per Unidentified Stenographer
5 January 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CLjC, UCCL 01296)
(SUPERSEDED)
(Stenographic letter.)1explanatory note
Yours of Nov. 30th arrived some time ago, but I have been on the sick list for more than a month, and have written no letters. I am now trying to clean up the batch.
I have not seen Bliss to talk business with him for more than a month, and I do not really know whether he has even begun the book or not.2explanatory note Yesterday was the first time I have been down town in a long time, and I called there but Bliss was out of town.3explanatory note It is about time they were getting to work on the book, and you must write and keep Bliss reminded of that. You don’t know his slow ways as well as I do else you would write him every forty-eight hours. I shall try to stir him up when I get hold of him again.
The artist is almost done making the pictures for my next book, and he told me he supposed he was to begin on the sketches for yours next.4explanatory note
I should think the new chapters you propose would be an admirable addition to the volume.
If I had Joe Goodman’s money and his brains I don’t think I would fool away the one and rack the other running an evening paper—or any other kind. But I suppose it is hard to get over old habits.5explanatory note
Steve’s loss is sad enough. He is a brave boy to be able to go on working under it; it is something I am afraid I could not do.6explanatory note
Billy has waited a long time—but it is never too late to do well, and to marry is to do well.7explanatory note
Yes, you hope to go to Oakland!
But I begin to believe that if you owned a Bonanza you would rot away there in Virginia City and never leave. But keep on living in Sutro Tunnel8explanatory note and possibly you may make up your mind to retire to California yet, and be content to be comfortable.9explanatory note
(Same old quill I used to use when we worked in the stable—she’s an awful ink-devourer.)10explanatory note
This notation—like all of the letter except for the complimentary close, signature, and final, parenthetical remark—is in the hand of Clemens’s unidentified stenographer.
Wright’s letter of 30 November 1875, inquiring about progress on The Big Bonanza, his account of Nevada’s Comstock silver mines, does not survive. In the spring of 1875 Clemens had encouraged him to write the book for Elisha Bliss’s American Publishing Company (see L6 , 424–26, 432–38, 472–73, 487–88, 500 n. 3; Wright 1876).
The American Publishing Company offices were at 284 Asylum Street (Geer 1875, 295).
True Williams had begun illustrating The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in November 1875 ( L6 , 585–86). He was one of a number of artists who contributed to Wright’s book.
When not traveling, Goodman, wealthy from his Comstock investments and his 1874 sale of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, lived in San Francisco. He is not known to have returned to journalism at this time ( L6 , 115–16, 439 n. 8).
Stephen E. Gillis, a typesetter on the Enterprise in the early 1860s, when Clemens knew him, was currently, according to his younger brother William’s recollections, news editor of the paper. His loss was the death of his wife, Kate, a niece of Joseph T. Goodman’s wife. They had married in 1867 (Gillis 1924, 34). The death demoralized Gillis for years. In a letter of 9 March 1881 (CU-MARK), Goodman told Clemens:
Steve Gillis, I fear, is sort of going to the dogs. He has two children living—his wife died five or six years ago. Two years ago he could have cleared up to $60,000 or $80,000 out of Sierra Nevada; but he neglected the opportunity and is penniless now. Moreover I hear he has taken to drink, and has had the delerium tremens once or twice. He was on the Enterprise the last I heard.
The Sierra Nevada mine, originally discovered in 1859, had “been before the public many times as a prospective bonanza. In 1878 the stock suddenly bounded from five dollars a share up to $260, when it began to recede. . . . There are numbers of persons who still have confidence in the mine” (Angel 1881 , 57, 612).
William R. Gillis’s wife, or wife-to-be, has not been identified.
The tunnel through Mount Davidson, near Virginia City, Nevada, conceived and promoted by Adolph H. Sutro to facilitate the transport of laborers and materials to the Comstock mines. It was not completed until 1878.
Wright never retired to California, remaining instead in Virginia City, where he witnessed the death of both the mining boom and the Enterprise. In July of 1897 he finally left, moving to West Liberty, Iowa, to live with his married daughter, Mell Evans. He died there on 16 March 1898, at the age of 68 (Doten 1973, 3:2229; Berkove 1988, 4).
In the spring of 1875, at Clemens’s urging, Wright had come to Hartford to work on The Big Bonanza—in a study Clemens set up in the loft above his stable (see L6 , 487–88). Wright next wrote, probably before receiving the present letter (CtY-BR):
John Mackay made part of his multimillion-dollar fortune in the Consolidated Virginia and California mines, in which the big bonanza strike of 1874 was made. In a letter of 17 September 1875click to open letter, Clemens had asked Wright to inquire of Mackay and other wealthy mine investors for “begging letters” to add to his collection of “this sort of literature” ( L6 , 439 n. 9, 535). Wright’s dedication as published read:
TO
JOHN MACKAY, Esq.
prince of miners
and “boss” of the big bonanza
is this book
respectfully inscribed
His published preface was:
I have put all I had to say into the body of this book; but, being informed that a preface is a necessary evil, I have written this one.
the author
His credit to the photographers, which appeared at the head of the “List of Illustrations,” read:
Note The illustrations of mining works, scenery, and machinery are from photographs taken on the spot by John S. Noe and E. Hurd, of Virginia City, Nevada. (Wright 1876, v, xxix, xxxix)
H. B. Loomis (d. 1893) was until 1881 a local reporter on the Enterprise, the Gold Hill (Nevada) Evening News, and other papers. Hurd and Noe (d. 1889) were well-known local photographers (Doten 1973, 2: passim, esp. 1380; 3: passim, esp. 1735, 2232).
Berkove 1988, 8–9.
The MS was one of nine letters from Clemens to Wright which after Wright’s death “were left with his daughter, Mell Evans. She, in turn, passed them on to her daughter, Irma Evans Morris. Effie Mona Mack learned of them while doing research for Mark Twain in Nevada (Mack 1947), and purchased photographic negatives of them” (Berkove 1988, 4, 18 n. 1). Mrs. Morris bequeathed the letters to her three children. After Evans Morris’s death in 1990, the letters were sold, and most were purchased from Admirable Books in March 1993 by CLjC.