Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

7. MT to Frank Bliss, August 26, 1901 (University of Texas Library); Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2005), 51.

  8. L, 1: 28–29, 33,37–39.

  9. MTA, 2: 287; L, 1: 40–44.

  10. Anthony Kennedy, “‘Mark Twain’ a Poor Typo,” The Inland Printer 40 (January 1908), 560, as quoted in L, 1: 2–3, 5n.

  11. L, 1: 53n.

  12. Fred W. Lorch, “Mark Twain in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 27 (July 1929), 408–56.

  13. MTB, 1: 107–12.

  14. This view, and indeed the actual existence of Macfarlane as more than a conceit when Twain used the name in his autobiography, has been challenged by later scholars. See Paul Baender, “‘Alias Macfarlane’: A Revision of Mark Twain Biography,” American Literature 38 (May 1966), 187–97; and Howard G. Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 56. For Paine, see MTB, 1: 115; MTA, 1: 146.

  6. CUB PILOT

  1. See John Gerber, “Mark Twain’s ‘Private Campaign,’ ” Civil War History 1 (March 1955), 37–60, which includes the text of “A Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”

  2. MTA, 1: 146.

  3. Allan Bates, “Mark Twain and the Mississippi River” (unpublished doctoral diss., University of Chicago, 1968), 3.

  4. MTCI, 418–25; Dudley R. Hutcherson, “Mark Twain as a Pilot,” American Literature 12 (November 1940),353–55; and Edgar Marquess Branch, “Mark Twain: The Pilot and the Writer,” Mark Twain Journal 23, no. 2 (1985), 29.

  5. L, 1: 103–5n.

  6. N&J, 2: 473n.

  7. L, 1: 385–90.

  8. Edgar M. Branch, “Bixby vs. Carroll: New Light on Sam Clemens’s Early River Career,” Mark Twain Journal 30 (Fall 1992), 2–22; Arlin Turner, “Notes on Mark Twain in New Orleans,” McNeese Review 6 (Spring 1954), 10–22.

  9. MTA 2: 289; Branch, “Bixby vs. Carroll,” 2–3; L, 1: 134n.

  10. L, 1: 62; Branch, “Bixby vs. Carroll,” 2.

  11. L, 1: 71–73; The Mysterious Stranger, ed. John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 184.

  12. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Including Chapters Now Published for the First Time, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 79.

  13. MTA 2: 290; Bates, “Mark Twain and the Mississippi River,” 113.

  14. N&J, 2: 555n; and Ernest E. Leisy, “Mark Twain and Isaiah Sellers,” American Literature 12 (January 1941), 398–405; MTB 1: 150 and 3: 1593. For a healthy sampling of the pros and cons on the enduring question of whether Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a successful pilot, see Edgar Marquess Branch, “‘Old Times on the Mississippi’: Biography and Craftsmanship,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 45 (June 1990), 73–87; “Mark Twain: The Pilot and the Writer,” Mark Twain Journal 23, no. 2 (1985), 28–43; Richard Bridgman, Traveling with Mark Twain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 64–69; Horst H. Kruse, Mark Twain and “Life on the Mississippi” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Raymond P. Ewing, Mark Twain’s Steamboat Years (Hannibal, MO: Cave Hollow Steamboat Landing, 1981), 45–49; Edgar J. Burde, “Mark Twain: The Writer As Pilot,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 93 (1978), 878–92; and DeLancey Ferguson, Mark Twain: Man and Legend (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1943), 49–53.

  15. Bates, “Mark Twain and the Mississippi River,” 128, 131–32; Letters, 1: 43–44.

  7. DEATH ON THE MISSISSIPPI

  1. L, 1: 85; Edgar Marquess Branch, Men Call Me Lucky: Mark Twain and the Pennsylvania (Miami, OH: Friends of the Library Society, 1985). Most of the facts about the tragedy are drawn from this work.

  2. L, 1: 80.

  3. L, 5: 42.

  4. L, 1: 84n.

  5. L, 1: 84n, 86n.

  6. L, 1: 270n, 321–22.

  8. FETCHING GRANT

  1. For the most detailed coverage of this aspect of Twain’s life, see John Gerber, “Mark Twain’s ‘Private Campaign,’ ” Civil War History 1 (March 1955), 37–60; it includes the text of “Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” as well as summaries of the other documents. This Collection is updated in Mark Twain’s Civil War, ed. David Rachels (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007).

  2. L, 1: 238, 165.

  3. L, 1: 259–61.

  4. Philip Ashley Fanning, Mark Twain and Orion Clemens (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003); L, 4: 171; MTBus, 47.

  5. Absalom Grimes, Confederate Mail Runner, ed. M. M. Quaife (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926), 3–5; Terrell Dempsey, Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 268.

  6. Mark Twain’s Letters, 1876–1880: An Electronic Edition, Mark Twain Project (Berkeley: University of California), 4: 139, 142; MTHL, 1: 278–81.

  7. J. Stanley Mattson, “Mark Twain on War and Peace: The Missouri Rebel and ‘The Campaign That Failed,’ ” American Quarterly 20 (Winter 1968), 783–94.

  8. Absalom Grimes, 11; MTSpk, 106–9. The short speech was published as “Mark Twain’s War Experiences” in the New York Times of October 7, 1877.

  9. Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), 225, 272–77; Absalom Grimes, 15–16.

  10. L, 4: 142, 144. See also Neil Schmitz, “Mark Twain’s Civil War: Humor’s Reconstructive Writing,” in Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),74–92.

  11. L, 1: 165.

  12. Gerber, “Mark Twain’s ‘Private Campaign,’ ” 59.

  13. Clara Clemens, My Father, Mark Twain (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), 292.

  14. Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 265–66.

  15. Quoted in Fred W. Lorch, “Mark Twain and the ‘Campaign That Failed,’ ” American Literature 12 (January 1941), 454–70.

  16. Mark Twain, Roughing It, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 574; MTB, 1: 170; Lorch, “Mark Twain and the ‘Campaign That Failed,’ ” 460.

  9. LIGHTING OUT

  1. L, 4: 171.

  2. Mark Twain, Roughing It, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 33.

  3. Noah Brooks, “Mark Twain in California,” Century 57 (November 1898), 97.

  4. Roughing It, 67.

  5. Roughing It, 77, 80, 88.

  6. Roughing It, 591–92.

  7. Roughing It, 88, 93.

  8. Roughing It, 99,115, 844–46.

  9. Roughing It, 127; James C. McNutt, “Mark Twain and the American Indian: Earthly Realism and Heavenly Idealism,” American Indian Quarterly 4 (August 1978), 223–242; Helen L. Harris, “Mark Twain’s Response to the Native American,” American Literature 46 (January 1975), 495–505; Lynn W. Denton, “Mark Twain and the American Indian,” Mark Twain Journal 16 (Winter 1971–72), 1–3; Louis J. Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 67.

  10. L, 1: 132.

  11. Effie Mona Mack, Mark Twain in Nevada (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 74.

  12. Mack, Mark Twain in Nevada, 77.

  13. L, 1: 145.

  10. A MILLIONAIRE FOR TEN DAYS

  1. Effie Mona Mack, Mark Twain in Nevada (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 13–23.

  2. Mark Twain, Roughing It, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 147.

  3. L, 1: 129.

  4. L, 1: 129n, 130; Roughing It, 197, 174.

  5. Roughing It, 175.

  6. Quoted in MTVC, 20.

  7. L, 1: 245.

  8. Roughing It, 211–19; L, 4: 23n. See also Everett Emerson, “Smoking and Health: The Case of Samuel L. Clemens,” New England Quarterly 70 (1997), 548–66.

  9. L, 1: 156–57; 165. The Great Landslide Case was a hoax in which the new U.S. attorney for Nevada Territory, called “
Buncombe” in chapter 34 of Roughing It, was duped into arguing the case of a rancher whose land had allegedly been covered by his neighbor’s ranch during a spring thaw in the hilly precincts of Washoe (Dick Hyde’s “ranch was situated just in the edge of the valley, and . . . [Tom] Morgan’s ranch, fences, cabins, cattle, barns and everything [slid] down on top of his ranch and exactly covered up every single vestige of his property, to the depth of about thirty-eight feet”). The greenhorn U.S. attorney, who considered himself “a lawyer of parts, and . . . very much wanted an opportunity to manifest it,” lost the case when the presiding judge ruled against Hyde, saying that plaintiff had “been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of God! And from this decision there is no appeal.”

  10. Roughing It, 230–31, 233.

  11. MTB, 3: 1648–50. See also Mark Twain’s Fables of Man, ed. John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 158–59.

  12. L, 1: 193.

  13. L, 1: 240n.

  14. Michael J. Phillips, “Mark Twain’s Partner,” Saturday Evening Post 193 (September 11, 1920), 22–23, 69–70, 73–74. The title of Higbie’s only partly published manuscript, obviously intended to take advantage of Mark Twain’s fame, is “A Little Experience in Nevada and Surrounding Country, in the Early Sixties, Leading Up to My Acquaintance with Samuel L. Clemens, ‘Mark Twain’ ” (MTP).

  11. “Mark Twain”

  1. L, 1: 238; ET&S, 1: 389–91; MTB, 1: 205; Benson, 54. See also Robert E. Stewart, “Mark Twain’s Return from Aurora,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 51 (Summer 2008), 127–39.

  2. Effie Mona Mack, Mark Twain in Nevada (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 183.

  3. Benson, 69; Andrew Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 76.

  4. Ronald M. James, The Roar and the Silence: A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1998), 31–32.

  5. Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920).

  6. L, 1: 242.

  7. ET&S, 1: 155–59.

  8. ET&S, 1: 173.

  9. MTB, 1: 216.

  10. MTEnt, 47–54. I wish to thank Robert H. Hirst for assistance in determining the facts about the illustration.

  11. L, 1: 244.

  12. L, 1: 255.

  13. ET&S, 1: 320–21; Benson, 91; and Mack, Mark Twain in Nevada, 195.

  14. Benson, 105.

  12. GOVERNOR OF THE THIRD HOUSE

  1. MTVC, 147–49.

  2. MTVC, 156–67; Benson, 94–96.

  3. Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain’s America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), 138.

  4. MTB, 1: 243–44; Benson, 100.

  5. MTEnt, 25–26.

  6. L, 1: 287–90.

  7. L, 1: 287n, 289.

  8. L, 1: 291–95n.

  9. MTB, 1: 250–52; MTEnt, 24–30; MTA, 1: 354–60.

  10. MTA, 1: 360; John C. Gerber, “Mark Twain’s ‘Private Campaign,’ ” Civil War History 1 (March 1955),37–60.

  13. THE JUMPING FROG

  1. MTE, 257–58.

  2. Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 41, 23–24.

  3. Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 2: 81–82n, 97–98.

  4. William R. Gillis, Memories of Mark Twain and Steve Gillis (Sonora, CA: Banner Press, 1924), 40.

  5. Benson, 122–23.

  6. MTHL, 1: 147.

  7. ET&S, 2: 86–93.

  8. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ed. John C. Gerber et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 233; L, 1: 315.

  9. ET&S, 2: 134.

  10. Leonard Keen Hirshberg, M.D., What You Ought to Know about Your Baby (New York: Butterick Publications, 1910), 21.

  11. L, 1: 322, 325n.

  12. L, 1: 327.

  13. Quoted in ET&S, 2: 272.

  14. ET&S, 2: 284.

  15. MTE, 200–203.

  14. VANDAL ABROAD

  1. This was the subtitle by which it is now much better known; the original main title in the Californian is “The Christmas Fireside for Good Little Boys and Girls. By Grandfather Twain.” The others are in chronological order: “Answers to Correspondents,” cobbled together from several such columns first published in the Californian on May 27 and June 10, 17, and 24; “ ‘After’ Jenkins,” first published as “The Pioneers’ Ball,” Enterprise, November 19 or 21, 1865; “Among the Spirits,” a conflation of “Among the Spiritualists,” Enterprise, January 26 or 27, 1866, and “ ‘Mark Twain’ among the Spirits,” Enterprise, February 4, 1866; “Among the Fenians,” first published as “Bearding the Fenian in His Lair,” Enterprise, January 30 or 31, 1866; “A Complaint about Correspondents, Dated in San Francisco,” first published as “An Open Letter to the American People,” New York Weekly Review, February 17, 1866; and “Brief Biographical Sketch of George Washington,” first published as “A New Biography of Washington,” and “Remarkable Instances of Presence of Mind,” first published as “Presence of Mind,” both in the Enterprise, sometime between February 25 and 28, 1866. I am indebted to Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project, for much of this information.

  2. “The Turning Point of My Life,” in What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Essays, ed. Paul Baender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973),528; Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, ed. A. Grove Day (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966), 53.

  3. “An Inquiry about Insurances” was first published as “How, for Instance?” in the New York Weekly Review of September 29, 1866; “Origin of Illustrious Men” appeared under the same title in the Californian, also on September 29; and “Concerning Chambermaids” was first published in the Weekly Review as “Depart, Ye Accursed!” on December 15, 1866.

  4. Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 6, 33.

  5. Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 260.

  6. Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 112.

  7. Andrew Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 104–5; N&J, 1: 189; and L, 1: 145.

  8. Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, 27, 31, 279, 282.

  9. R. Kent Rasmussen, Mark Twain: A to Z (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 49–50; Walter Francis Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1947), 95; “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat,” Harper’s 34 (December 1866), 104–13.

  10. L, 1: 343–44.

  11. Mark Twain, Roughing It, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 371.

  12. N&J, 1: 234; L, 1: 359.

  13. L, 1: 353,355n.

  15. WILD HUMORIST OF THE PACIFIC SLOPE

  1. MTSpk, xv.

  2. MTSpk, 5; Mark Twain, Roughing It, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 533.

  3. MTB, 3: 1601–4; Lorch, 47; Walter Francis Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii (Chicago: Lakesides Press, 1947), 447.

  4. Mark Twain’s Speeches, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1923), ix.

  5. Lorch, 26–27.

  6. It is not altogether clear whether he gave his Sandwich Islands lecture in Dayton, Nevada, on November 8, 1866; see L, 1: 362n, 365. This date is not included in Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii, 422.

  7. L, 1: 364–65.

  8. Alta California, December 15, 1866, quoted in Lorch, 49–50.

  9. MTTB, 25.

  10. MTTB, 34–35.

  11. N&J, 1: 239; MTTB, 41.

  12. N&J, 1: 269–80.

  13. MTTB, 70, 73–74.

  16. WESTERNER IN THE EAST

  1. MTTB, 83.

  2. MTHL 1: 329 n. 2.

  3. N&J, 1: 109; L, 2: 48–49, 57.

  4. MTTB, 111.

  5. MTTB, 111–16; L, 2: 16.

  6. MTTB, 122–26.
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  7. L, 2: 19n; Albert von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994), 430; Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; repr., 1966), 500n.

  8. James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1893), 2: 796.

  9. L, 2: 29.

  10. MTA, 2: 352; MTB, 1: 312; Frank Fuller, “Utah’s War Governor Talks of Many Famous Men,” New York Times, October 1, 1911; Fatout, 77; “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture,” in Who Is Mark Twain? ed. Robert H. Hirst (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 8–9.

  11. This was the reason Fuller gave for Nye’s absence that night, but its accuracy is challenged by the fact that Fuller told the New York Times (see note 10, above) that Nye had called Clemens “a damned Secessionist” during a reunion of the two former governors in 1892, whereas James Warren Nye died in 1876; see Robert E. Stewart, “Mark Twain’s Return from Aurora,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 51 (Summer 2008), 137.

  12. MTA, 2: 355.

  13. L, 2: 49–50, 52, 60; MTTB, 248.

  17. PILGRIMS ON THE LOOSE

  1. L, 2: 64.

  2. Charles J. Langdon to Mrs. Jervis Langdon, June 9, August 21 and 22, 1867, all in MTP.

  3. L, 2: 192n.

  4. Quoted in Robert H. Hirst, “The Making of The Innocents Abroad” (doctoral diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1975), 94–95.

  5. Quoted in Hirst, “The Making of The Innocents Abroad,” 58.

  6. L, 2: 392–97.

  7. L, 2: 202.

  8. Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York: E. P. Hutton, 1920), 258.

  9. Elisha Bliss to MT, August 4, 1869, MTP; Hirst, “The Making of The Innocents Abroad,” 252, 475 n. 3.