To Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett
1 June 1863 • San Francisco, Calif.
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00066)

[No. 2—{$2000 Enclosed}]

Lick House, S. F. June 1.1

My Dear Mother & Sister

The Unreliable & myself are still here, & still enjoying ourselves. I suppose I know at least a thousand people here—some of them a great many of them citizens of San Francisco, but the majority belonging in Washoe—& when I go down Montgomery street, shaking hands with Tom, Dick & Harry, it is just like being in Main street in Hannibal & meeting the old familiar faces. I do hate to go back to Washoe. We [ g fag ] ourselves completely out every day, and go to sleep without rocking, every night. We dine out, & we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were. After breakfast, I don’t often see the hotel again until midnight—or after. I am going to the Dickens mighty fast. I know a regular village of families here in the house, but I never have time to call on them. Thunder! we’ll know a little more about this town, before we leave, than some of the people who live in it. We take trips across the Bay to Oakland, and down to San Leandro, and Alameda, and those places, and we go out to the Willows, and Hayes Park, and Fort Point, and up to Benicia;2 and yesterday we were invited out on a yachting [excursion], & had a sail in the fastest yacht on the Pacific Coast. Rice says: “Oh, no—we are not having any fun, Mark[—Oh, no, I reckon not—it’s somebody else—it’s probably the “gentleman in the wagon!”] (popular slang phrase.) When I invite Rice to the Lick House to [dinner], the proprietors send us [champaign] and claret, and then we do put on the most disgusting airs. Rice says our calibre is too light—we can’t stand it to be noticed!

I rode down with a gentleman to the Ocean House, the other day, to see the sea-horses, and also to listen to the roar of the surf, and watch the [ships] drifting [ here about], here, & there, and far away at sea.3 When I stood on the beach & let the surf [wet] my feet, I recollected doing the same thing on the shores of the Atlantic—& then I had a proper appreciation of the vastness of this country—for I had traveled from ocean to ocean across it, on land, with the exception of crossing Lake Erie—(and I wish I had gone around it.)4

Sam

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 According to Clemens’s letter of 16 May to the Territorial Enterprise, he and Clement T. Rice first stayed at San Francisco’s Occidental Hotel at Bush and Montgomery streets (see ET&S1, 248–53). Evidently they had by this time moved to the more opulent Lick House at Montgomery and Sutter, opened just eleven months earlier. The Lick House, owned by the eccentric land speculator James Lick, was known for its active social life and boasted a dining room modeled on the banquet hall at the Palace of Versailles (Langley 1863, 7, 227, 278; James, 261–72).

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2 The Willows, at Mission and Eighteenth streets, and Hayes Park, at Laguna and Grove streets, were favorite pleasure resorts offering a variety of entertainments and recreational facilities. Fort Point, a massive brick fortification, is on the northernmost promontory of the San Francisco peninsula. Benicia, founded in 1847, is a town on the north shore of the Carquinez Strait. An important stop on the route to the California mines, and the state capital in 1853–54, it was the site of an army ordnance base and a coaling and repair base for Sacramento River boats (Estavan, 16:23–34; Motheral, 6–9; Hart, 36).

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3 The Ocean House hotel and restaurant, south of the Cliff House. The numerous sea lions visible on the rocky shoreline were a popular attraction (Lockwood, 121). Clemens’s “sea-horse” (i.e., walrus) was a misnomer.

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4 Clemens crossed Lake Erie during his August 1853 trip from St. Louis to New York City (see 24 Aug 53 to JLC, n. 2).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

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

Previous publication: L1, 255–256; MTB, 1:232–33, excerpts; MTL, 1:90–91, with omission.

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

Emendations and textual notes:

No. 2—{$2000 Enclosed} • [possibly inserted; ‘E’ possibly ‘e’]

g fag • [‘f’ over partly formed ‘g’]

excursion • excursinon [‘o’ over doubtful ‘n’]

“Oh . . . “gentleman . . . wagon!” • [sic]

dinner, • [followed by stray marks, canceled by Clemens, that were apparently caused by offset of wet ink from some other document laid on the MS]

champaign • [sic]

ships • [possibly ‘ships.’; followed by a canceled stray mark (see note at 255.23)]

here about • [‘about’ over ‘here’]

wet • west [‘t’ over ‘s’]