15 September 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: MtHi, UCCL 00506)
c
Four or five years ago a V righteous Vigilance Committee in your Ⓐemendationcity hanged a casual acquaintance of mine named Slade, along with twelve other prominent citizens whom I only ◇ Ⓐemendationknew by reputation. Slade was a “section-agent” at Rocky Ridge station in the Rocky Mountains when I crossed the plains in the Overland stage ten years ago, & I took breakfast with him & survived.2explanatory note
Now I am writing a book (MS. to be delivered Ⓐemendationto publisher Jan. 1,) & as the Overland journey has made six chapters of it thus far & promises to make six or eight more, I thought I would just rescue my late friend Slade from oblivion & set a sympathetic public to weeping for him.3explanatory note
N ⒶemendationSuch a humanized fragment of the original I Devil could not & did not go out of the world without considerable newspaper Ⓐemendationeclat, in the shape of biographical notices, particulars of his execution, etc., & the object of this letter is to beg of you to ask some one connected with your city papers to send me a Virginia City newspaper of that day if it can be done without mutilating a file.
{If found, please
enclose in LETTER form,
else it will go to the office of Buffalo
“Express”
& be lost among the
exchanges.}Ⓐemendation
I beg your pardon for writing you so freely & putting you, or trying to put you, to trouble, without having the warrant of an introduction to you, but I did not know any one in Virginia City & so I ventured to ask this favor at your hands. Hoping you will be able to help me4explanatory note
I am, Sir,
Hosmer (1814–93) had been the first chief justice of the supreme court of Montana Territory, serving from 1864 to 1868. Then from 1869 to 1872 he served as postmaster of Virginia City, the territorial capital. Clemens may not have known Hosmer, or even his name, but assumed that the postmaster could redirect this request appropriately.
On the morning of 3 August 1861, the ninth day of his overland journey to Nevada Territory, Clemens had breakfasted with Joseph A. (Jack) Slade (1829?–64), an Overland stage agent and a notorious desperado and murderer, who was hanged on 10 March 1864 in Virginia City, then part of Idaho Territory. He had already recalled their encounter in his seventh “Around the World” letter, in the Buffalo Express of 22 January 1870 ( RI 1993 , 584–88, 810–11; SLC 1870).
Clemens devoted chapters 10 and 11 of Roughing It, both of which he completed in March 1871, to Slade’s nefarious career ( RI 1993 , 60–75, 811, 819, 835–36).
Hosmer’s reply is not known to survive, but it seems likely that he sent Clemens, or referred him to, Thomas J. Dimsdale’s The Vigilantes of Montana (1866). The book, based on articles Dimsdale had published in the Virginia City Montana Post in 1865–66, was a primary source for Clemens’s account of Slade in Roughing It ( RI 1993 , 584–86, 811).
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the Hezekiah L. Hosmer Papers, Montana Historical Society, Helena (MtHi).
L4 , 195–196.
donated to MtHi in 1963 by Mrs. Frank B. Austin.