No letters have been found for the month between 15 December 1866, when Clemens departed San Francisco for New York (by way of Nicaragua), and 15 January 1867, three days after his arrival, when he wrote the first letter in this volume. Most of what is known about that voyage, therefore, comes from one of Clemens’s notebooks and from eight dispatches about the trip published by his employer, the San Francisco Alta California: one letter from Nicaragua, plus one telegram and six additional letters from New York ( N&J1 , 238–99; SLC 1867, SLC 1867, SLC 1867, SLC 1867, SLC 1867, SLC 1867, SLC 1867, SLC 1867).

It was a memorable trip. The first night out from San Francisco a violent storm nearly swamped the America, terrifying the passengers in steerage and making virtually everyone seasick. “Happily I escaped,” Clemens observed, “had something worse.” This unnamed illness kept him confined, though not completely solitary, both before and during the voyage. On 28 December he reached San Juan del Sur and, after a two-day trek overland, arrived at Greytown, where he boarded the San Francisco, bound for New York. On 2 January, one day out of Greytown, cholera struck. By 5 January three were dead and a fourth mortally ill. Thinking of the most recent victims—“both so well when I saw them yesterday evening” Clemens wrote in his notebook, “I almost realize that I myself may be dead to-morrow” ( N&J1 , 245, 277).

Seven nerve-racking days later, on 12 January, the San Francisco steamed into New York harbor; by then seven had died (four from cholera), and there had probably been more deaths among the twenty-one passengers who fled the ship at Key West. Mark Twain described his arrival for the Alta:

He stayed for nearly three weeks at the Metropolitan Hotel, well known as the “resort of Californians and people from the new States and Territories.” It was a large, six-story brownstone building on the north-east corner of Broadway and Prince Street, capable of housing six hundred guests and “furnished throughout in the most splendid and costly style.” Mark Twain classed it among the “great caravan hotels” that did “an immense transient business (try to get a room at one of them if you doubt it).” Since 1852 it had contributed to the fortunes of the Leland brothers (Charles, Simeon, Warren, and William), whom Clemens did not know, although he knew and liked two members of the second generation—Jerome B. and Lewis Leland, proprietors since 1863 of the Occidental Hotel—“Heaven on the half shell”—in San Francisco (Browne, 394; Morris, 5–6; James Miller, 66–67; SLC 1867; “Obituary. Charles Leland,” New York Times, 20 Oct 85, 2; ET&S1 , 474; ET&S2 , 10, 367, 564).

New York itself had greatly changed since the first time Clemens saw it, in the summer of 1853, “when I was a pure and sinless sprout.” For one thing, it was more expensive: you could pay as much as “$30 a week for the same sort of private board and lodging you got for $8 and $10 when I was here thirteen years ago.” It was also more spread out, more populous—and, of course, colder. From the time of his arrival the temperature hovered around 25⁰F, and a heavy snowfall snarled the city on 17 January (SLC 1867, SLC 1867; New York Tribune: “The Snow Storm,” 18 Jan 67, 4; “The Weather,” 31 Jan 67, 5). A New York correspondent of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin said on 24 January that he had met Mark Twain “a few days after his arrival” and

Clemens had at least three separate projects that required his walking such “infernal long distances.” He was trying to publish a book based on his 1866 dispatches from the Sandwich Islands. He was intending to lecture in New York, and perhaps in other eastern cities. And he was bent on finding a New York (or at least an eastern) journal with a large circulation, willing to pay him well for regular contributions.

Between 1864 and 1866 he had published some work in the New York Sunday Mercury, the New York Saturday Press (now defunct), and (most recently) the New York Weekly Review and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. He now returned to some of these journals, while also exploring the New York Evening Express, the Tribune, the Herald, and Street and Smith’s New York Weekly, among others. What he wanted, as he told a friend a year later, was “a paper that will give me room according to my strength—& pay me double price” ( ET&S1 , 347–56; SLC 1866, SLC 1866, SLC 1866; 25 Jan 68 to Bowenclick to open link).

The Sandwich Islands book had been publicly urged upon Mark Twain (no doubt with his collusion) less than two weeks after he returned to San Francisco from Honolulu on 13 August 1866. It was probably his friend James F. Bowman—poet, journalist, and editor pro tem of the Californian—who wrote:

On 2 October Clemens told his San Francisco lecture audience that “his object in delivering this lecture was to obtain funds which would enable him to publish an account of the Sandwich Islands in the form of a volume, with illustrations by Edward Jump,” a French-born caricaturist with a modest local reputation. Probably by the time he reached New York, Clemens had arranged and presumably edited clippings of his Union letters, turning them into at least the rough manuscript for a book. His search for a publisher, however, would be harder than Bowman predicted: no sign until May has been found that anyone even agreed to consider the manuscript, which never was published (SLC 1866; “Academy of Music,” San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 3 Oct 66, 3; Hart, 216; N&J1 , 109).

Clemens’s expectations about lecturing in the East, and especially in New York, rested on the general encouragement (and caution) of his San Francisco colleagues, and on a few invitations from eastern cities which he received before departing. Bret Harte wrote the Springfield (Mass.) Republican after Mark Twain’s first San Francisco lecture that he was “urged by his friends to extend his tour even to the East” (Stewart, 263). And the Evening Bulletin noted that Mark Twain was going East

On 4 December, Clemens himself mentioned an invitation to lecture in Philadelphia, and he reportedly had offers from the “Mercantile Library Associations” of Cincinnati and St. Louis. A rudimentary scheme for an eastern lecture tour may even be detectable in what the Alta said in December about his travel plans: after arriving in New York, Clemens intended first to “visit the home of his youth—St. Louis,” then to go “through the principal cities to the Atlantic seaboard again,” and thence to Europe (SLC to JLC and family, 4 Dec 66click to open link; “Pen and Scissors,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 8 Dec 66, 2; “‘Mark Twain’s’ Farewell,” San Francisco Alta California, 15 Dec 66, 2).

No such royal progress would occur. In fact, Clemens needed to find a manager before he could undertake even a brief lecture tour. He also needed to decide exactly when to lecture in New York, and how (if at all) to change the lecture itself, in view of “the social and aesthetic differences” between western and eastern audiences. He soon discovered, however, that these differences were not necessarily what he or his friends supposed. On 2 February, he recorded his new perspective in an Alta dispatch written after seeing a performance of the Black Crook—notorious for its nearly naked “clipper-built girls”: “Don’t you suppose those friends of mine in San Francisco were jesting, when they warned me to be very choice in my language, if I ever lectured here, lest I might offend?” (SLC 1867).

In choosing a manager, Clemens ultimately relied on the loyalty and enthusiasm of a friend—Frank Fuller (1827–1915). Born in Boston, Fuller studied to be a physician, then a dentist, before taking work as a newspaperman. In 1861 Lincoln appointed him secretary of Utah Territory under Acting Governor Francis H. Wootton, but he very soon became acting governor himself when Wootton left the territory. In 1906 Clemens mistakenly recalled meeting Fuller for the first time in Salt Lake City, in 1861, while he and Orion were en route to Nevada. (In fact, the Clemens brothers had departed Salt Lake on 7 August, a month before Fuller arrived there on 10 September.) Fuller himself remembered that they first met in Virginia City in 1862, sometime after Clemens joined the Enterprise staff in early October. Fuller also recalled that he later visited California, “found Mark Twain there,” and they “became quite intimate. That was in 1863. He was writing chiefly for the Morning Call.” But this greater intimacy may well have developed as late as 1864: even though Clemens was in San Francisco in May and June 1863, when he arranged to correspond from Virginia City for the Call, he did not become the Call’s local reporter until May 1864. Soon thereafter Fuller returned East, for by November 1865, along with Herman Camp and one other partner, he had opened a “Mining Bureau for all parts of the Continent” in New York City. In January 1867 he was still in New York but otherwise employed, “ensconced in a fine suite of offices at 57 Broadway ... as Vice President of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company” (“Frank Fuller Dead; Utah War Governor,” New York Times, 20 Feb 1915, 5; Portsmouth Census, 740; Whitney, 2:25, 104; AD, 11 Apr 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:350; “Matters at Salt Lake City,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 16 Sept 61, 3; Rogers, 49; Fuller to A. B. Paine, 11 Jan 1912, Davis 1956, 1–2; Fuller, 5:10; “Letter from New York,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 2 Dec 65, 1).

Paine reported that “Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York in January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was doubtful,” saying, “I have no reputation with the general public here.... We couldn’t get a baker’s dozen to hear me” ( MTB , 1:312). The time of this exchange is confirmed by the Evening Bulletin correspondent who met Clemens “a few days after his arrival” in January, for Clemens told him then that a “committee of the most distinguished D.D.’s and L.L. D.’s had already waited on him in the sixth story of the Metropolitan Hotel ... to request him to deliver the aforesaid lectures on the Sandwich Islands at Keeter Pooper’s that is, Peter Cooper’s Institute” (“Gossip from New York,” letter dated 24 Jan, San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 19 Feb 67, 1). The identities of these “distinguished” persons are not known, but Fuller was probably one of them, for in April, when he was acting as Clemens’s lecture manager, he summoned Californians to a meeting in support of Mark Twain “By order of the Committee” (“Special Notices,” New York Herald, 28 and 29 Apr 67, 1).

Also in January, Clemens’s plan to publish a Sandwich Islands book was preempted by a suggestion from yet another longtime friend, who urged him to publish a collection of his California and Nevada newspaper sketches. “I had but a slender reputation to publish it on,” he recalled in 1906, “but I was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture it if some industrious person would save me the trouble of gathering the sketches together” (AD, 21 May 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE , 143). That “industrious person” was Charles Henry Webb (1834–1905), founder and editor (alternating with Bret Harte) of the Californian (1864–66).

Webb had preceded Clemens to New York by several months. On 30 May 1866 he reported that both Mark Twain and Bret Harte were even then much “appreciated” in the city, and he predicted “a warm welcome and open field” for both whenever they came East. When Clemens arrived at the Metropolitan on 12 January, Webb was already installed in rooms at 643 Broadway, just two blocks further uptown (25 Sep 64 to JLC, n. 5click to open link; 15 Dec 66 to JLC, n. 3click to open link; Webb 1866, 1867). Their first New York meeting occurred within days and was fondly remembered: “My, how that January day in your rooms in Broadway comes back!” Clemens reminisced to Webb in 1896; “there was a ‘reporter’s cobbler’ there, & much cheer, & some young men who are old men now or dea—& all this was twenty-nine years ago. It was there that I first saw Ned House.” He recalled elsewhere that he “saw House frequently during 3 or 4 months—from Jan. 15, 1867 onward—but the intercourse was not close enough to be called a friendship” (SLC to Webb, 16 Feb 96, CtY-BR; SLC to Dean Sage, 5 Feb 90, ODaU).

Edward Howard (Ned) House (1836–1901) was then a music and drama critic for the New York Tribune. He had been among the so-called Bohemians associated with Henry Clapp, Jr. (1814–75), and he had contributed to Clapp’s Saturday Press along with writers like William Winter (1836–1917) and Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne, 1834–67), among others. As House himself said in May, the name “Mark Twain” was not utterly unknown to him even at their first meeting. He could easily remember the time in 1865 when “a communication entitled ‘Joe Smiley and his Jumping Frog,’ with the hitherto unknown signature of ‘Mark Twain,’ appeared in The Saturday Press.... the style of the letter was so singularly fresh, original, and full of character as to attract prompt and universal attention among the readers of light humorous literature” (Browne, 153–57; House, 2).

Clemens said in 1906 not only that Webb suggested he publish a “volume of sketches,” but also that he “undertook to collate the sketches” for him (in MTE , 144). It is by now clear, however, that Clemens did much of this work himself. He had brought with him a scrapbook of his clippings from the Californian and the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, from which most of the printer’s copy for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches would soon be drawn. He had probably compiled this scrapbook a year earlier, while still in San Francisco, shortly after Harte suggested that “he club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, & publish a book together” through a “New York publisher” (SLC to JLC and PAM, 20 Jan 66click to open link, L1 , 328). This collaboration with Harte did not materialize, and by early 1867 Harte had decided to publish a volume, largely made up from his own Californian sketches, through George W. Carleton (1832–1901). For his part, Clemens soon began to follow Webb’s suggestion for a book, making a tentative selection from his scrapbook, crossing out or revising every clipping in it—adjusting the diction and removing allusions to death, damnation, and drink—in order to avoid offending the supposedly more refined taste of his eastern audience ( ET&S2 , 503–46).