17 September 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00653)
Inclose a letter from Bunker. Now as I touch him up a little in the book, I don’t want to write him. So you must writeⒶemendation him & say that as I am probably out lecturing by this time I leave all my correspondence to be answered by you & Livy for the next 5 or 6 months. That will get me out of the difficulty.1explanatory note
The baby is doing splendidly. We go to Buffalo tonight to pack up for Hartford.
Benjamin B. Bunker was attorney of Nevada Territory from 1861 to 1863, when he was removed for inattention to his duties after more than a year’s leave of absence. While in Nevada, Clemens sometimes wrote scornfully and irreverently of Bunker, foreshadowing the depiction of him as the gullible and pompous General Buncombe in chapter 34 of Roughing It ( L1 , 135 n. 6, 147–48, 170, 235 n. 4; ET&S1 , 280–81; RI 1993 , 221–27, 631–32). The letter from Bunker that occasioned this commission for Orion is not known to survive.
References
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- 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). 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
- 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
- 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
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L4 , 458–459.
see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.