The occasion for Clemens’s interrupted letter to David Ross Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby) is not known; no letter from Locke to Clemens from this period has been discovered. In 1873 Locke was managing editor of the New York Evening Mail, while retaining an interest in the Toledo Blade (Austin, 35, 39).

The “great lecture-jubilee” in which Clemens had agreed to appear (without knowing the exact date) has not been identified. There survives in the Mark Twain Papers, however, an undated list of names in Pugh’s hand, which could have been enclosed in a letter that is now lost. Under the first heading, entitled merely “The List,” are twenty-six names, all of well-known lecturers, readers, or other performers—including Mark Twain himself, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Petroleum Nasby, Anna Dickinson, Josh Billings, Bret Harte, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and three musical groups. Under a second heading, “Invited,” are six more names—including John B. Gough, Henry Ward Beecher, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The third heading, “Present,” includes only “Gen. U.S. Grant & cabinet.” The list cannot be dated with certainty, but must have been prepared between February 1871, when Harte arrived in the East, and March 1874, when Charles Sumner died. No record of any event involving the people listed has been discovered, suggesting that Pugh was unable to realize his plan.