10 June 1856 • Keokuk, Iowa (MS: NPV, UCCL 00011)
I have nothing to write. Everything is going on well. The Directory is coming on finely.2explanatory note I have to work on it occasionally, which I don’t like a particle. I don’t like to work at too many things at once. They take Henry and Dick3explanatory note away from me too. Before we commenced the Directory, I could tell before breakfast just how much work could be done during the day, and manage Ⓐemendation accordingly—but now, they throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their work. I have nothing to do with the book4explanatory note—if I do did Ⓐemendation I would the Ⓐemendation two book hands Ⓐemendationdo more work than they do, or else I would drop. Ⓐemendation It is not a mere supposition that they do not work fast enough—I know it; for yesterday the two book hands were at work all day, Henry and Dick all the afternoon, on the advertisements, and they set up tw five Ⓐemendation pages and a half—and I set up two pages and a quarter of the same matter after supper night before last, and I don’t work fast on such things. They are either excessively slow motioned or very lazy. I am not getting along well with the job work. I can’t work blindly—without system. I gave Dick a job yesterday, which I calculated he could set in two hours and I could work off in three, and therefore just Ⓐemendation finish it by supper time, but he was transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this morning, remains untouched. Through all the great pressure of job work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the kind.
John is gone—disappeared. I think he has ran Ⓐemendationaway to get away from his brutal old father.5explanatory note
Excuse brevity—this is my 3d letter to-night.
Jane Clemens was now living in St. Louis with her daughter and son-in-law, but it is not known when she moved there. She had been in Muscatine, Iowa, with Orion and Henry Clemens, at least as late as the spring of 1854. Possibly she did not go to St. Louis until June 1855, when Orion and his wife, Mollie, and Henry moved to Keokuk; conceivably she lived with them for a time in Keokuk before joining the Moffetts.
Orion had begun assembling information for his Keokuk City Directory immediately after his arrival in Keokuk in June 1855. The first edition was available, for one dollar, by 12 July 1856 (Lorch 1929, 431). Orion anticipated criticisms from the local press: “Errors in this Directory,” he stated, “apologise for themselves, because the attempt is the first in Keokuk, and it would be a novelty among directories, if there were no mistakes; yet to prevent them neither pains nor labor has been spared. . . . we shall have an opportunity to improve in our next” (OC 1856, preface). Orion published a second edition of the directory in 1857, but profits from it failed to meet expectations because he printed several hundred copies too many (Rees, 401–2).
Apprentice printer Richard Higham, a “good-natured, simple-minded, winning lad of seventeen” (AD, 26 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:251–52). After learning of Higham’s death during the Civil War, Clemens reminisced fondly about him (see 2 Apr 62 to JLCclick to open letter).
Clemens wrote at least one line of the Keokuk City Directory: his own listing, which identified him as “Antiquarian.” In 1888 an unidentified Keokuk “gentleman” remarked that Clemens “claimed the profession of antiquarian because of his researches among the ancient and venerable bugs of the hotel in which he boarded” (reported in Curtis, 1).
Kerr’s father remains unidentified.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 63–65; MTB , 1:108–9, excerpt; MTL , 1:32–33, with omissions.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.