Since writing to Pamela Moffett on 23 June, mentioning a plan to offer $60,000 for a one-third interest in the Cleveland Herald, Clemens seems to have received a discouraging letter from Abel Fairbanks. Although Olivia Langdon was aware of Clemens’s personal reservations about Fairbanks and knew of Fairbanks’s mishandling of Clemens’s lecture arrangements in February (see L2 , 301, and 13 Feb 69 to OLLclick to open letter), her dislike of the “Herald people” was most probably a response to their foot-dragging, since late 1868, over her fiancé’s business propositions. Not only were Fairbanks and his partners, George A. and George S. Benedict, reluctant to part with a satisfactory share of the Herald, the “small interest” they were about to offer carried a price higher than Clemens was willing to pay (see 5 July 69 to Fairbanks, n. 4click to open letter).

Clemens traveled with the Langdons from Elmira to New York on 10 June, left for Hartford on 16 June, stopped again in New York on 22 June, and returned to Elmira on 25 June. The record of his cash account with Slote, Woodman and Company shows that he withdrew $200 on 11 June (“Mr S. L. Clemens in a/c & Interest a/c with Slote Woodman & Co to August 15. 1869,” CU-MARK).

The record of Clemens’s account with Slote, Woodman and Company shows a withdrawal of $200 on 25 June. Presumably Clemens kept $50 for himself, and had the remainder sent to his mother, who recorded receipt of a check for “$100 50” on 29 June (JLC, 4). The firm of John J. Daly and John R. Boas, wholesale stationers, was listed in the St. Louis directory at 321 North Main Street (Richard Edwards 1869, 179, 259).

When a month later Clemens still had not arrived in St. Louis, Jane Clemens sent him the following letter (CU-MARK):

Horace Bixby was Clemens’s old piloting mentor ( L1 , 70–71).

The lecture was “Curiosities of California,” which Clemens “mapped out” by 10 May and substantially drafted by 5 July. He abandoned it sometime before 27 September in favor of “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” with which he opened the 1869–70 lecture season on 1 November in Pittsburgh (10 May 69 to Redpathclick to open letter; 5 July 69 to Fairbanksclick to open letter; 27 Sept 69 to Blissclick to open letter). Part of the California lecture, entitled “Scenery” and describing Lake Tahoe, survives in the Mark Twain Papers (SLC 1869).

Orion’s “good letter” presumably described his plan to dispose of the Clemenses’ Tennessee land. He, like Pamela Moffett, had probably asked Clemens to obtain Jervis Langdon’s opinion of the arrangements (see 23 June 69 to PAM, n. 4click to open letter).