29 March and 4 April 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (Transcript and MS: Morris and Anderson, CU-BANC, UCCL 11611)
Wonders never will cease. When the postman came this morning I recognized your handwriting & Ⓐemendationsaid to my wife, “Now you shall see that human sympathies can stretch their influences further across a continent (with unbroken force), than the telegraphic spark can. (The spark must be repeated midway). I will tell you the contents of this letter without breaking the seal; & yet I have held no communication with this friend in eleven years. This letter will ask advice & information of me about publishing a book concerning the Comstock leadⒶemendation, one feature of which shall be a chapter or two about the Big Bonanza. The reason this letter has been written, is, that less than five days ago, I wrote to Dan suggesting that he write this very book! My mind suggested it to his mind, for my letter to him has not been mailed, yet because I have also written my publisher & am waiting Ⓐemendationfor his answer before I start Dan on a book which may possibly not be wanted.1explanatory note
Then ⒶemendationI broke the seal & read passages to her which showed that I had correctly stated what the contents would be.
Next I went & got my own letter out of the pigeon-hole & surprise No. 2 came! to wit: Your letter to me was dated March 22; mine to you was dated March 24—two days later. So it was your mesmeric current that had flowed across the mountains & deserts three thousand miles & acted upon me, instead of mine flowing westward & acting upon you. So Ⓐemendation you were the originator of the idea. Now as I dropped my work & began to act on the very instant that the notion occurred to me, (that isⒶemendation, on the very day, possibly the very moment you were writing me—for I called the carriage & went down to my publishers on the 22d, & again on the 23d, & then wrote you on the 24th (because I despaired of catching the publisher in) three things are plainly established—namely:
1st Mesmeric sympathies can flash themselves 3000 miles within the space of 12 hours—possibly instantly. (What hour of the day did you write me?)
2d They come clear through, & don’t have to be repeated at way stations between, like land telegraphy.
3d—They travel from west to east, not from east to west.
However, this point on No. 3 is not well taken, because there isn’t any proof that they don’t travel westwardly upon occasion.
I mean to get my letter from Bliss, so you can see by the postmark that I did write him on the 24th & am not now stacking up a fanciful lie for you.2explanatory note
Keep this present letter of mine. Maybe we can utilize it in some way. 3explanatory note
Ⓐemendation
publishing risks Ⓐemendation. Can’t you make the old good soul regard that as a fair equivalent for release from responsibility? BecauseⒶemendation, don’t you see, there ain’t any risk. I am a large stockholder Ⓐemendation& director in our publishing house, & have some influence.4explanatory note And besides, if our folks don’t want the book, I will very easily find a subscription house that will want it. (I say subscription, because only insane people publish in the old author-robbing way.)
I want you, to about August, to canvas Virginia & Gold Hill yourself. Why not? It is but small sacrifice of dignity, & then the returns are large. You will clear about $1.75 on each book. Reserve other Nevada camps for yourself, too—that is, be General Agent for the whole State, & sublet to canvassers at 40 per cent off, you receiving the books from here at 50 per cent off & clearing 10 per cent from your underlings’ work.
Th Include that Ralston mining pamphlet in the book, & make Jones & the other big fish take hundreds of copies & agree to require only one copy of you until you shall have finished canvassing—so as not to glut & kill the market. 5explanatory note I Ⓐemendationwill try to make the publishers supply you with all the books you want (not to be sold outside of Nevada) at a trifle above cost. The retail prices will be $3.50; $4, & $5, according to binding. in margin: The book to be same size as Roughing It. The cost of a $3.50 copy is only $1.20. So if we can only manage to get them at $1.30 or $1.40, you’ll make a neat thing out of the 3 or 4000 you sell to the big fish.6explanatory note Let the big fish take the cheap copies—the $3.50 ones; your profit will be just about they Ⓐemendationsame, & they will get more books for their money.
Dan, there are more ways than one of writing a book; & your way is not the right one. You see, the winning card is to nail a man’s interest with Chapter 1, & never let up on him for an instant till you get him to the word “finis.” That can’t be done with detached sketches; but I’ll show you how to make a man read every one of those sketches, under the stupid impression that they are mere accidental incidents that have dropped in on you unawares in the course of your narrative. My letter of the 24th gives the correct idea of what the book should be. It isn’t any more trouble to write that book than it is to report an inquest.7explanatory note
Drop your reporting & come here, right away. Whatever money you need, get it of Joe, or telegraph me.8explanatory note Come Don’t get it of any reluctant devil who will make you feel under obligations to him. Don’t Ⓐemendationget it of Mackey unless you choose, (if you have any delicacy about asking him,) because he is already doing so handsomely. But if he prefers to lend it, all right.9explanatory note Only remember that you need go no further than Joe or me. You Ⓐemendationknow old Joe Goodman pretty well—& I know myself. But do not mention to anybody that I make this proposition, because it is better in the eyes of the world that you seem entirely independent.
Come right along at once. It exasperates me to think of your slaving away all night long, when there is no earthly occasion for it. To write a book felicitously a man needs to be delightfully circumstanced & entirely free from cares, interruptions & annoyances.
Here you shall stop at the best hotel, & every morning I will walk down, meet you half way, bring you to my house & we will grind literature all day long in the same room; then I’ll escort you half way home again. Sundays Ⓐemendationwe will smoke & lie. When you need money you will know where to get it. If ever you feel deslicate about taking it of me, there’s the publisher, who will cheerfully advance it.
If you write the book out there, it will not be more than one-half as good as it will if you write it here. Atmosphere is everything! If you prefer to write at night, you may write all night here, if you want to—there’s a most noble divan in my study to stretch your bones on when you get tired. Besides, when it comes to building a book I can show you a trick or two which I don’t teach to everybody, I can tell you! You may think I’m an old fool, Dan, but I warn you I’m a mighty sound one in some things.
Bring Joe along with you. What is the use of his staying out there till May? Joe can tell you what an inspiration it is to write in the same room with another fellow. He wrote loads of poetry while I wrote Roughing It—& between whiles we played “66.” We’ll play billiards, here, or “66,” whichever you prefer.10explanatory note You shall use all your old best sketches in your book & use them to better advantage than you are planning for, now. Bring along lots of dry statistics—it’s the very best sauce a humorous book can have. Ingeniously used, they just make a readyer smack his chops in gratitude. We must have all the Bonanza statistics you can rake & scrape. You shall get up a book that the very children will cry for.
I telegraphed you, the moment I got your letter, I was so afraid you would commit yourself to some Stenhouse or Bancroft or Worthington.11explanatory note
Now as to royalty. No publisher likes to buy a pig in a poke, of course; so let us leave that alone until we can show the completed MS. to the defendant—then strike for all he will stand, of course. He shall not have it for less than 5 per cent (what I get on Innocents Abroad,) & we will try to get as much more as possible. You need never pay me back any borrowed money unless you get it out of the book.
Now you pack up & come along & go to work. Telegraph me.
first 3 lines of page (about 12 words) torn away to cancel
By George it was good to hear of old Steve & Daggett & Mackey once more! Give them my ancient love unimpaired.12explanatory note
The reason I don’t demand that you eat & sleep in my house all the time you are here, Dan, is partly because you mightn’t want to, but mainly because my wife’s health is so unsettled that at times we can’t venture to have company, she is so apt to torture Ⓐemendationherself with fears that her table is not all it ought to be, or the servants lax, or that she is failing to make the guest comfortable. She feels so about her own mother. There is only one guest in the world who gives her not the slightest dread, & that is Joe Goodman. He makes eternal sunshine for her, & she detests the day that he has to leave.
last 6 lines of page (complimentary close, signature, and first postscript) torn away
P. P. S.—Bring lots of photographs of mills, machinery, dumps, p◇a or anything that will make a picture, for we always try to cram our books full of pictures. Bring pohotographs of the men who have made the biggest fortunes out of the Bonanza, (Joe among the rest—& Dennis) 13explanatory note & Mackey) & get little bi personal histories sketches of their coast histories out of them, to use with the portraits, & hint that their glorification will be gauged by the number of books they take. 14explanatory note Strike them hard—hard—HARD! in margin: Don’t be afraid of Stenhouse’s book.15explanatory note Bosh!
I Ⓐemendationdelayed my letter in order that I might see my publisher, & meantime my wife was taken down with dipththeriaⒶemendation, & so I dropped everything to look after her. I sent for my publisher twice, & he had his long trips for nothing, because I was out, both times—about the only two times I have been out in three weeks. But the third time I sent for him I had sense enough to stay in. He liked the idea of the book, & said he had dropped you a line about it.16explanatory note So I said that that was all I wanted to know; & that all in good time you should show him a MS that would make him stand & deliver a good royalty or else I was much mistaken in my author.
Clemens presumably mailed his 24 March letter with the present one, possibly in a single envelope, on 4 or 5 April.
Clemens did not send Wright the 24 March letter to Bliss, but he might have had Bliss display it after Wright came to Hartford in May 1875 (see pp. 487–88). In any event, in his 24 January letter to his sister, Wright had already expressed a belief in what Clemens called “mesmeric sympathies”: “It appears to me that all this mind often is mingled as the air and again is separated when mind stands before mind and there passes between the two minds volumes of thought without any trouble about the words or any need of words” (CU-BANC). Both Clemens and Wright later published accounts of the striking circumstances described here. In 1889, Wright discussed “Thought Telegraphy” in his correspondence for the Salt Lake City Tribune:
Some time ago I wrote a letter to a literary friend in the East. In about three days I received a letter from that friend. Our letters had crossed each other, and both were about a certain matter. Soon came another letter—a very long one—in which he (the friend) said that he knew my letter was written before his had time to reach me. He said he was so sure he knew the contents of my letter that he took it home unopened and said to his wife: “Here is a letter from a man from whom I have not had a letter in five years. Now I will tell you what it is about before opening it.” He was correct in his guess and wrote me about twenty pages about “mind-telegraphy,” as he called it. (Wright 1889)
(In fact, as Clemens’s present letter, his “very long one,” shows, his and Wright’s initial letters did not actually cross in the mail.) Clemens’s “Mental Telegraphy” appeared in Harper’s Monthly in December 1891. He cited the exchange of letters with Wright as “the oddest thing that ever happened to me,” and claimed it was the experience that first called his attention to the phenomenon whereby “mind can act upon mind in a quite detailed and elaborate way over vast stretches of land and water” (SLC 1891, 95, 97). The article included descriptions of several similar incidents involving himself and his acquaintances.
The text of the letter up to this point survives only in Wright’s handwritten transcription, preserved by his descendants, while the remaining portion survives in manuscript in the Dan De Quille Papers in The Bancroft Library (see the textual commentary). The two parts have been combined here in accordance with strong evidence—including Wright’s 1889 report that the letter was “about twenty pages”—that they belonged to a single letter. Wright probably made his transcription in 1893, when he received a request for a copy of Clemens’s letter from Richard Hodgson, secretary-treasurer of the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research, who wanted to “complete the evidence” about the incident (Hodgson to Wright, 30 Aug 92 and 4 Apr 93, CU-BANC). The manuscript of the second part consists of sixteen pages numbered 7 to 21, plus a last unnumbered leaf. A word count of the surviving manuscript suggests that the missing six pages contained about 500 words—the approximate number in Wright’s transcription (475), plus perhaps another one-fourth of a page (about 20 words), lost when Wright failed to transcribe the bottom of page 6. (The second segment of the present text begins at the top of page 7 in mid-sentence.)
See 24 Mar 74 to Aldrich, n. 8click to open link, and L5 , 310 n. 5.
In addition to Ralston, the “big fish” backing the pamphlet were John P. Jones, James G. Fair, and John W. Mackay. Jones (1829–1912), a native of England who spent his youth in Cleveland, went to California at the start of the gold rush, then in 1867 moved to Nevada, where he became superintendent and later part owner of the Crown Point mine. In 1873 he was elected to the United States Senate from Nevada, a post he held for thirty years. Seaver reported in his “Personal” column in Harper’s Weekly for 2 May 1874 that Jones was
the possessor of the largest income of any person in America, if not in the world, his annual revenue amounting to $6,000,000. He is the owner of a silver mine more productive than any on earth. His part of the profits recently amounted to $250,000 a month, and have just been doubled by the discovery of a new vein. (Seaver 1874, 375)
Fair (1831–94), originally from Ireland, was the superintendent and a principal owner of the Consolidated Virginia and California mines. In partnership with Mackay (see note 9), he had a controlling interest in a number of other mines, quartz mills, and was worth $30 or $40 million (Lewis, xiii; Wright 1876, 403–5).
Bliss typically sold books to his agents for half their cover price—$1.75 for a $3.50 book ( L5 , 115 n. 2). For a discussion of how much profit he realized, see 8 Apr 75 to Webb, n. 3click to open link.
Clemens of course described his technique in writing Roughing It—which had not been in any way the easy task he claimed here (see RI 1993 , 797–867).
Joseph T. Goodman, the former editor and co-owner of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, was now living in San Francisco on the considerable fortune he had made from his Comstock investments and from the sale of the Enterprise in 1874 ( L1 , 242 n. 2; RI 1993 , 650; “Death Calls Discoverer of Mark Twain,” San Francisco Chronicle, 2 Oct 1917, 8).
John W. Mackay (1831–1902), to whom Wright ultimately dedicated The Big Bonanza, was born in Ireland and came to America as a boy. (Clemens consistently misspelled his name.) In 1851 he went to California, where he mined near Downieville, and then, in 1859, moved on to Nevada, where he worked for wages. In an 1897 interview, Clemens recalled that when he first met Mackay in Virginia City in 1862, the “future millionaire” had just started in the brokerage business and had less money than Clemens himself (Budd 1977, 78). Within a short time he began to amass a fortune, first from the Hale and Norcross mine, and then, in partnership with James G. Fair and others, from the Consolidated Virginia and California mines, in which the big bonanza strike of October 1874 was made. He was now worth $50 or $60 million. Wright described Mackay as an “unassuming” man, as well as “one of the most kind-hearted and generous,” whose knowledge of the Comstock was unsurpassed (Wright 1876, 363–66, 399–401). And Seaver agreed: in his “Personal” column in Harper’s Weekly for 27 November 1875 he claimed that Mackay, despite his estimated income of $831,000 a month, was the “most modest and retiring of all of the California millionaires” (Seaver 1875).
Goodman had stayed with Clemens in Elmira in the spring and summer of 1871 ( L4 , 378, 386; RI 1993 , 840–42). Sixty-six is a card game played with a deck of twenty-four cards, in which the object is to score 66 points out of a possible 130. For Goodman’s advice to Wright, see 29 Apr 75 to Wright, n. 1click to open link.
Wright wrote his sister on 24 January (CU-BANC):
Mr T. B. H. Stenhouse is in this city. He is a Mormon—an ex-Mormon, I should say. He has written a big book on the Mormons. His wife has also written a book of 600 pages on the business, handsomely illustrated and all that, with preface by Harriet Beecher Stowe. You may stand in awe of all these people, but I don’t. I have known Mr & Mrs Stenhouse for 10 yrs or 11 years. I was at their house in Salt Lake City in 1863 and ate of their “grub.” . . . Stenhouse has been prying round to know “what literary labors I am engaged in outside of those upon my papers.” I told him none and tell him truth.
Thomas Brown Holmes Stenhouse (1825–82) was the author of The Rocky Mountain Saints: A Full and Complete History of the Mormons, from the First Vision of Joseph Smith to the Last Courtship of Brigham Young . . . and the Development of the Great Mineral Wealth of the Territory of Utah (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873). From 1864 to 1869 he was the editor and proprietor of the Salt Lake City Telegraph. His wife, Fanny (b. 1829), wrote Expose of Polygamy in Utah: A Lady’s Life among the Mormons (American News Company, 1872) and Tell It All: The Story of a Life’s Experience in Mormonism: An Autobiography, which had a preface by Stowe and was issued by the Hartford subscription publisher A. D. Worthington in 1874. During the 1873–74 season she lectured on “Polygamy in Utah” for James Redpath’s Boston Lyceum Bureau ( Lyceum 1873, 7).
Stephen E. Gillis, formerly on the Enterprise staff, and Rollin M. Daggett, who in 1874 succeeded Goodman as the newspaper’s editor in chief ( L1 , 291–92 n. 3, 310–11 n. 3).
Denis McCarthy had already made and lost a fortune in the 1860s before the big bonanza strike of October 1874 brought him new riches, some of which he used to purchase the Virginia City Evening Chronicle (“Death of D. E. McCarthy,” Virginia City Evening Chronicle, 17 Dec 85, 2; Angel, 326–27).
The Big Bonanza is illustrated with numerous engravings, including portraits of Mackay, Fair, and Jones. Wright did not bring all of the photographs to Hartford, however, but wrote for them during the summer. Fair responded to such a request on 5 August 1875: “I am glad the pictures I had taken for you pleases you—I done the best I could. . . . I have no picture of a car load of Bars—I would get one taken but the artist is on a glorious bust & in Carson—Mr Mackey—Mr James and Ralston were glad to hear from you & know of your good progress with your Book” (CU-BANC; see also S. L. Jones to Wright, 13 Aug 75, CU-BANC). I. E. James (b. 1830) was a mining surveyor and railroad engineer who settled in Virginia City in 1860 and supervised construction of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad in 1870. In The Big Bonanza, Wright described him as “the man who has done nearly all of the intricate surveying that has been required in the leading mines on the Comstock lode. Although one of the most modest and unassuming men on the Pacific coast, with him nothing in the way of engineering appears to be impossible” (Wright 1876, 167, 400, 404, 407; Angel, 587).
Wright may have feared that Stenhouse, whose Rocky Mountain Saints included a history of Utah mining, was planning to write a book about the Comstock lode.
Bliss’s letter has not been found.
Transcript facsimile is copy-text for ‘Hartford . . . way.’ (433.1–434.37). The editors have not seen the original transcript, handwritten by William Wright, which was owned in 1988 by his descendants Evans Morris, Rosemary Morris, and Marjory Anderson, who provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers. MS, pages numbered 7–21 plus one unnumbered page, Dan De Quille Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-BANC), is copy-text for ‘publishing . . . Clemens’ (435.1–438.9). Although Wright preserved the two parts of the letter separately, the number of words in his transcript (460) accords well with the number of words conjectured to have been on the six pages missing from the MS (500), indicating that together they form one nearly complete letter, with only a few sentences missing. Furthermore, Wright himself, in an 1889 column in the Salt Lake City Tribune, described Clemens’s letter, on “thought telegraphy,” as “very long—. . . about twenty pages.” This description is accurate only if we assume that Wright was referring to the MS of the original letter (twenty-two pages), and not just to the section that he transcribed. Wright’s flush-left paragraph style has been replaced with Clemens’s usual indented style at 434.13, 434.14, 434.25, 434.28, 434.30, and 434.31. In addition, Wright’s self-corrections, reported below, have not been transcribed in the text.
L6 , 433–441; Berkove 1988, 7–8, transcript portion; Lewis, xviii–xx, MS portion, and Berkove 1988, 5, brief excerpt of MS portion.
The MS was one of nine letters from Clemens to Wright which after Wright’s death “were left with his daughter, Mell Evans. She, in turn, passed them on to her daughter, Irma Evans Morris. Effie Mona Mack learned of them while doing research for Mark Twain in Nevada (1947), and purchased photographic negatives of them” (Berkove 1988, 4, 18 n. 1). Mrs. Morris bequeathed the letters to her three children. After Evans Morris’s death in 1990, the letters were sold; although most of them were purchased from Admirable Books in March 1993 by the Copley Library (CLjC), the present location of this transcript is not known. 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.
transcript is copy-text for ‘Hartford . . . way.’ (433.1–434.37)
MS is copy-text for ‘publishing . . . Clemens’ (435.1–438.9)