1 June 1863 • San Francisco, Calif. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00066)
No. 2—{$2000 Enclosed}Ⓐemendation
The Unreliable & myself are still here, & still enjoying ourselves. I suppose I know at least a thousand people here—some of them a great many of them citizens of San Francisco, but the majority belonging in Washoe—& when I go down Montgomery street, shaking hands with Tom, Dick & Harry, it is just like being in Main street in Hannibal & meeting the old familiar faces. I do hate to go back to Washoe. We g fag Ⓐemendation ourselves completely out every day, and go to sleep without rocking, every night. We dine out, & we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were. After breakfast, I don’t often see the hotel again until midnight—or after. I am going to the Dickens mighty fast. I know a regular village of families here in the house, but I never have time to call on them. Thunder! we’ll know a little more about this town, before we leave, than some of the people who live in it. We take trips across the Bay to Oakland, and down to San Leandro, and Alameda, and those places, and we go out to the Willows, and Hayes Park, and Fort Point, and up to Benicia;2explanatory note and yesterday we were invited out on a yachting excursionⒶemendation, & had a sail in the fastest yacht on the Pacific Coast. Rice says: “Oh, no—we are not having any fun, Mark—Oh, no, I reckon not—it’s somebody else—it’s probably the “gentleman in the wagon!”Ⓐemendation (popular slang phrase.) When I invite Rice to the Lick House to dinnerⒶemendation, the proprietors send us champaignⒶemendation and claret, and then we do put on the most disgusting airs. Rice says our calibre is too light—we can’t stand it to be noticed!
I rode down with a gentleman to the Ocean House, the other day, to see the sea-horses, and also to listen to the roar of the surf, and watch the shipsⒶemendation drifting here aboutⒶemendation, here, & there, and far away at sea.3explanatory note When I stood on the beach & let the surf wetⒶemendation my feet, I recollected doing the same thing on the shores of the Atlantic—& then I had a proper appreciation of the vastness of this country—for I had traveled from ocean to ocean across it, on land, with the exception of crossing Lake Erie—(and I wish I had gone around it.)4explanatory note
According to Clemens’s letter of 16 May to the Territorial Enterprise, he and Clement T. Rice first stayed at San Francisco’s Occidental Hotel at Bush and Montgomery streets (see ET&S1 , 248–53). Evidently they had by this time moved to the more opulent Lick House at Montgomery and Sutter, opened just eleven months earlier. The Lick House, owned by the eccentric land speculator James Lick, was known for its active social life and boasted a dining room modeled on the banquet hall at the Palace of Versailles (Langley 1863, 7, 227, 278; James, 261–72).
The Willows, at Mission and Eighteenth streets, and Hayes Park, at Laguna and Grove streets, were favorite pleasure resorts offering a variety of entertainments and recreational facilities. Fort Point, a massive brick fortification, is on the northernmost promontory of the San Francisco peninsula. Benicia, founded in 1847, is a town on the north shore of the Carquinez Strait. An important stop on the route to the California mines, and the state capital in 1853–54, it was the site of an army ordnance base and a coaling and repair base for Sacramento River boats (Estavan, 16:23–34; Motheral, 6–9; Hart, 36).
The Ocean House hotel and restaurant, south of the Cliff House. The numerous sea lions visible on the rocky shoreline were a popular attraction (Lockwood, 121). Clemens’s “sea-horse” (i.e., walrus) was a misnomer.
Clemens crossed Lake Erie during his August 1853 trip from St. Louis to New York City (see 24 Aug 53 to JLC, n. 2click to open link).
References
- Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1: 1853–1866. Edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1988
- Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 3 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. [Volume numbers in citations are to this edition; page numbers are the same in all editions.] 1912
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Early Tales & Sketches, Volume 1 (1851–1864). Edited by Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, with the assistance of Harriet Elinor Smith. The Works of Mark Twain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1979
- Langley, Henry G., comp. The San Francisco Directory for the Year Commencing October, 1863. San Francisco: Towne and Bacon. 1863
- James, George Wharton. Heroes of California. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1910
- Estavan, Lawrence, ed. San Francisco Theatre Research. 18 vols. San Francisco: Works Projects Administration. 1938–42
- Motheral, J. G. Fort Point: Gibraltar of the Pacific. [San Francisco]: Fort Point Museum Association. 1971
- Hart, James D. A Companion to California. New York: Oxford University Press. 1978
- Lockwood, Charles. Suddenly San Francisco: The Early Years of an Instant City. San Francisco: San Francisco Examiner Division of the Hearst Corporation. 1978
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 255–256; MTB , 1:232–33, excerpts; MTL , 1:90–91, with omission.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.