1

Lewis Jacob Cist (1818–85), a poet as well as a banker and government official in St. Louis and Cincinnati, amassed a collection of more than eleven thousand autographs and portraits (VAB 2005). The letter from him that Clemens answered is now lost.

2

In fact the St. Louis Missouri Republican had published at least five contributions by Clemens between 1858 and 1867: on 22 October 1858 a piece of chatty river correspondence (signed “C.”), written while he was serving as steersman on the packet John H. Dickey; on 27 May 1860 a brief, matter-of-fact river report signed by him and Wesley Jacobs, his City of Memphis copilot; on 30 August 1860 a subtly humorous “Pilot’s Memoranda,” signed by him and J. W. Hood, his Arago copilot; on 17 March 1867 “Cruelty to Strangers,” a letter to the editor, signed with his pen name, making a punning complaint about a local prohibition of “lying on the grass”; and on 24 March 1867 “Explanatory,” also a letter to the editor signed with his pen name, humorously announcing a 25 March St. Louis performance of his Sandwich Islands lecture (SLC 1858; SLC 1860a; SLC 1860b; SLC 1867d; SLC 1867e; Branch 1982, 199–201; ET&S1, 142–45). Clemens is not now believed to have written “Special River Correspondence,” which appeared in the paper on 8 September 1860 and has been attributed to him (Ganzel 1967, 396–400).

3

Clemens first used his pen name on a letter from Carson City, Nevada Territory, published by the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise on 3 February 1863 (SLC 1863; 16 Feb 1863 to JLC and PAM, L1, 245–46 n. 1).

4Cist’s apparent request for a “letter-sheet”—which could be more than one size—has not been explained. Clemens wrote on a folded sheet of paper, using one page measuring about five by eight inches.