To Robert M. and Louise M. Howland with a note to James W. Nye
6 March 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00440)

[ c ]

Buffalo, Mch. 6.

[T] Dear Bob & Lady—1

I have had so much to do of late (had so much “setting around” to do, being now in the fourth week of the honeymoon,) that I have had no comfortable opportunity to answer your welcome [letter.

I] wish you had told me—you experienced people—if it is always as [pleasant] [as it] is now. If all of [one’s married] days are as happy as these new ones have been to me, I have fooled deliberately fooled away 30 years of my life. One or If it were to do over again I would marry in early infancy instead of wasting time cutting teeth & breaking crockery. Hey Bob?

“It’s a great country—Hey Bob?”2

I had a long letter from Jonny Kinney a week or two ago, & want to answer it but things interfere—but I will, shortly. He is a partner in his father’s bank—E. Kinney & Co., Cincinnati.3

I wonder how the late Miss Lou likes married life. Better than trotting up & down between Miss Clapp’s school & Mr. Meyer’s ranch, I suspect.4

But this letter will probably ‸may‸ never reach you—so why prolong it? I wish you both all the happiness that you deserve—& if you get all that, you will not even ask for any more yourselves.

Contentedly
Yr friend

Samℓ. L. Clemens.

Mr. Robert M. Howland | Care Hon. James Nye | U. S. Senate | Washington [postmarked:] buffalo n.y. mar 7 [across envelope end:]

if not delivered within 10 days, to be returned to

Please forward it, Governor, & oblige5

Yrs Ever

Samℓ. Mark Twain.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Robert Muir Howland met Clemens in Nevada in August 1861 and soon became one of his mining partners. Howland had married Louise Althea Meier on 10 November 1867. The Howlands made a wedding journey to New York, the groom’s home state, and then went to Washington, D.C., where Clemens probably saw them in late December 1867 or early January 1868. Howland appeared as one of the stranded passengers in “Cannibalism in the Cars,” written in January 1868 (L1, 142 n. 2, 156, 161 n. 2; SLC 1868; “Married,” “Gone to the Land of Honeymoon,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 12 Nov 67, 3; Howland, 4–5; 8 Feb 70 to Fuller n. 3).

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2 Evidently a Nevada catch phrase. Clemens repeated it in a 3? September 1877 letter to Howland (CU-MARK).

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3 No correspondence is known to survive between Clemens and John D. Kinney, another of his first Nevada friends. The two men were involved in several timber and mining speculations between September 1861, when Kinney arrived in the territory, and March 1862, when he returned to Cincinnati. One venture formed the basis for chapters 22 and 23 of Roughing It, where Kinney appeared as “Johnny K——.” The other members of the banking firm were Eli Kinney (John’s father) and F. M. Hulburd (L1, passim; RI 1993, 147–57; Cincinnati Directory 1870, 351).

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4 Emanuel Meier (variously spelled) and his family, including his daughter Louise (b. 1848?), were natives of Ohio. From 1854 to 1859 they lived in Downieville, California, where Meier kept a general store. In the early 1860s he had a “milk ranch” near Carson City. Louise Meier was attending Hannah K. Clapp’s Sierra Seminary in Carson City when Robert Howland and Clemens first met her. Clemens described the school in a letter of 14 January 1864 to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (Berlin, 24–79 passim, 154, 187–89, 447; Kelly: 1862, 69, 85; 1863, 97, 107; “Local Matters,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 20 May 66, 3; Angel, 220, 228; MTEnt, 134, 226; SLC 1864).

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5 Nye, formerly governor of Nevada Territory (1861–64), was elected a Republican senator in 1864 when Nevada became a state. Clemens had last seen him in Washington in early 1868 (SLC 1868; L2, 177 n. 3).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK). The letter was written on the same stationery as 10 Feb 70 to Hine. The monogram was excised sometime after receipt, removing portions of some characters on the back of the leaf.

Previous publication: L4, 87–88; LLMT, 144, brief excerpt.

Provenance:donated to CU-MARK in 1977 by Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Gunn. Gunn was the Howlands’ grandson.

Emendations and textual notes:

c • [cut away]

T • [partly formed; possibly ‘F’]

letter. | [¶] I • letter.—| [¶] I

pleasant • pleasamnt

as it • [a]s it [cut]

one’s married • one[’s m]arried [cut]