24 April 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (Dubuque Herald, 28 Apr 74, UCCL 12067)
Sir—A friend writes me from your city that a person styling himself “Charles Clemmens, agent for Mark Twain,” has been advertising me to lecture in Dubuque on the 20th of this month. I hear that he collected all the money for reserved seats &Ⓐemendation then decamped, but was caught & arrested by your sheriff.2explanatory note
I hope that the full rigor of the law will be meted out to this small villain. He professes to be my brother. If he is, it is a pity he does not know how to spell the family name.3explanatory note
I am not in the lecture field this year, either east or west.4explanatory note
(Mark Twain.)
Elmira, N. Y., April 24th.5explanatory note
The editor and co-proprietor of the Dubuque Herald was M. M. Ham; his partner was D. D. W. Carver. Clemens did not know either man, and therefore used a generic salutation easily adapted for other newspapers as well (masthead, Dubuque Herald, 28 Apr 74, 1; Rowell: 1870, 650; 1891, 229; see notes 2 and 5).
The Dubuque Herald published Clemens’s letter on 28 April 1874, introducing it as follows:
On Tuesday, April 21st, Mr. Wm. Barnard of the Lorimier House, wrote to his friend, Mrs. Langdon, of Elmira, N. Y., the particulars of the swindle perpetrated by the “Jumping Frog,” and also sent her a copy of the Herald containing a full account of the affair. Mark Twain’s wife is a daughter of Mrs. Langdon, and it so happened that Mr. Clemens (Twain) with his wife and family had just arrived at Elmira on a visit to Mrs. Langdon, when she received the letter of Mr. Barnard. He was naturally astonished at the villainy and audacity of the fellow, of whom of course he had never heard, and at once inclosed the following note to Mr. Barnard for publication in this city. It was written from Elmira on Friday the 24th, and was received last evening. Subsequent to writing this he telegraphed by his attorney to have the fellow re-arrested and prosecuted. This is Mark Twain’s letter. (“‘Mark Twain’ after the ‘Frog,’” 4)
Clemens’s cover letter to William Barnard, enclosing the present letter to the Herald, has not been recovered. Clemens enclosed the Herald’s 21 April “full account of the affair” in a letter to John Brown: see Enclosure with 27 April 1874 to John Brownclick to open link. The “Jumping Frog” was the Herald’s contemptuous epithet for Jared S. Strong, of Canton, Illinois, whose career as a confidence man already included impersonations of a railroad conductor, a phrenologist, and a physician specializing in curing piles. Strong had arrived in Dubuque on 15 April, claiming to be “Charles Clemmens,” Mark Twain’s brother and “advance agent.” He sold 230 tickets (at 75¢ each) to a lecture he promised Mark Twain would give at the Dubuque Atheneum on Monday, 20 April, and then fled with the proceeds just before the performance was to begin. Pursuit by Dubuque City Marshal Kintzinger and Detective J. G. Shattuck was immediate. Strong was apprehended on the morning of 21 April in Scales Mound, Illinois, and brought back to Dubuque early that evening. He was accompanied by a woman the Dubuque Herald called “his new found wife, a lady whose virtues are self-evident,” and later identified as Hannah Shaffer, “an unsophisticated country girl,” a milliner from nearby Galena, Illinois, whom he had only recently “duped . . . to become his wife.” Since the Herald’s notice of the arrest did not appear until 22 April, Barnard could not have enclosed it in his letter to Mrs. Langdon, though he was able to report the event to her. On 25 April, the day after Clemens wrote to Dubuque, his attorneys (the Elmira firm of H. Boardman Smith, Archibald A. Robertson and Newton P. Fassett) sent a follow-up telegram (see note 3; Dubuque Herald: “Personal,” 16 Apr 74, 4; “Go and Hear Mark Twain,” 16–18 Apr 74, 4; “The ‘Jumping Frog,’” 21 Apr 74, 4; “Clemmens’ Arrival,” 22 Apr 74, 4; “The Jumping Frog’s Wife,” 24 Apr 74, 4; “Caught on the Fly,” 29 Apr 74, 4; Dubuque Times: “Minor Items,” 22 Apr 74, 4).
By the time Clemens sent this letter, his hope for justice had already been frustrated. On 22 April, Strong was brought before a Dubuque justice of the peace on charges of bilking the Key City House, a local hotel, of thirteen dollars in board and lodging and five dollars in cash, credit advanced on the strength of his claim that he was Mark Twain’s brother and agent. He was acquitted “because the prosecution could not disprove that he was Charles Clemmens and that he was the brother and advance agent of Twain.” The Dubuque Herald of 23 April called that decision “the worst burlesque on Iowa law and our municipal authority, that has yet come to hand. . . . If this dead beat Clemmens is allowed to go free with a leer in his mouth . . . we deserve to become the laughing stock of all our neighbors” (“First Blood for the Frog,” 4). Strong was immediately rearrested, this time for defrauding the printers who produced his handbills and the booksellers who sold the bogus tickets. On 23 and 24 April he appeared before a second and a third judge. Again he was released, because “there was no presumptive guilt sufficient to hold him”; it was argued that “men who have swindled the community a hundred fold worse than he have been allowed to escape, and go untouched by the legal throng, and why should we be so eager to bring misery upon this poor penniless wretch for his comparatively slight offence” (Dubuque Herald: “The Worst Fraud of All,” 25 Apr 74, 1; “The Clemmens Trial,” 24 Apr 74, 4). The Dubuque Herald found “some merit in the proposition, though it does not obviate the fact of his rascality,” but called the dismissals “an outrage” and “a grim joke.” Even as it repeatedly joked about the incident in its columns, the Herald deplored “the fact that a large proportion of our citizens, of all classes, were disposed to condone this crime, under the plea that it was ‘a good joke’” and hoped that “the confidence men of the country” would not take Strong’s escape from punishment “as an invitation to flock here and ply their practices with impunity.” On 24 April, immediately after his second discharge, “by advice of his attorneys” Strong “was ferried over to the Illinois shore as quick as possible to avoid another arrest” (Dubuque Herald: “The ‘Jumping Frog’ Swindle in Its Moral and Legal Aspects,” “The Last Blood for the Frog,” 25 Apr 74, 1, 4; Dubuque Times: “The Jumping Frog,” 23 Apr 74, 24 Apr 74, 4; “Failed to Make a Case,” 25 Apr 74, 4; see the following typical jokes in the Dubuque Herald: “‘Roughing It’ at St. Charles,” 21 Apr 74, 4; “A Frog He Would A Wooing Go,” 22 Apr 74, 4; “Caught on the Fly,” 22–25 Apr 74, 4). On Tuesday, 28 April, the day after Clemens’s letter arrived, the Herald reported a telegram received on 25 April from his lawyers (4):
“Mark Twain” after the “Frog.”—Judge T. S. Wilson received a lengthy dispatch from the attorneys of “Mark Twain,” or rather Samuel J. Clemmens, at Elmira, New York, Saturday night, enquiring for particulars of the fraud perpetrated upon our citizens, whether the prisoner, the pretended brother, J. S. Strong, alias Charles Clemmens, was still in custody, whether he had been convicted, if not, asking that he be immediately re-arrested and held until Mr. Clemmens (who is at home and not in Europe) and his attorney could come here and have the law properly administered. In accordance with the request of the dispatch, detective Shattuck was again commissioned to arrest the “frog,” and started on his trail on the train going east Sunday noon. At last accounts the detective found that the “frog” had left for Forreston, leaving his wife at Scales Mound, but not having enough money to pay his fare the conductor of the train had put him off, and that he is now somewhere between Forreston and Amboy. Detective Shattuck will doubtless bring him back in good time well ripened for the demands of justice.
The parenthetical “who is at home and not in Europe” was the Herald’s correction of its original 21 April report that “the last heard of Mark Twain he was in Europe exploring the ruins of Pompeii, and ‘Roughing It’ in Jerusalem” (“Caught on the Fly,” 4). Scales Mound, Illinois, was about thirty rail miles east of Dubuque, across the Mississippi River. Forreston was fifty miles southeast of Scales Mound; Amboy was another forty miles south of Forreston. The 25 April telegram from Clemens’s lawyers shows that he lost no time in trying to prosecute Strong. For subsequent developments, see 27 Apr 74 to Brown, n. 4click to open link.
In an interview with the Dubuque Herald, “Charles Clemmens” had concocted an extravagant lecture itinerary for Mark Twain (see Enclosure with 27 April 1874 to John Brownclick to open link).
This same letter, with trivial variations, also appeared in the Dubuque Times (like the Herald, a morning paper) on 28 April (“A Letter from the Distinguished Humorist,” 4). The Times had previously observed:
The “sell” of Monday evening was some fun to the Dubuquers—those who didn’t go to see the “Jumping Frog”; more fun to the citizens of other cities in Iowa; but probably the person who will find it the most funny when he hears of it, will be “Mark Twain” himself. (“Minor Items,” 24 Apr 74, 4)
In printing Clemens’s letter, the paper remarked:
We received last evening, through Mr. Wm. Barnard, of the Lorimier House, whose wife, we understand, is a relative of Mark Twain’s, the following letter from this distinguished author. No one here, however, we may add right here, save those who were called upon to administer the law upon the rascal, have for a moment supposed him to be Mr. Clemens’ brother, after the fraud was exposed.
Doubtless Clemens wrote his letter with the Dubuque Herald primarily in mind, since that was the newspaper Barnard had sent to Elmira, but he clearly intended Barnard to make it available to other local papers. In addition to the Times—which altered Clemens’s salutation to read: “To the Editor of the Times:”—Barnard may also have given it to the Dubuque Telegraph, but no file of that paper has been found. The Galena Gazette, an evening newspaper, reprinted the Times text on 28 April (“Mark Twain in Search of His Brother,” 3). If Barnard’s wife was “a relative of Mark Twain’s,” she must have been related to Mrs. Langdon, but she has not been independently identified.
“‘Mark Twain’ after the ‘Frog,’” Dubuque Herald, 28 Apr 74, 4. Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, Ill. (ICRL).
L6 , 116–119; “A Letter from the Distinguished Humorist,” Dubuque Times, 28 Apr 74, 4; “Mark Twain in Search of His Brother,” Galena (Ill.) Gazette, 28 Apr 74, 3, reprinting the Dubuque Times.