Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Jane Lampton Clemens and Family
2 November 1866 • Virginia City, Nev.
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00110)

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Va, Nov. 1.

All the Folks, Affectionate Greeting:

You know the flush times are past, & it has long been impossible to more than half fill the Theatre here, with any sort of attraction—but they filled it for me, night before [last.—]full—dollar all over the house.

I was mighty dubious about Carson, but the enclosed call & some telegrams set that all right—I lecture there tomorrow night.1

They offer me a full house & no expenses, in Dayton—go there next.2

Sandy Baldwin says I have made the most sweeping success of any man he knows of.

I have lectured in San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, Grass Valley, Nevada, You Bet, Red Dog & Virginia. I am going to talk in Carson, Gold Hill, Silver [in bottom margin: (over] City, Dayton, & Washoe,3 San Francisco again, & again here if I have time to re-hash the lecture.4

Then I am bound for New York—lecture on the Steamer, maybe. I’ll leave toward 1st December—but I’ll telegraph you.

Love to all.

Yrs

Mark

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens was writing on 2 November: the Carson City lecture of “tomorrow night,” scheduled in the preceding two letters, took place on 3 November; the Virginia City lecture of the “night before last” took place on 31 October. In Virginia City, at Maguire’s Opera House, Clemens had an audience of about eight hundred. Alfred Doten, writing in the Territorial Enterprise of 1 November, called it “one of the largest and most fashionable audiences that ever graced the Opera House”:

The entire dress circle and the greater portion of the parquette were filled with ladies, while all the available space for extra seats and standing room was occupied. It was a magnificent tribute to the lecturer from his old friends. Of the lecture itself we can only speak in general terms, as its points are too numerous and varied to admit of special mention. Combining the most valuable statistical and general information, with passages of drollest humor—all delivered in the peculiar and inimitable style of the author—and rising occasionally to lofty flights of descriptive eloquence—the lecture constitutes an entertainment of rare excellence and interest. (Doten 1866, 3; see also Doten 1973, 2:901)

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2 On 8 November.

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3 Clemens was “the guest of Thomas Fitch at the latter’s home in Washoe City for a week during the Nevada lecture tour”:

Thomas Fitch secured the courthouse of Washoe City. Here Mark Twain gave his lecture on the Sandwich Islands. Fitch introduced his friend, who had arrived at the point where he needed no introduction to the Western side of America, at least. . . .

On their way back to Fitch’s home after the lecture Twain was depressed. He had not liked his lecture.

“Well, Sam, it was a great success,” said Thomas Fitch, who had acted as doorkeeper, cheerily. “I have taken in over $200.”

“Yes, and I have taken in over 200 people,” returned Twain gloomily.

“Now, Sam, don’t belittle yourself. You know you rank as one of the foremost humorists of the day,” returned his friend.

“I know. But as a lecturer I am a fraud, ain’t I?” insisted Twain.

“You have a tendency that way,” said Fitch, laughingly.

Mark Twain bubbled over with sudden humor.

“I know, Tom,” he said, “but there are over two hundred towns in the United States and all have over five thousand inhabitants, and maybe I can play all of them at once.” (Wells, 13)

Fitch, whom Clemens had once characterized as an unscrupulously ambitious “two-faced” dog, was now district attorney of Washoe County, Nevada (see 11 Nov 64 to OC). The lecture in Washoe City must have occurred between 4 and 7 November, Clemens’s only free dates before his departure from Nevada on 12 November.

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4 On 10 November, following his lecture in Gold Hill, Clemens was the victim of a prank concocted by Denis E. McCarthy, Steve Gillis, and several other friends, who waylaid him on the “Divide,” a “lonesome, windswept road” between Gold Hill and Virginia City, ostensibly to relieve him of the evening’s proceeds. Their real intention, Gillis claimed in 1907, was to provide him with a ready subject for a second Virginia City lecture, since he had refused to give his Sandwich Islands talk again, “saying that he would not repeat himself in the same town, that he was tired of the old lecture, and that he had neither time nor material to prepare a new one” (Gillis to Albert Bigelow Paine, ca. June 1907, in Davis 1956, 3; see also MTB, 1:297–302). According to Alfred Doten, Clemens lost “about $125 in coin, & a very valuable gold watch . . . worth $300” as well as “two jacknives, & three lead pencils” and he put “a card in the paper in morning [11 November], offering to negociate for the watch” (Doten 1973, 2:903). Furious when he learned of the joke and unplacated by the return of his property, Clemens left Virginia City on 12 November. He arrived the following night in San Francisco, where, a month later, he unexpectedly profited from the Gillis-McCarthy “robbery” (see 15 Dec 66 to JLC and family, n. 1). He delivered his Sandwich Islands lecture in San Francisco on 16 November, in San Jose on 21 November, in Petaluma on 26 November (not 23 or 24 November, as previously thought), in Oakland on 27 November, and again in San Francisco on 10 December (“Robbed,” San Francisco Morning Call, 15 Nov 66, 1; Petaluma Journal and Argus: “Mark Twain,” 22 Nov 66, 2; “Reprehensible,” 29 Nov 66, 2; MTH, 422–23; Fatout 1960, 56–66). For the dates of the earlier lectures mentioned here see p. 362 and 29 Oct 66 to Howland, n. 1.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).

glyph Previous publication: L1, 365–367; MTL, 1:121, with omissions.

glyph Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

last.— • [dash over period]