29 October 1866 • Virginia City, Nev. (MS: NvHi, UCCL 00107)
I have just received your dispatch—& I’m all right—how are you?
I expect to lecture here day after to-morrowⒶemendation—(Wednesday) provided I can get the theatre—can’t tell yet—& lecture in Gold Hill Thursday, Silver City Friday and in Carson Saturday if you think I can get a good audience there. What do you think of it?1explanatory note Ask old Abe Curry if the people will turn out—I hunted for him in Sacramento but I could only hear of him at every corner but never catch him.2explanatory note
Good Bye— Take a drink at my expense.
Clemens amended these lecture plans somewhat, appearing in: Virginia City on Wednesday, 31 October; Carson City on Saturday, 3 November; Dayton on Thursday, 8 November; Silver City on Friday, 9 November; and Gold Hill on Saturday, 10 November. (For further details of his itinerary at this time, see 2 Nov 66 to JLCclick to open letter and family.) Since he had left Nevada in May 1864 under the imputation of having slandered the ladies of Carson City, he was understandably concerned about how he would now be received (MTH , 422; Fatout 1960, 54–55; Doten 1973, 2:901, 903).
Abraham (sometimes Abram) V. Z. Curry (1814?–73), a principal founder (in 1858) and leading citizen of Carson City, had been active in territorial affairs. His generosity in providing the first Territorial Legislature (1861) with a furnished meeting place and free transportation to it was the basis of Clemens’s assertion, in chapter 25 of Roughing It, that “but for Curry the government would have died in its tender infancy” (Marsh, Clemens and Bowman, 478 n. 133; Mack 1936, 178–79, 228–29; ET&S1 , 463–64).
MS, Nevada Historical Society, Reno (NvHi). A facsimile of the MS is in Branch 1950 following 130.
L1 , 362–363; Hutcheson, 1–2.
Louise Howland, Robert M. Howland’s daughter, gave the MS to the Nevada State Museum in about 1948. It was deposited at the Nevada Historical Society in the 1970s and subsequently became the property of the Historical Society (Hutcheson, 1–2; Eric Moody, Curator of Manuscripts, Nevada Historical Society, telephone conversation with K. M. Sanderson, 2 Jan 1987).