15 September 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: MtHi, UCCL 00506)
c
Four or five years ago a V righteous Vigilance Committee in your Ⓐemendationcity hanged a casual acquaintance of mine named Slade, along with twelve other prominent citizens whom I only ◇ Ⓐemendationknew by reputation. Slade was a “section-agent” at Rocky Ridge station in the Rocky Mountains when I crossed the plains in the Overland stage ten years ago, & I took breakfast with him & survived.2explanatory note
Now I am writing a book (MS. to be delivered Ⓐemendationto publisher Jan. 1,) & as the Overland journey has made six chapters of it thus far & promises to make six or eight more, I thought I would just rescue my late friend Slade from oblivion & set a sympathetic public to weeping for him.3explanatory note
N ⒶemendationSuch a humanized fragment of the original I Devil could not & did not go out of the world without considerable newspaper Ⓐemendationeclat, in the shape of biographical notices, particulars of his execution, etc., & the object of this letter is to beg of you to ask some one connected with your city papers to send me a Virginia City newspaper of that day if it can be done without mutilating a file.
{If found, please
enclose in LETTER form,
else it will go to the office of Buffalo
“Express”
& be lost among the
exchanges.}Ⓐemendation
I beg your pardon for writing you so freely & putting you, or trying to put you, to trouble, without having the warrant of an introduction to you, but I did not know any one in Virginia City & so I ventured to ask this favor at your hands. Hoping you will be able to help me4explanatory note
I am, Sir,
Hosmer (1814–93) had been the first chief justice of the supreme court of Montana Territory, serving from 1864 to 1868. Then from 1869 to 1872 he served as postmaster of Virginia City, the territorial capital. Clemens may not have known Hosmer, or even his name, but assumed that the postmaster could redirect this request appropriately.
On the morning of 3 August 1861, the ninth day of his overland journey to Nevada Territory, Clemens had breakfasted with Joseph A. (Jack) Slade (1829?–64), an Overland stage agent and a notorious desperado and murderer, who was hanged on 10 March 1864 in Virginia City, then part of Idaho Territory. He had already recalled their encounter in his seventh “Around the World” letter, in the Buffalo Express of 22 January 1870 ( RI 1993 , 584–88, 810–11; SLC 1870).
Clemens devoted chapters 10 and 11 of Roughing It, both of which he completed in March 1871, to Slade’s nefarious career ( RI 1993 , 60–75, 811, 819, 835–36).
Hosmer’s reply is not known to survive, but it seems likely that he sent Clemens, or referred him to, Thomas J. Dimsdale’s The Vigilantes of Montana (1866). The book, based on articles Dimsdale had published in the Virginia City Montana Post in 1865–66, was a primary source for Clemens’s account of Slade in Roughing It ( RI 1993 , 584–86, 811).
References
- Montana Historical Society, Helena, Mont.
- 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 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Roughing It. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Edgar Marquess Branch, Lin Salamo, and Robert Pack Browning. The Works of Mark Twain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. This edition supersedes the one published in 1972. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1993
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “Around the World. Letter Number 7. Pacific Coast—Concluded.” Undated letter. Buffalo Express, 22 January, 2. 1870
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the Hezekiah L. Hosmer Papers, Montana Historical Society, Helena (MtHi).
L4 , 195–196.
donated to MtHi in 1963 by Mrs. Frank B. Austin.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.