per Telegraph Operator
29 March 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (Transcript: CU-BANC, UCCL 01217)
Ent. ofs.
You have a splendid good thing. Meddle with no Western publisher, nor with Worthington either. Do not let Ralston have the pamphlet unless he allows you to add it to the book.1explanatory note Make bargains of no kind until you get my letters.2explanatory note
Clemens answered a 22 March letter from Wright that has not been found (see the next letter). It is clear, however, from Wright’s letters to his sister, Lou Wright Benjamin, that he wrote to Clemens for advice about two proposed works: a paperback (“the pamphlet”) about the Comstock lode and its developers, and a collection of sketches. San Francisco publisher A. L. Bancroft and Hartford subscription publisher A. D. Worthington had expressed interest in the sketchbook. William C. Ralston (1826–75) was the founder and president of the Bank of California whose speculations with the bank’s funds, especially in the Comstock mines, brought about its collapse in August 1875. He was one of several prominent businessmen and mine owners who had urged Wright, widely acknowledged as an authority on the mines, to write a work about the Comstock that would increase their fortunes by attracting investors while memorializing their own roles in the development of the bonanza (see the next letter, nn. 5, 9). Wright was uncomfortable with the pressure from Ralston and the other would-be backers, but was tempted by their offer to pay the publishing costs. On 24 January he wrote to his sister (CU-BANC):
The matter of my book is pushed and crowded upon me every day. All I have to do to make money if all else fails is to turn clown and publish a book. I can get all the money I want. Many men with their pockets overflowing would almost turn them wrong side out for the sake of having a paragraph in the book about themselves, when if I were sick and destitute and not likely to print a book would not give me a single dollar. I am beginning to receive short histories of what this man and what that man did on certain trying occasions, for it is thought that my book will give all that has ever happened on the Pacific Coast. Yesterday I received an account from the head man of Wells, Fargo & Co. and this Coast of how he crossed the mountains in some big storm. I have not read it yet, but I have no doubt I might make a hero of him and not half try. Before trying however I think I should get his check for about $500 worth of the books, which is a good way of securing the success of a “work of merit” in these desperate days. In case I start in on a book I shall go after the rich men of this Coast for enough to make me safe and then shall make them print the book and give me all of the profits of it. There is no use of doing things by halves. If they are bound to have a book I will give them a book—red-hot. I want to be in a position to snap my fingers at the critics who are sure to go after me and my book and to have money to hire newspapers to let me give the critics as good as they send.
Later in the same letter he described his second project, which would not require wealthy patrons: “It will be nothing more than a collection of little sketches already published, with some new ones and all of the old ones a good deal enlarged.” Wright described both books again in a letter to his sister of 28 March (CU-MARK):
I have written to Mark Twain about a publisher for my book and about the whole business. I expect an answer shortly. Meantime A. L. Bancroft & Co., of San Francisco are anxious to either publish the book or to have the management of its sale on this coast. I shall give them no answer till after hearing from Mark. . . . I have not yet finished a single sketch for the book, though I am getting the material together and doing what I can toward it when I can spare time from the book I am now engaged upon. Two books and the local columns of the paper is a big job to have on hand at one and the same time. . . . Although to be in paper covers, it is likely to be quite a book. I have finished the underground regions of the mines and am about done with the mills and processes by which the silver is extracted from the ores. I have yet to write a description of the “bonanza mines” and an account of the discovery and early history of the Comstock, with something of the present appearance of Virginia City, etc. We expect to print 10,000 the first edition. It will be a big help toward selling the second book—the sketches—as I put in a little something pleasant wherever I can, dry as is the subject. I think I should call it “The Big Bonanza.”
In fact, Wright’s book on the mines did not appear in “paper covers.” The American Publishing Company, Clemens’s publisher, issued it by subscription in 1876 as The Big Bonanza: An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History, and Working of the World-Renowned Comstock Lode of Nevada. Wright did not publish a separate volume of sketches.
That is, Clemens’s letters of 24 March, and 29 March and 4 April. As the next letter indicates, he had not yet mailed the first and he sent this telegram before he began writing the second.
Transcript, handwritten by William Wright in a letter to Lou Wright Benjamin, 29 Mar 75, Dan De Quille Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-BANC).
L6 , 432–433; Lewis, xvii.
The De Quille Papers were donated in 1953 by Henry L. Day, through the courtesy of Joel E. Ferris.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.