To William Wright (Dan De Quille)
8 February 1876 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: CLjC, UCCL 01305)
(SUPERSEDED)

Hartford Feb. 8/76

Dear Dan:

I enclose $1500, which I beg you to deposit in bank until put into California or Con. Virginia at such time as John Mackey thinks is best, & when he says sell, sell, whether at a loss or a profit, without waiting to swap knives. I suppose he will advise you, won’t he? If he won’t do it, get the advice from somebody else you can depend on. Senator Jones agrees with you that California is the most promising stock to buy, though of course it may not be by the time my letter reaches you. Use your [judgment. Don’t] buy on time, but only buy what you can pay cash down for.1

I invested all the money I had a month ago, in Illinois.2 I only venture this present small amount in stocks because I’m short. If I had $20,000 in bank I think I would not be afraid to venture it the way things look out there.

I can’t catch Bliss at home, lately, but shall try again tomorrow or next day. However, I know what he will say—viz., that he is hurrying up the engravings & can’t do anything until they are done.

Here comes a devil s to visit me3—so I’ll say good bye my boy.

Yrs

Mark.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 Between 1873 and 1875 the California and Consolidated Virginia mines were two of Nevada’s richest ore producers, and the price of their shares boomed, reaching a high of $780 and $700, respectively, in January 1875. After that the shares of both began to fall precipitously in value, a decline that was hastened by the destruction of Virginia City by fire in October 1875. In investing in these companies now, Clemens anticipated a recovery in share value that did not come, so that this speculation, like his mining ventures in Nevada in the early 1860s, proved unprofitable (see 7 Mar 76, 26 Mar 76, and 29 Nov 76, all to Wright; Angel 1881,612, 617–20; L1, 122–267, passim). John P. Jones, the multimillionaire mine owner and Republican senator from Nevada, had joined Clemens in 1875 in investing, unsuccessfully, in the Hartford Accident Insurance Company (see L6, 171–72, 439 n. 5).

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2 No record of this investment has been found.

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3 Unidentified.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Copy-text:

MS, CLjC.

Previous publication: Berkove 1988, 9.

Provenance:The MS was one of nine letters from Clemens to Wright which after Wright’s death “were left with his daughter, Mell Evans. She, in turn, passed them on to her daughter, Irma Evans Morris. Effie Mona Mack learned of them while doing research for Mark Twain in Nevada [(Mack 1947)], and purchased photographic negatives of them” (Berkove 1988, 4, 18 n. 1). Mrs. Morris bequeathed the letters to her three children. After Evans Morris’s death in 1990, the letters were sold, and most were purchased from Admirable Books in March 1993 by CLjC.

Emendations and textual notes:

judgment. Don’t • judgment.—|Don’t