4 August 1863
This brief sketch probably appeared in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise for 4 August 1863, which is not extant. Only a portion of it has been preserved in Myron Angel's History of Nevada, the source of the present text.1
According to Angel, Clement T. Rice agreed to write Clemens' local items while Clemens was laid up with a cold, but took advantage of Clemens' absence to play a practical joke on him. Rice wrote and published the following in the Enterprise, probably on Sunday, August 2.
August 1, 1863.
Apologetic.—It is said, “an open confession is good for the soul.” We have been on the stool of repentance for a long time, but have not before had the moral courage to acknowledge our manifold sins and wickedness. We confess to this weakness. We have commenced this article under the head of ‘Apologetic’—we mean it, if we ever meant anything in our life. To Mayor Arick, Hon. Wm. M. Stewart, Marshal Perry, Hon. J. B. Winters, Mr. Olin, and Samuel Witherel, besides a host of others whom we have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position, we say to these gentlemen, we acknowledge our faults, and in all weakness and simplicity—upon our bended marrow-bones—we ask their forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for anything but the best of feeling toward us. To “Young Wilson,” and the “Unreliable”, (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have given them. Towards these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man could be—and we have always prided our-self on this base quality. We feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were. We will now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days. What more can we do? The latter-named gentleman has saved us several [begin page 268] times from receiving a sound threshing for our impudence and assurance. He has sheltered and clothed us. We have had a hankering, “my boy,” to redeem our character—or what little we have. To-morrow we may get in the same old way again. If we do, we want it now understood that this confession stands. Gentlem[e]n do you accept our good intentions?2
Mark Twain's rebuttal refers to this item in “yesterday's paper” and was probably written on Monday; but it could not appear until the paper's next issue, on Tuesday, August 4.
We are to blame for giving “the Unreliable” an opportunity to misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great extent at the result. We simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to shold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass rabbit of the Sierras. We have done.
The first printing in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably on 4 August 1863, is not extant. The sketch survives, only in part, in a reprinting of the Enterprise in Myron Angel, ed., History of Nevada (Oakland: Thompson and West, 1881), p. 293, which is copy-text. Copy: first edition from Bancroft. Three asterisks preceding the first word of the copy-text indicate that Angel omitted a portion of the Enterprise text. Paine reprinted the sketch without identifying his source, but collation gives no suggestion that he had access to the Enterprise, and he may easily have reprinted Angel (see MTB , 1:235). His text is here regarded as without authority. There are no textual notes or emendations.