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Explanatory Notes        Apparatus Notes (Ⓐ)

Source: Rutherford B. Hayes Library, Fremont, Ohio ([OFH])

Cue: "Here's a shout"

Source format: "MS, correspondence card"

Letter type: "correspondence card"

Notes:

Last modified:

Revision History: AB

Published on MTPO: 2022

Print Publication:

This edited text supersedes the previously published text
MTPDocEd
To William Dean Howells
22 February 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, correspondence card: OFH, UCCL 01533)

P.S.—I suppose you got our letter about the March visit a week or two ago?1explanatory note

Hartford, Feb. 22.
slc
My dear Howells:

Here’s a shout for Hayes! The fact is I was afraid to shout by telegraph last Sunday, I have been fooled so often.2explanatory note I hope he will put Lt. Col. Richard Irwin Dodge (Author of “The Great Plains & their Inhabitants”) at the head of the Indian Department.3explanatory note There’s a man who knows all about Indians, & yet has some humanity in him——(knowledge of Indians, & humanity, & are seldom found in the same individual). Come!—it is high time we were fixing up this cabinet, my boy.

Look here—send postal to say you & the madam will be he hereⒶemendation 2d or 3d of March—do, now, please. The play is done. We are plotting out another one.4explanatory note

Yrs Evrer
Mark.
Textual Commentary
Source text(s):

MS, correspondence card, OFH.

Previous Publication:

Richardson 1942, no page; Davis 1950, 2.

Provenance:

Opened in 1916, bib13793 preserves President Rutherford B. Hayes’s “12,000 volume personal library along with archival material from his military and political career, particularly his presidency, 1877-1881.”

More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.

Explanatory Notes
1 No such letter is extant. See 26 Feb 1877 to Howells, n. 1.
2 Presumably “last Sunday” (18 February) was when Clemens learned that the Electoral Commission had awarded Louisiana’s eight electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes. The commission was still investigating the disputed votes of Oregon and South Carolina, and did not declare Hayes the winner of the election until 28 February (“Louisiana for Hayes,” New York Tribune, 17 Feb 1877, 1; 9 Aug 1876 to Howells, n. 1; 9 Nov 1876 to Howells, n. 1).
3 In January, Richard Irving Dodge (1827-95) had published The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. Clemens’s copy, with his marginalia, is in the Mark Twain Library, in Redding, Connecticut. It was one of his sources in 1884 when he wrote “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians.” Howells wrote to President Hayes on 24 February, enclosing Clemens’s recommendation with the comment, “Here is Mark Twain’s contribution to your cabinet-works” (OFH). Dodge, a career army officer, was probably not seeking, nor did he receive, a government appointment (Dodge 1877; Kime 1990; Inds, 33-81, 271-72, 275; MTHL, 1:172-73 n. 2). See also Driscoll 2018, 195-96.
4 The finished play was Clemens’s and Bret Harte’s Ah Sin. The plotted second collaboration never came about. In a late February 1877 letter (which is not known to survive), Clemens, after denying Harte a loan, made an offer that Harte rejected in an angry letter of 1 March. For a transcription of Harte’s letter see 27 Feb 1877 to PAM, n. 3.
Emendations and Textual Notes
Ⓐ here ● he here corrected miswriting

References

  1. Rutherford B. Hayes Library, Fremont, Ohio
  2. 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
  3. Richardson, Lyon N. “Men of Letters and the Hayes Administration.” New England Quarterly 15 (March): 110–41. 1942
  4. Davis, Chester L., Sr. “Mark Twain and President Hayes.” Twainian 9 (November–December): 2–3. 1950
  5. Dodge, Richard Irving. The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants, Being a Description of the Plains, Game, Indians, &c. of the Great North American Desert. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1877
  6. SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians, and Other Unfinished Stories. Foreword and notes by Dahlia Armon and Walter Blair. Texts established by Dahlia Armon, Paul Baender, Walter Blair, William M. Gibson, and Franklin R. Rogers. The Mark Twain Library. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1989
  7. MTHL. Mark Twain–Howells Letters. Edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, with the assistance of Frederick Anderson. 2 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1960
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