26 April 1866 • Island of Maui, Sandwich Islands (MS: Jacobs, UCCL 00098)
Gentlemen—Don’t you think for a moment of going up on Haleakala without giving me an opportunity of accompanying you! I have waited for & skirmished after some company for some time without avail, & now I hear that you will shortly be at Haiku.3explanatory note So I shall wait for you.
Cannot you let me know, just as soon as you arrive, & give me a day or two (or more, even, if possible,) to get there in, with my horse? Because I am told the distance hence to Haiku is 15 miles—to prosecute which will be a matter of time, to my animal, & possibly a matter of eternity. His strong suit is grace & personal comi comelinessⒶemendation, rather than velocity.
(Or “Mark Twain,” if you know m have forgotten Ⓐemendationmy genuine name.)
My address
is “Wailuku Plan-
tation.” parallel wavy lines
Ⓐemendation
(Original.)
I shall send two or three notes for by different parties, for fear one might miss fire—an idea suggested by my own native sagacity.
A town and district on the north coast of the island of Maui.
Aged twenty-seven and thirty respectively, the Kimball brothers had been among Clemens’s fellow passengers aboard the Ajax. They departed Honolulu for San Francisco on 2 June aboard the bark D. C. Murray (Ajax passenger list, PH in CU-MARK; “Passengers,” Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 9 June 66, 2).
A village on the coast of Maui on the route to the extinct volcano Haleakala, whose name means “House of the Sun” (MTH , 58). Clemens did not describe his visit to Haleakala for the Sacramento Union; he did so in chapter 76 of Roughing It, but without naming his companions.
References
- Collection of Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs. Dispersed by sale in 1996. But ODa2 is still primary source.
- 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
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Frear, Walter Francis. Mark Twain and Hawaii. By Walter Francis Frear. Chicago: Lakeside Press. 1947
MS, collection of Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs, Dayton, Ohio.
L1 , 335–336; Autographs and Modern Signed Editions. Catalogue 70 (Bridgewater, Mass.: Paul C. Richards Autographs, [1972]), item 174, with omissions.
Victor Jacobs acquired the MS from Paul C. Richards Autographs, which had acquired it from Rodney C. Eaton, a great-nephew of the Kimballs’. In 1971 Mr. Eaton sent a photographic facsimile of the MS to the Mark Twain Papers.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.