Election day was 3 November, but since it was midnight, Clemens actually wrote his letter on 4 November. His mother had either described—or, more likely, enclosed a clipping about—a recent “horrible and strange” murder in St. Louis. On 23 October, Henry D. Christian, a government detective who “paid special attention to the hunting up of tobacco frauds,” was found in an alley, unconscious with a serious head wound. He remained in a coma until his death the next day. His murderers were not identified, but were thought to be men he had informed against, since in the course of his duties he was known to have “brought down maledictions upon himself as well as threats of vengeance” (“Murder. Assassins at Work. Terrible Struggle for Life,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 26 Oct 68, 4).

The object of Clemens’s second call (on “53d street”) was Olivia’s friend Fidele Brooks, who lived at 675 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Fifty-third; Clemens had recently promised to visit her (30 Oct 68 to OLLclick to open link). Mrs. Brooks’s younger sister, Josephine Griffiths Polhemus, was also staying there, in order to attend what her daughter Anne later described as a “fashionable girls school of that time,” which was “Miss Meeker’s English and French Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies.” The recipient of Clemens’s first call, ostensibly in Forty-ninth Street, remains unidentified, but since the Wileys lived at 54 East Forty-ninth Street, near Madison Avenue—not, as Clemens wrote here, “in 45th street”—he may have inadvertently reversed the Wileys’ address with that of his first call. Clara Wiley (b. 1851) was the daughter of George Washington Wiley and the former Elmira Gregg. The “boys” were Clara’s brothers: James (b. 1847 or 1848), George Lourie (1848?–1924), Will (1853?–82), and Snowden (b. 1856 or 1857). (George later married Josephine Polhemus, in 1873.) The Wileys were friends of the Brookses’ and, coincidentally, old friends and neighbors of Clemens’s family, who had known them since the late 1840s, both in Hannibal and in St. Louis. George Washington Wiley had lived in Hannibal until the gold rush of 1849 lured him to California, but by the early 1850s he was back in Missouri, where he became a partner in a St. Louis wholesale grocery firm. Sometime after mid-1860 he moved his family to New York (Anne Wiley Leek to Dixon Wecter, 3 Jan 1948, CU-MARK; “Instruction,” New York Evening Post, 22 Aug 68, 3; Wilson 1868, 1161; “George L. Wiley,” New York Times, 17 Apr 1924, 19; St. Louis Census 1860, 209; MTBus , 34, 101; Josephine Polhemus Wiley to OLC, 24 Jan 74, CU-MARK; Hagood and Hagood, 85, 87; Knox, 8, 206). Clemens did call on the Wileys again, sometime before leaving for Cleveland on 7 or 8 November. In 1944 Clara’s younger sister, Margaret (b. 1858 or 1859), wrote to Clemens’s nephew, Samuel C. Webster, about this second visit:

Clemens had known the Garth family, Hannibal tobacconists, since they arrived from Virginia in 1842. Susan E. Garth (b. 1814 or 1815) was the wife of the older son, David J. Garth (1822–1912); their two “girls” were Elvira (b. 1844 or 1845) and Mary (b. 1846 or 1847). “Jno. & Helen” were David’s younger brother, John H. Garth (1837–99), and his wife, the former Helen V. Kercheval (1838–1923), also of Hannibal; Clemens later described her as “one of the prettiest of the schoolgirls” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:184). By 1862 the Garth brothers had moved to New York City. David, who had been the young Clemens’s Sunday school teacher (and tobacconist), lived on Henry Street in Brooklyn. In 1868 he was a partner in the Manhattan banking firm of Garth, Fisher, and Hardy. John, one of Clemens’s closest Hannibal friends, operated a tobacco-processing factory in Brooklyn until 1866 or 1867, when he evidently moved to Baltimore ( Portrait , 776–77; Wilson 1866, 369; Wilson 1867, 376; Wilson 1868, 394; Inds, 320, 328).