11 December 1870 • New York, N.Y. (New York Tribune, 13 Dec 70, UCCL 11731)
Sir: Mr. R. C. Gridley, widely known upon the Pacific coast, died at Paradise, Cal., November 24, of neuralgia of the heart. Mr. Gridley was one of the early emigrants to the Californian gold-fields, &Ⓐemendation, during his twenty years’ residence, maintained an enviable reputation for integrity, benevolence, & enterprise.2explanatory note His name was familiar to the nation during the days when fairs & such enterprises, in behalf of the Sanitary fund,3explanatory note were common, in consequence of his efforts in aid of that charity with the once famous “Sanitary flour sack.” He had engaged to carry a 50-pound sack of flour from one end of the town of Austin, Nevada, to the other, in case an approaching election went against his political party. His party lost the election, & Mr. Gridley made good his word. When he had completed his task, he put up the flour at auction, for the benefit of the United States Sanitary fund. The buyer immediately ordered that it be sold again for the fund. Mr. Gridley sold it again, & continued to sell & resell it till it had brought $800, gold. The news spread far & wide, & other towns called for Mr. Gridley & the flour sack. He left his partner in charge of his business4explanatory note & started with the sack, & in every town was received with bands of music & by the citizens in mass. In one day, in Virginia City & its suburbs (17,000 inhabitants), the sack sold for $30,000, gold.5explanatory note Mr. Gridley sold it in the large towns & cities of California, & then brought it East, & sold it over & over again here;6explanatory note &, finally, after selling it at the Mississippi Valley Fair, at St. Louis, for a great sum, it was made into small cakes there, & these were sold at extravagant prices.7explanatory note This long & tedious expedition, undertaken & carried through to the end with whole-hearted zeal, albeit there was no dollar of remuneration in it for Mr. Gridley, is the best exemplar of the generous nature of the man, & also of his great energy.8explanatory note
Albemarle, Dec. 11, 1870.
Horace Greeley, the founder of the New York Tribune, had been its chief editor for nearly thirty years. In writing to the paper Clemens customarily directed his letters to Whitelaw Reid, the managing editor since 1869.
Reuel Colt Gridley (b. 1829) had been one of Clemens’s Hannibal schoolmates. For Clemens’s on-the-spot account of the events he here recalled for the Tribune, see L1 , 281–84. He reworked this material in chapter 45 of Roughing It ( RI 1993 , 294–98).
The United States Sanitary Commission and the Western Sanitary Commission, established in 1861, were the two major organizations that raised funds for the care of sick and wounded Union soldiers. During the next five years they raised more than $24 million in cash and supplies ( L1 , 284 n. 3).
Gridley, Hobart, and Jacobs, an Austin grocery firm ( L1 , 285 n. 10).
Actually about $23,200 in gold; the day was 16 May 1864 ( RI 1993 , 661–62).
Gridley auctioned the flour sack twice in Sacramento and once in San Francisco; his eastern auctions have not been identified ( RI 1993 , 663–64).
Pamela Moffett was among the women supporting the Mississippi Valley Sanitary Fair, which was held in St. Louis in May and June 1864 and raised some $600,000. Gridley did not take the sack to St. Louis until the summer of 1865, however. The scheme to bake the flour into cakes, possibly first conceived by Clemens himself, was never carried out ( L1 , 282–83; RI 1993 , 664).
Estimates of the total Gridley raised range between $40,000 and $275,000 in gold. In Roughing It Clemens put it at “a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in greenbacks.” Given the fluctuating value of the greenback, that probably was the equivalent of, at most, about $87,000 in gold ( RI 1993 , 298, 662, 664).
For another instance of Clemens’s obscuring his identity when making a “serious” public statement, see 29 Apr 71 to Reidclick to open link.
“The Famous Sanitary Flour Sack,” New York Tribune, 13 Dec 70, 5.
L4 , 270–272.