enclosure: 5explanatory note
[To the Editor of the Courier-Journal.]
Farmington avenue, Hartford, Oct. 9.
Mr. Owen S. McKinney, of Palatine, West Virginia, writes to ask if I know “Mrs. E. H. Bonner, alias Harry Buford,” & says she exhibits documents purporting to come from me, & Ⓐemendation also professes to be joint proprietor with me of “a book now in process of completion entitled Harry Buford’s Adventures During the War.”6explanatory note
There is a large mistake here somewhere. I have not furnished documents of the above sort to anybody. I am not joint proprietor in any book with any woman.
My warrant for requesting you to deliver this word of warning to the public consists in the fact that one sentence in Mr. McKinney’s letter makes this reference: “Great prominence is given the lady by the Louisville Courier-Journal & the Mobile Register.” From this I infer that you have been imposed upon with the story of the joint book proprietorship, & hence I venture to offer you this correction of the error.7explanatory note Yours truly,
Mark TwainⒶemendation.
The manuscript of the enclosure is not known to survive. The text is supplied here
from Clemens’s clipping from the
Louisville Courier-Journal of 16 October 1874, doubtless sent by Watterson. Clemens inscribed it
“Louisville Courier-Journal
S. L. Clemens” (“A Card from Mark Twain,” 2, clipping
in CU-MARK).
McKinney had written (CU-MARK):
McKinney’s language suggests that he may have been a journalist or printer (“one of the craft”); his connection with the Marion Machine Works has not been explained. The source of the documents Bonner showed him, with the “printed heads” of Clemens’s publisher, conceivably was Thomas Belknap, who in 1876 would publish her book, The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army (Velazquez). Belknap was one of the founders, in 1865, of the American Publishing Company, and an independent publisher as well. His direct connection to the American Publishing Company had ended by 1870, but by 1871 he was associated with Francis C. Bliss, the brother of Elisha Bliss, in a subsidiary, Belknap and Bliss. That association ended by 1872, and Belknap was again an independent publisher, with no declared connection to the Blisses. By 1875 he had joined two other apparently independent houses which shared an address with the American Publishing Company and another of its known subsidiaries, the Columbian Book Company. Although the firms were now at 284 rather than 116 Asylum Street, they had not moved: in the spring of 1874 Asylum and seventeen other Hartford streets were renumbered (Trumbull, 1:624; “Hartford Residents,” Bliss family, 1; Geer: 1869, 423, 495; 1870, 435, 507; 1871, 123, 226, 282; 1873, 291; 1874, 6, 227; 1875, 227, 295; L4 , 217 n. 2, 449 n. 2).
On 31 August 1874 the Louisville Courier-Journal had published a lengthy account of the adventures of Bonner as a Confederate soldier (“A Confederate Amazon,” 1, reprinting “An Adventurous Lady,” Mobile [Ala.] Register, 25 Aug 74, 1). Although the article noted that Bonner was writing a book about her experiences, it did not report a claim that Mark Twain was her collaborator, or otherwise mention him. Clemens might have sent a “word of warning” to the Register as well as the Courier-Journal, but no such letter has been found in the Mobile newspaper. The Courier-Journal published additional pieces about Bonner on 6 and 7 September 1874 (“An Interesting Visitor,” 4; “Arnold’s Difficulty,” 4), but neither mentioned Mark Twain. For Bonner’s belated response to Clemens’s disclaimer, see the next letterclick to open link, n. 2.