To Mary Mason Fairbanks
26 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CSmH, UCCL 00566)

c

Home, Jan. 26.

Dear Mother:

Tell Bone & Benedict1 that the article is by James Redpath of Bleeding Kansas fame2 (now proprietor of the big “Boston Lyceum Bureau”)—the best posted man in the land on lecturers. Now that I come to think of it, the article is “by a retired lecturer,” or something of that kind, which pretty plainly points to me. If the next one passes through my hands I will see that [ is it ]is “by the boss of a late lecture bureau” or something like that. I couldn’t dare to write about my own guild, that [way. And ]It would be like blackguarding one’s own family.3

Well, it seems the Moffett children can’t come—I enclose letter. We are very very sorry, & yet we don’t dare to expose the cub to any more influences calculated to keeps him up nights.4 He did well, last night—was peaceable, & I let him off & didn’t “go for” him with Dewees’ Mustang Liniment.5 Tell Mollie to never mind the absence of the Moffetts—we’ll entertain her, & we’ll get her to help entertain the baby.6

Yes, you sent the wedding cards by me. Livy & Lang. know all about the pretty summer trip, & are calculating very strongly on it.

Remembering the hatchet, I am your own moral son, which cannot tell a lie, when a body is looking straight at him

Samℓ.

[one MS page (about 70 words) missing]

shovel in some solid facts to balance the nonsense:—namely: Livy & the girl & the baby spent another day at the hospital, today & let Langdon nurse a patient there. We are all back home, [now. We ]are to keep this up until next Monday, & then the woman can be moved here.

Trot Mollie along on time. Also make the bride & groom be sure to stop.7

Yr Son

Samℓ.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Publishers of the Cleveland Herald. John Herbert Aloysius Bone (1830–1906), born in Cornwall, England, moved to Cleveland in 1851 and soon began contributing to the Herald. He published his first book, Stories and Legends; With Other Poems, in 1852, and in 1857 joined the staff of the Herald, where he remained for nearly thirty years, producing lead articles and editorials and becoming known as “a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge and a writer of ability” (Rose, 471). George A. Benedict was editor-in-chief and one of the proprietors of the Herald, the partner of Abel W. Fairbanks. Clearly Clemens referred to him and not to his son, George S. Benedict, also a partner and the paper’s business manager, who died in a train wreck on 6 February 1871. Clemens’s acquaintance with the Benedicts dated from late 1868 and early 1869, when he was considering the purchase of an interest in the Herald (Coyle, 66; “Death of George S. Benedict,” Cleveland Herald, 8 Feb 71, 2; L2, 360; L3, 49, 69, 85 n. 2, 195, 277 n. 1).

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2 Redpath had been a crusading abolitionist, famous for his advocacy and personal bravery, as well as his periodic dispatches from Kansas Territory to the New York Tribune between 1854 and 1859, during the strife between pro- and anti-slavery factions. In 1859 and 1860 he published three influential books, each in part about Kansas: Hand-book to Kansas Territory and the Rocky Mountains’ Gold Region; The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, which sold over 40,000 copies by the mid-1870s; and The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, which included a verbatim history of the first slave kept in Kansas. Redpath dedicated The Roving Editor to John Brown: “You went to Kansas, when the troubles broke out there—not to ‘settle’ or ‘speculate’—or from idle curiosity: but for one stern, solitary purpose—to have a shot at the South. So did I” (Redpath 1968 [1859], iv; Horner, 40–99 passim; “James Redpath,” in Lyceum 1876, unnumbered prefatory page; L3, 217–18 n. 8).

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3 See 30 Jan 71 to Redpath.

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4 The enclosure, probably a letter from Pamela Moffett describing an illness Annie and Samuel had had recently, is not known to survive.

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5 William Potts Dewees (1768–1841), a pediatrician, was the author of A Treatise on the Physical and Medical Treatment of Children (1825), which included prescriptions for colic and other infant ailments. Mustang Liniment, used to treat horses, was not one of Dewees’s nostrums (Carson, 58).

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6 While in Cleveland earlier in January (12 Jan 71 to OLC), Clemens must have invited fourteen-year-old Mollie Fairbanks to Buffalo, promising that the Moffett children would be there as well. There is no evidence that she came.

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7 It is not known if Alice and William Gaylord—presumably on, or about to begin, their honeymoon—visited Buffalo.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Huntington Library, San Marino (CSmH, call nos. HM 14269 and 14271).

Previous publication: L4, 314–316; MTMF, 145–47.

Provenance:see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

is it • ist

way. And • way.—| And

now. We • now.—|We