The letter from Clark, the secretary and treasurer of the newly organized Associated Pioneers of the Territorial Days of California, inviting Clemens to attend their meeting on 18 January, is not known to survive. Although available only in a printed transcription, the present letter was doubtless in the hand of the same unidentified stenographer who produced his dictated letters of 5 January to Morgan G. Bulkeley and William Wright, and his letter of 6 January to Pamela Moffett.

On the evening of 18 January 1876, the Associated Pioneers held its first annual meeting and banquet, at the Sturtevant House in New York, celebrating the discovery, on 24 January 1848, of gold in California. John A. Sutter (1803–80), California colonist and self-styled “General” on whose property the discovery was made, was himself ill and unable to attend. In Sutter’s absence, the “honored guest” was another old friend of Clemens’s, Joaquin Miller. Clemens’s letter was one of several read aloud. The details of his acquaintance with Sutter are not known ( Pioneers 1876, title page, 4, 24–25, 27; Hart 1987, 306, 508).