 ( L4 , 27 n. 5, 321–22 n. 1). On 15 July 1874, the Censor reported:
Mr. David Gray, managing editor of the Buffalo Courier, made a short trip to our village and county last week, and expressed himself as delighted with the scenery and general appearance of things. We notice by our exchanges that Rochester University has recently conferred upon Mr. Gray the honorary degree of Master of Arts. (“Fredonia and Vicinity,” 3)
In 1876 Clemens recalled Clara’s feeding problems (see also 16 Mar 75 to Howells, n. 2click to open link):
From the Bay’s first birth-day till some weeks had passed, her chances were uncertain. She could live on nothing but breast milk, & her mother could not furnish it. We got Mary Lewis, the colored wife of the colored lessee of Quarry Farm to supply it a couple of weeks; but the moment we tried to put her on prepared food she turned blue around her mouth & began to gasp. We thought she would not live an hour. 15 minutes. Then we got Maggie O’Day from Elmira, who brought her blind child with her & divided up her rations—not enough for the two; so we tried to eke out the Bay’s supply with prepared food, & failed. She turned blue again & came near perishing.
We never tried prepared food any more. Next we got Lizzie Botheker, & had to pay her worthless husband $60 to let her come, beside her wages of $5 per week.
Next we got Patrick’s wife (our coachman) Mary McAleer to furnish milk for the Bay.
Lastly we got Maria McLaughlin, wife of a worthless Irishman, & she staid a year till the Bay was weaned. Maria chewed, smoked, (swore, used obscene language in the kitchen) stole the beer from the cellar & got drunk every now & then, & was a hard lot in every possible way—but the Bay throve on her vices, right along. So the Bay’s name in full, is
Clara Langdon Lewis O’Day Botheker McAleer McLaughlin Clemens. (SLC 1876–85, 8–10)
The twice-frustrated name choice was in memory of Clemens’s younger brother, fatally injured in a steamboat explosion in 1858 (see L1 , 80–86).
Susy was named Olivia Susan for her maternal grandmother and maternal aunt, Olivia Langdon and Susan Crane, respectively. It was expected that a second daughter would be named for Clemens’s mother: in a letter of 14 June, responding to the birth announcement, Orion referred to the new baby as “little Jane Clemens” and “Eunice Jane” (CU-MARK). The latter name suggests that the Clemenses also had Olivia’s paternal grandmother, the late Eunice Ford, in mind. They named their third daughter, born in 1880, Jane Lampton Clemens, but she was always known as Jean ( L2 , 299 n. 1).
In instructing his mother to send this letter on to Orion (see the third paragraph), Clemens neglected to consider the effect this remark might have. Orion and Mollie’s only child, Jennie, had died of spotted fever in Carson City, Nevada, on 1 February 1864, at the age of eight ( L1 , 280 n. 16).
The “157 pages of literature” included work on the dramatization of The Gilded Age, which Clemens completed by 15 July, and, probably, some progress on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (15 and 16 July 74 to Wattclick to open link). Of the twenty-five letters written “during the past 3 days,” only three, or at most four, are extant and published in this volume.
Susy scribbled several wavy vertical lines across the preceding paragraph. Before forwarding this letter to Orion and Mollie, Jane wrote a letter of her own on it, beginning on page 6, beneath Clemens’s complimentary close and signature, and continuing on the backs of pages 1, 5, and 6:
dear children. Mary I forgot to send the quilt pieces, are you ready to put them togother. Dont you think you had better send off all of your tenants they will cost you more than they are worth. Use the houses yourselves such people might do you some secret injury.
Mrs John Forbs mother is over 80 years old I caled to see her yesterday she had written her a long letter it was well written I mean her grandaughter she is living in Desmoin Iowa she is States Librarian that is what her grandmother thinks the office is she gets twelve hundred dollars a year. She is Mrs George. Nelly Pringle cannot walk her knee is so bad Dr Couch is attending her now he dont encourage her much. Orion I dont know that Carson ever received my letter Ford may have told him something will make him go on dont you think you had better write to carson. Sapha White caled here yesterday morning before breakfast I told Mrs. Warren she said what in the world did Sapha come down here so early our breakfast was so late. She had buisness down in town and stoped Caty has been with her sick sister two weeks day after to-morrow we are doing the work and A Myer here Mela does more than she ever did before.
It is six oclock no one up yet, very cool. I am going to start the fire to get warm. Try penny roil on the chicken to cure them rub him
This great letter came with a cotton string tied round it I paid 3c postage. I am going to tell him I thought it was full of checks but was dissapointed. Hope you passed a happy day yesterday. We wished we were with you. Sam pretends I did not answer the many letters he never wrote.
July 18th
For the houses Jane alluded to, see 23 Apr 74 to OC, n. 1click to open link. E. R. Ford, a Keokuk banker and real estate dealer in the mid-1850s, had been acting as Orion’s agent in disposing of the Clemens family’s land in Fentress County, Tennessee, evidently for a half interest in the property. On 7 August 1874 Orion wrote to Ford, complaining that after four years Ford had yet to forward any money, despite having traded the land for property in St. Charles County, Missouri, which he had then mortgaged
for six thousand dollars to invest in iron mining for yourself alone. This was mortgaging our half for $3,000, for money from which we are to derive no benefit. Is this proper in an agent? I am led to the belief that under this mortgage the St. Charles county land has been sold. If this be the case you have had three thousand dollars cash benefit of our half. Do you mean to pay us that amount, at least; or do you mean to redeem and deed us our half of the land?—an act of eminent propriety too long already delayed. (CU-MARK)
Ford’s response, if any, has not been found, but he and Orion were still in dispute over the Missouri and Tennessee lands in the fall of 1874. On 25 October 1874, Orion wrote to Jane and Pamela, informing them that Ford had
offered to return all the Tennessee lands he got of us if we would pay him what he had advanced for taxes, &c., on them, and 10 per cent interest, amounting in all, he said, to $500 or $600. The titles he said would be as perfect as when he got them. . . . I thought no taxes had been paid on them in four years, that I did not think he could return all the lands, that the offer was a trap, that I had no money, if it was in good faith, and that the interest was to be 6 per cent if the lands were returned, instead of 10 per cent the amount of interest agreed upon if paid out of the proceeds of sales. (CU-MARK)
Then, in the spring of 1875, Orion traveled to Jamestown, in Fentress County, and also to St. Charles, in an attempt to resolve the “Ford matter,” which he told Clemens was “in such a confused tangle that it is a pleasure to work with it.” He hoped, doubtless in vain, that in St. Louis he would be able to “sell the Ford claim . . . for enough to repay Pamela her outlay on Tennessee land” (OC to SLC, 9 June 75, CU-MARK). Carson has not been identified, nor have the others Jane mentioned, most of them apparently Fredonia residents. “Penny roil” was pennyroyal (Hedeoma pulegioides), which contains a pungent oil that was used medicinally and was said to repel insects, especially fleas. Clemens’s “great” letter filled only one side of six small sheets, but may have had a bulky enclosure, now lost. The “happy day yesterday” was Orion’s forty-ninth birthday (OC: 1856, 69, “Advertisements,” 17; 1857, 29, 133; OC to MEC, 14 and 15 May 75, 20 May 75, 23 May 75, 9 June 75, all in CU-MARK).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L6 , 184–88.
see Moffett Collection in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.