25 September 1864 • San Francisco, Calif. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00087)
P. S.—Jerome Rice was an old friend of mine at the Lick House a year ago. We always sat together at table. He used always to pledge his “lost wife & babies” in his wine at dinner, & wonder whether they were living or dead & I used to stand security that he should live to see them again, poor fellow. He was one of the best men in the world. His wife went from the ship to the funeral.—Ⓐemendation& afterwards lay in a swoon 36 hours. While Rice was here rolling in suddenly acquired wealth, his wife was wearing stockings in Texas which she made out of old pieces of blanket. She was in the enemy’s ies Ⓐemendationcountry, & could not escape. She had a hard time.1explanatory note
You can see by my picture that this superb climate agrees with me. And it ought, after living where I was never out of sight of snow-banks Ⓐemendation24 hours during 3 years. Here we have neither snow nor cold weather, fires are never lighted, & yet summer clothes are never worn—you were wear Ⓐemendationspring clothing the year round.
Steve Gillis, who has been my comrade for 2 years, & who came down here with me, is to be married, in a week or two, to a very pretty girl worth $130,000 in her own right2explanatory note—& then I shall be alone again, until they build a house, which they will do shortly.
We have been here only 4 months, yet we have changed our lodgings 5 times, & our hotel twice. We are very comfortably fixed where we are, & h nowⒶemendation, & have no fault to find with the rooms or with the people—we are the only lodgers in a well-to-do private family, with one grown daughter in & a piano in the parlor adjoining our room. But I need a change, & must move again. I have taken rooms further down the street. I shall stay in this little quiet street, because it is full of gardens & shrubbery, & there are none but dwelling houses in it.3explanatory note
I am taking life easy, now, & I mean to keep it up for a while. I don’t work at night any more. I told the “Call” folks to pay me $25 a week, & let me work only in daylight. So I get up at 10 in the morning, & quit work at 5 or 6 in the afternoon. You ask if I work for greenbacks? Hardly. I What Ⓐemendationdo you suppose I could do with greenbacks here?4explanatory note
I have engaged to write for the new literary paper—the “Californian”—Ⓐemendationsame pay I used to receive on the “Golden Era”—one article a week, fifty dollars a month. I quit the “Era,” long ago. It wasn’t high-toned Ⓐemendationenough. I thought that whether I was a literary “jackleg” or not, I wouldn’t class myself with that style of people, anyhow. The “Californian” circulates among the highest class of the community, & is a paper the best weekly literary paper in the United States—& I suppose I ought to know.5explanatory note
I work as I always did—by fits & starts. I wrote two articles last night for the Californian, so that lets me out for 2 weeks.6explanatory note That would be about seventy-five dollars, in greenbacks, wouldn’t it?
Been down to San José (generally pronounced Sannozay—emphasis on last syllable)—today—50 miles from here, by RailroadⒶemendation. Town of 6,000 inhabitants, buried in flowers & shrubbery. The climate is finer than ours here, because it Ⓐemendationis not so close to the ocean, & is protected from the winds by the coast range.
I had an invitation today, to d Ⓐemendation go down on an excursion to San Luis Obispo & from thence to the city of Mexico, to be gone 6 or 8 weeks, or possibly longer, but I could not accept, on account of my contract to act as chief mourner or groomsman at Steve’s funeral. wedding.
I have triumphed. They refused me & other reporters some information at a branch of the Coroner’s office—Massey’s undertaker establishment, a few weeks ago. I published the wickedest article on them I ever wrote in my life, & you can rest assured we got all the information we wanted after that. It made Mr. Massey come to his milk, mighty quick. Next week the Coroner died, & when they came to fill the vacancy, I had a candidate pledged to take the lucrative job out of Massey’s hands, & I went into the Board of Supervisors & button-holed hold Ⓐemendation every member & worked like a slave against for my man. When I began he hadn’t a friend in the Board,. ⒶemendationHe was elected, just like a knife, & Mr Massey is out in the cold.7explanatory note I learned to pull wires in the Washoe Legislature, & my x experience Ⓐemendationis, that when a bill is to be put through a body like that, the only thing necessary to insure success is to get the reporters to log-roll for it.
What has become of that girl of mine that got married? I mean Laura Wright.
I wrote to Aunt Ella 3 months ago. I don’t hear often from Orion & Mollie. I hardly ever write. When you write to me, write through Orion.
By the new census, San Francisco has a population of $ 130,000. They don’t count the hordes of Chinamen.
I send a picture for Annie, & one for Aunt Ella—that is, if she will have it.8explanatory note
Clemens had stayed at the Lick House in September 1863 while he was in San Francisco attempting to cure a cold. Jerome Rice was a local auctioneer and real-estate dealer who suffered fatal injuries when his carriage went over an embankment on 7 September 1864. He survived four nights at the site of the accident before being rescued, but died shortly thereafter. Clemens published an account of Rice’s ordeal in the Morning Call of 13 September, where he commented:
His wife and family, who have been enduring for four years all the privations and misfortunes that war could entail upon them in a section of Texas desolated alternately by both contending parties, and whom he had not seen and scarcely ever heard from during that time, will arrive here from Boston, (to which port they lately escaped,) day after to-morrow. . . . Who, among all the brave men that shall read this sad chapter of disasters, could carry, with firm nerve, the bitter tidings to the unsuspecting widow and her orphans, and uncoffin before them a mutilated corpse in place of the loving husband and father they are yearning to embrace? (“Sad Accident—Death of Jerome Rice,” CofC, 124)
Clemens probably enclosed a clipping of this article in his letter.
The San Francisco directory effective October 1864 listed Clemens at 32 Minna Street and Steve Gillis—along with his younger brother, William (1840–1929), and their father, Angus (1800–70)—on Brannan Street, between Seventh and Eighth streets. Clemens’s next known move kept him on the “little quiet street”: the directory effective December 1865 put him and Steve Gillis at the rooming house that Angus Gillis was then operating at 44 Minna Street (Langley 1864, 106, 174; Langley 1865, 121, 195; William R. Gillis to Harry A. Williams, 31 May 1924, PH in CU-MARK).
In February and July 1862 the United States government, pressed to meet Civil War costs, had passed laws authorizing the issue of treasury notes unbacked by specie. Although these “greenbacks” were legal tender for all debts public and private, gold coin remained the dominant currency in California (Mitchell, 74–79, 81–98, 142–44). The value of greenbacks in the San Francisco market fluctuated; at the time of this letter a $1.00 greenback was worth $.4775 in gold (“San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board, 24 September, 1864,” San Francisco Alta California, 25 Sept 64, 6). Federal employees had to accept their pay in greenbacks, but Clemens, like other nonfederal workers, received his salary (reduced fifteen dollars a week under his “daylight” arrangements) in gold. Six times from 31 July to 2 October 1864, he protested in the Morning Call on behalf of federal employees, who had to purchase goods and services in gold despite being paid in the depreciated paper currency (see CofC , 227–31).
The Californian first appeared in May 1864, owned and initially edited by Charles Henry Webb (1834–1905) with Bret Harte (1836–1902) as the principal contributor. Harte also acted as its editor between 10 September and 19 November 1864 and presumably accepted the first nine of Clemens’s contributions, eight of which have been identified (see ET&S2 , 66–71, 72, 79–133). Webb and Harte had been associated with the popular Golden Era and hoped to capture its audience with an elegant format and more sophisticated material. In order to accomplish this, the Californian “attracted the most able writers of the metropolis during its short but expensive life. Its principal failings—that it confined itself too much to polite essays and satires and that it ignored local color almost entirely—were results of the temper of the period” (Walker 1969, 178). The paper changed hands in 1866, but, unable to achieve financial success, survived only another two years.
Mark Twain’s first contribution to the Californian, published on 1 October 1864, was “A Notable Conundrum,” about the Fourth Industrial Fair of the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco. The second sketch referred to here cannot now be identified (see ET&S2 , 66–71, 72).
The “wickedest article” was “A Small Piece of Spite,” published in the Morning Call on 6 September 1864 (see CofC , 233–36). Atkins Massey (1819–92) was San Francisco’s leading undertaker; Coroner Benjamin A. Sheldon (1825–64) had an office in Massey’s funeral parlor at 651 Sacramento Street. The coroner elected after Sheldon’s sudden death on 10 September was Dr. Stephen R. Harris (1802–79), who had been San Francisco’s third mayor from 1 January to 9 November 1852 (Heintz, 16–19).
The photographs for Ella Hunter Lampton and Annie Moffett were probably duplicates of the one mentioned in the first paragraph (not the postscript). No copy of the photograph has been found.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 311–314; MTB , 1:256, excerpts; MTL , 1:99–100, with omissions.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.