1 and 5 May 1868 • Virginia City, Nev.,and San Francisco, Calif. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00204)
I cannot go a-Maying today, because it is snowing so hard—& so I have been writing some newspaper letters &1explanatory note
I didn’t finish—& now I have just arrived home again a few minutes ago. I find your kind letter of April 2 & Charley’s of April 1 awaiting me.2explanatory note I have had the hardest trip over the Sierras. Steamboat to Sacramento (balmy summer weather & the peaches & roses all in bloom)—railway to the summit (snow thirty feet deep on level ground & 100 in the drifts)—6-horse sleighs to Donner Lake—mail coaches to Coburn’s—railway to Hunter’s—stage-coaches to Virginia—all in the space of 24 hours.3explanatory note Distance 150 miles. Coming back last night in a snowstormⒶemendation, the two & a half hours’ sleighing (part of the time clear weather & superb moonlight,) was something maj magnificentⒶemendation—we made ten miles an hour straight along. We had no such thrilling fun in Palestine.4explanatory note
I lectured here—a little over sixteen hundred dollars in the house—gold & silver. The seats were all taken & paid for long before night, & then I stopped the sale of tickets, which made a large number of people mad—people who came at 7 p.m. & had to go away again. But I couldn’t help that. I didn’t want them standing up & bothering me. It was a miserably poor lecture. I shall write a better one the next time I come to San Francisco.
I wish I could have been there during Charley’s visit. It Ⓐemendationwas having a tolerably cheerful time of it at sea at that time, however, & I had rather be afloat than anywhere else—except at your house ma mère.
The Alta has given me permission to use the printed letters. It is all right, now.5explanatory note
I could not go with Mr. Burlingame, though I wanted to do it badly. I told him I would join him in Europe before his mission was finished.6explanatory note
I must try & send my photograph with this. It is better looking than I am, & so I ordered two hundred. I mean to order a thousand more. I will send you five hundred to put in your album.7explanatory note
I find letters here from Mrs. Hooker (Did your meet her?—Mr. Beecher’s sister)—& Julius Ⓐemendation MoultonⒶemendation .—& a dozen letters from other people.
But I see that I can’t keep my eyes open. It is near midnight. I am utterly & completely worn out. I intended to sleep on the boat—they gave me the bridal chamber as usual—(a ghastly sarcasm on my lonely state, but intended as a compliment) but I knew so many people on board that I staid up to talk—& now I cannot write—I can hardly see, for that matter.8explanatory note I was determined to write at you tonight, though, bef because ⒶemendationI shall have so little spare time for two or three weeks to come that I was afraid I might neglect it.
Under these circumstances I know you will overlook the stupidity of this effort, & write me just the same as if I had done ever so well. Won’t you?
Remember me most kindly to the family, & when you write Charley tell him I am going to answer very shortly.
P.S. You must remember me to Mr & Mrs Severance. I got S’s postscript.9explanatory note Thanks.
Probably part or all of two dispatches to the Chicago Republican dated 1 and 2 May, both from Virginia City. In the second, Clemens mentioned the trip up from San Francisco which he described in the 5 May portion of this letter (SLC 1868 [MT00734], 1868 [MT00736]).
Charles Langdon’s 1 April letter was probably written during or shortly after his recent visit to the Fairbankses in Cleveland. On 29 March, Langdon’s mother wrote Mrs. Fairbanks, “Charlie may be today with you.... Won’t he enjoy a visit with you & a rehearsal of the past, & also be delighted to see Mr & Mrs Severance?” (CtHMTH).
The delayed spring of 1868 allowed the train from Sacramento to run only as far as Cisco—fourteen miles from, and eleven hundred feet below, the summit at Donner Pass. The short stretch of existing track beyond Cisco was still covered with deep snowdrifts, requiring passengers to continue from there by sleigh to Donner Lake. At Donner Lake, a railroad construction crew of several thousand laborers—mostly Chinese—was at work blasting and cutting Tunnel No. 9 through solid granite, to close a seven-mile gap that had remained in the track since the onset of the previous winter. Stagecoaches could travel the road from Donner Lake to Coburn Station, where the railroad track resumed, running northeast toward Reno as far as John M. Hunter’s station on the Truckee River, about nine miles inside the Nevada state line. The gap at the summit was not closed until 18 June, when it became possible to ride the train continuously from Sacramento to Reno in under ten hours (Lewis, 76–85; Carlson, 140; Angel, 643; “Across the Sierra Nevadas,” San Francisco Alta California, 20 June 68, 1).
After lecturing at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City on 27 and 28 April, Clemens appeared twice in Carson City, on 29 and 30 April. (The second performance was a school benefit, for which he revived his old Sandwich Islands lecture.) He then returned briefly to Virginia City, where he undoubtedly enjoyed having a few more days “to shake hands and swap yarns with his old friends,” as Goodman had predicted upon his arrival (“Mark Twain,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 24 Apr 68, 2; see Lorch 1968, 79–81, for a fuller account of the Nevada tour). In a newspaper dispatch written on 2 May (see note 1), Clemens remarked that he was not looking forward to his pending return trip from Virginia City to San Francisco on 3 May:
I rather dread the trip over the Sierra Nevada to-morrow.... It is more irksome than it was before—more tiresome on account of your being obliged to shift from cars to stages and back again every now and then in the mountains. We used to rattle across all the way by stage, and never mind it at all, save that we had to ride thirty hours without stopping. (SLC 1868 [MT00736])
Many years later the author recalled his discussion with Frederick MacCrellish of the Alta:
I said that if they had acted fairly and honorably, and had allowed the country press to use the letters or portions of them, my lecture-skirmish on the coast would have paid me ten thousand dollars, whereas the Alta had lost me that amount. Then he offered a compromise: he would publish the book and allow me ten per cent. royalty on it. The compromise did not appeal to me, and I said so. I was now quite unknown outside of San Francisco, the book’s sale would be confined to that city, and my royalty would not pay me enough to board me three months; whereas my Eastern contract, if carried out, could be profitable for me, for I had a sort of reputation on the Atlantic seaboard acquired through the publication of six excursion-letters in the New York Tribune and one or two in the Herald.
In the end Mr. Mac agreed to suppress his book, on certain conditions: in my preface I must thank the Alta for waiving its “rights” and granting me permission. I objected to the thanks. I could not with any large degree of sincerity thank the Alta for bankrupting my lecture-raid. After considerable debate my point was conceded and the thanks left out. (SLC 1904, 76–77)
This summary seems to imply that the discussion with the Alta owners occurred after Clemens had returned from his failed “lecture-raid.” But the discussion probably preceded the start of that tour, for on 1 May, in a dispatch to the Chicago Republican, Clemens wrote: “When I had finished the business that brought me home, I lectured for the mutual benefit of the public and myself” (SLC 1868 [MT00734]). MacCrellish’s deliberations may nevertheless have continued until Clemens’s return to San Francisco on 5 May.
Burlingame and his retinue arrived in San Francisco on 31 March, two days before Clemens, and “took rooms at the Occidental Hotel,” where Clemens also stayed. Burlingame sailed for the East Coast on 30 April, before Clemens returned from his inland tour (San Francisco Alta California: “Arrival of the Chinese Embassy,” 1 Apr 68, 1; “Eastward Bound,” 30 Apr 68, 1).
Sometime between 2 and 16 April, Clemens had his photograph taken at the “Photographic Art Gallery” of Bradley and Rulofson, at the corner of Montgomery and Sacramento streets in San Francisco. William Herman Rulofson (1826–78) was born in Canada; he went to California in 1849 and worked in Sonora (Tuolumne County) before moving his business to San Francisco in 1863, where he became partners with Henry W. Bradley (b. 1812 or 1813), a photographer and wealthy dealer in photographic supplies. Rulofson directed the gallery and soon became one of the most famous portrait photographers of his day, receiving in the 1870s numerous national and international awards for his work. His 1878 catalog claimed that his files contained “negatives of every person of note who ... visited this coast since 1849.” After Rulofson’s death, his collection of plates was purchased by the poet Joaquin Miller, who had them scraped clean to build a greenhouse on his property in Oakland (Langley 1867, 99, and “Advertising Department,” 33; Haas, Part 1:289, 292–95, Part 2:48–49; Lloyd, 420–21). Two of Rulofson’s 1868 portraits of Clemens (different views taken at the same sitting) are extant in three carte de visite prints and one postcard-sized enlargement; it is not known which one he sent to Mrs. Fairbanks.
Clemens apparently spent the night of 4 May in Sacramento and at 2:00 p.m. the next day departed for San Francisco on the California Steam Navigation Company’s Capital, captained by his friend Edward A. Poole (1823–81) (“River Travel,” Sacramento Union, 5 May 68, 4; ET&S2 , 514; “Death of a Pioneer,” San Francisco Chronicle, 9 Nov 81, 2).
Solon Severance’s postscript, presumably.
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14226).
L2 , 211–215; MTMF , 25–27.
see Huntington Library, p. 512.