1 In both of the printed sources for this letter, the manuscript of which is lost, Paine said it was addressed to Orion—not Mollie—Clemens. But the letter’s injunction not to “let the folks at home hear” of the Alta problem makes sense only if Clemens was writing to someone away from home. Orion would have been puzzled by such an instruction, since he was living “at home” in St. Louis, but Mollie was living with her parents in Keokuk, Iowa. And since Clemens had already told the St. Louis family (Jane, Pamela, and Orion) about his “superb contract” (24 Jan 68 to JLC and family), it seems unlikely that he would repeat himself to them a month later. Having recently received from Mollie three clippings of his Alta dispatches (mentioned as received in 21 Feb 68 to JLC and family), Clemens did have reason to write her a letter, and soon he demonstrably did so, as the envelope he addressed to her, postmarked 22 February, establishes. In another letter written at this time but now lost, Clemens must have also informed Pamela of his problem, swearing her to strict confidence even with members of the family (just as he later did in respect to his pending engagement to Olivia Langdon). Pamela evidently confided the information to Orion, but not to Mollie, and probably not to Jane—for in April, Orion was obliged to explain to Mollie why he had known about the problem but had not told her: “Pamela thought Sam had enjoined strict privacy on her, and I said nothing [to you] because she thought Sam would be displeased if privacy to that extent was not kept” (OC to MEC, 10 Apr 68, CU-MARK). Paine reported that when Clemens first heard about the Alta’s plans (ostensibly from Joseph Goodman), he “got confirmation of the report by telegraph” (MTB, 1:359). Clemens must have learned the bad news and “done all [he could] by telegraph” within a day of writing the previous letter to Orion (on 21 February), which does not mention the problem. It is therefore extremely likely that the envelope transcribed here, and the letter fragment that Paine said was addressed to Orion, belong in fact to each other, and that the letter itself was written no earlier than 21 and no later than 22 February, the date of the postmark.

2 Noah Brooks recalled the Alta editors’ response to the news—which they had certainly heard by 14 January—that Clemens planned to reuse his Quaker City letters:

No copy of this “advance notice” has been found, but whether Clemens saw it or was otherwise apprised of the Alta’s plans, he was evidently persuaded on or about 22 February to telegraph for permission to reuse the letters, something he had declined to do earlier (Jan 68 to JLC and PAM). The “final result by mail” which he then awaited came about two weeks later, on or about 8 March. A California newspaper, reprinting an item from a still-unidentified “Eastern exchange” (published sometime in mid-March), summarized the situation with some authority:

Clemens had, in fact, received his $1,250 fare in currency, or “greenbacks,” plus $500 in gold (equivalent to $700 in currency), for a total of about $1,950, or “less than two thousand dollars” (see 15 Apr 67 to JLC and family, n. 1).

3 In Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), Paine implied that this closing comment about Burlingame and the previous paragraph both belonged to the 21 February letter to Orion. But Paine’s redaction of this same passage, published in the May 1912 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine (Paine, 938), included the comment about Burlingame and the previous paragraph, but omitted any part of the 21 February letter to Orion. Likewise, when he published the letter to Orion in Mark Twain’s Letters (1917), he omitted both the Burlingame comment and the previous paragraph. It is therefore much more likely that the Burlingame comment is part of this letter to Mollie than part of the earlier letter to Orion.