29 October 1866 • Virginia City, Nev. (MS: NvHi, UCCL 00107)
I have just received your dispatch—& I’m all right—how are you?
I expect to lecture here day after to-morrowⒶemendation—(Wednesday) provided I can get the theatre—can’t tell yet—& lecture in Gold Hill Thursday, Silver City Friday and in Carson Saturday if you think I can get a good audience there. What do you think of it?1explanatory note Ask old Abe Curry if the people will turn out—I hunted for him in Sacramento but I could only hear of him at every corner but never catch him.2explanatory note
Good Bye— Take a drink at my expense.
Clemens amended these lecture plans somewhat, appearing in: Virginia City on Wednesday, 31 October; Carson City on Saturday, 3 November; Dayton on Thursday, 8 November; Silver City on Friday, 9 November; and Gold Hill on Saturday, 10 November. (For further details of his itinerary at this time, see 2 Nov 66 to JLCclick to open link and family.) Since he had left Nevada in May 1864 under the imputation of having slandered the ladies of Carson City, he was understandably concerned about how he would now be received (MTH , 422; Fatout 1960, 54–55; Doten 1973, 2:901, 903).
Abraham (sometimes Abram) V. Z. Curry (1814?–73), a principal founder (in 1858) and leading citizen of Carson City, had been active in territorial affairs. His generosity in providing the first Territorial Legislature (1861) with a furnished meeting place and free transportation to it was the basis of Clemens’s assertion, in chapter 25 of Roughing It, that “but for Curry the government would have died in its tender infancy” (Marsh, Clemens and Bowman, 478 n. 133; Mack 1936, 178–79, 228–29; ET&S1 , 463–64).
References
- Nevada State Historical Society, Reno, Nev.
- 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
- Hutcheson, Austin E. “Twain Letter to Bob Howland Asks about Good Audience for Carson City Lecture.” Twainian 4 (September-October): 1–2. 1948
- Frear, Walter Francis. Mark Twain and Hawaii. By Walter Francis Frear. Chicago: Lakeside Press. 1947
- Fatout, Paul. Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1960
- Doten, Alfred. The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849–1903. Edited by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. 3 vols. Reno: University of Nevada Press 1973
- Marsh, Grant. “Sam Clemens’ Pard.” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 8 December, 7. 1878
- Mack, Effie Mona. Nevada: A History of the State from the Earliest Times through the Civil War. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Company. 1936
- 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
MS, Nevada Historical Society, Reno (NvHi). A facsimile of the MS is in Branch 1950 following 130.
L1 , 362–363; Hutcheson, 1–2.
Louise Howland, Robert M. Howland’s daughter, gave the MS to the Nevada State Museum in about 1948. It was deposited at the Nevada Historical Society in the 1970s and subsequently became the property of the Historical Society (Hutcheson, 1–2; Eric Moody, Curator of Manuscripts, Nevada Historical Society, telephone conversation with K. M. Sanderson, 2 Jan 1987).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.