5 May 1868 • San Francisco, Calif. (Typed transcript made for Albert Bigelow Paine and
handwritten transcript made by Dana S. Ayer:
CU-MARK and WU-MU, UCCL 02731)
The Alta people, after some hesitation, have given me permission to use my printed letters, & have ceased to think of publishing them themselves in book form. I am steadily at work, & shall start east with the completed manuscriptⒶemendation about the middle of June.1explanatory note
IⒶemendation lectured here on the trip the other night—over sixteen hundred dollars in gold in the house—every seat taken & paid for before night.
Clemens’s intention was probably to depart on the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s Golden City, scheduled for Saturday, 13 June. The company routinely dispatched its steamers for the Isthmus of Panama (and hence for New York) on the sixth, fourteenth, twenty-second, and thirtieth of each month, except when the date fell on a Sunday, which occasioned departure one day earlier or later (“Ocean Steamers,” San Francisco Alta California, 4 June 1868, 4).
All variants among the source texts are reported here. Readings identified by the siglum ‘MTP’ are editorial emendations that draw from or fully replace the source readings when none of those is deemed an accurate representation of the original manuscript.
None. The text is based on three transcripts, each of which derives independently from the original holograph letter, which has not been found. Tr1 and Tr2 are almost textually identical, but like other duplicate typescripts prepared for Paine, were probably both made with the original manuscript accessible to the typist: when they agree, they strongly confirm each other.
Transcripts published in MTB and MTL both derive from Tr1 or Tr2, so their (very slight) variants are derivative and not recorded here.
MTB, 1:363, partial publication; MTL, 1:152–53; L2, 215–16.
See Paine Transcripts and Brownell Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.