No letters are known to survive for the next two months. In chapter 78 of Roughing It Clemens gave short shrift to the interval between his return from Honolulu on 13 August 1866 and the delivery of his first formal lecture on 2 October: “I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment. I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me!” In fact, Clemens was demonstrably busy during this period and, given his liberal settlement with the proprietors of the Sacramento Union, was not without funds (see 30 July . . . 20 Aug 66 to JLC and PAM, n. 6click to open link). In the second half of August he presumably finished writing his Sandwich Islands letters to the Union and possibly began drafting “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat,” published by Harper’s Monthly in December (SLC 1866, 104–13). Also in August he resumed his contributions to the New York Weekly Review with “How, for Instance?” (published 29 Sept 66). The Sacramento Union employed him again in September to help report the thirteenth annual fair of the California State Agricultural Society, held in Sacramento from the tenth to the fifteenth of the month. Clemens devoted his attention to the stock shows and horse races: James Anthony, one of the Union proprietors, called him “the best reporter of a horse-race that ever was made” (Mary Josephine Anthony to Mrs. Bishop, portion of 1925 letter in CU-MARK; for Clemens’s probable contributions to the Union’s coverage of the fair, see Branch 1969, 179–86.) After the fair, Clemens conceivably did some preliminary work on the book made up of his Sandwich Islands letters which he submitted to the New York publishers Dick and Fitzgerald in 1867, only to withdraw it because of what he termed the “dull publishing times” (see N&J1 , 176–77 n. 166). He concluded his September efforts with “Origin of Illustrious Men,” published in the Californian on the next-to-last day of the month ( ET&S3 , no. 193).

On 2 October—with the encouragement of his friend John McComb (1829–96), soon to become a proprietor and the supervising editor of the San Francisco Alta California—Clemens took a step that had a profound effect on his life and career. He delivered his first lecture, on the Sandwich Islands, to a packed house at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The rousing success of this lecture (comically described in chapter 78 of Roughing It) resulted in a quickly arranged tour of California and Nevada towns under the management of Denis E. McCarthy, formerly co-owner of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In the first two weeks of the tour Clemens lectured in Sacramento (11 October), Marysville (15 October), Grass Valley (20 October), Nevada City (23 October), Red Dog (24 October), and You Bet (25 October), all in California, before moving on to Virginia City, where he wrote the next letter ( MTB , 1:291–94; “The Alta California,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 4 Nov 66, 2; MTH , 421–22; Fatout 1960, 33–54).