17 April 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (Paraphrase, postal card: Anderson Galleries catalog, sale of 9–11 May 1921, lot 153, UCCL 09794)
Autograph Note on postcard, signed with initials. April 17, 1877. To American Publishing Co., askingⒶemendation that a copy of “Sawyer” and “Sketches” be sent to A. C. Grimes.1explanatory note
Absalom Grimes (1834–1911) was a Mississippi steamboat pilot who early in the Civil War had served with Clemens in the Ralls County Rangers, a unit officially pledged to defend Missouri but Confederate in sympathy. He later became a Confederate mail runner and spy. Grimes presumably had recently written to Clemens, requesting copies of his books. In 1885 Clemens remembered Grimes in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” his account of the Marion Rangers (as he called the Ralls County Rangers), describing him accurately as “an Upper Mississippi pilot, who afterwards became famous as a dare-devil rebel spy, whose career bristled with desperate adventures” (SLC 1885c; MTCW, 106). Beginning as early as 1876, Grimes gave several accurate accounts, in interviews, of his 1861 service with Clemens. In January 1877, for example, he reportedly said:
In June, 1861, in company with Samuel Clemens and Samuel Bowen, all river pilots, I joined the Ralls County Rangers of the Missouri State Militia under Gen. Tom Harris. We were put into camp near Florida, in Ralls County, without tents, arms or commissary stores. We soon broke camp. Clemens started out West to California, and turned humorist under the nom de plume of “Mark Twain.” (“River News,” Cincinnati Gazette, 19 Jan 1877, 7, reprinting a report of the interview in the Memphis [Tenn.] Avalanche)
Grimes also described his service with Clemens in his memoirs, which were published after his death as Absalom Grimes: Confederate Mail Runner (AutoMT1, 527–28; Grimes 1926, 3–19.) Bliss complied with Clemens’s request: in a letter of 31 July 1886 to the editor of the St. Louis Republican, Grimes recalled what occurred after Clemens left the Ralls County Rangers: “I have never seen Mark since, although I would like to very much. I have had one or two short letters from him and also been kindly presented with his works, ‘Tom Sawyer’ and sketches” (MTCW, 30–33, 135, 151; see this work for further discussion of Clemens’s article and Grimes’s recollections).
References
- 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
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Previously Unpublished Letters. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 8 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” Century Magazine 31 (December): 193–204. Reprinted in Budd 1992a[bib00146], 863–82. 1885
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, and Leslie Diane Myrick. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2010
- Grimes, Absalom. Absalom Grimes: Confederate Mail Runner. Edited by M. M. Quaife. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 1926
Postal card, Anderson Galleries catalog, sale of 9–11 May 1921, lot 153.
MicroPUL, reel 1.
Offered for sale by Henkels, 28 Jan 1925, lot 61.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.