The Clemens family did not begin this trip, which provided the raw material for A Tramp Abroad (SLC 1880c), until April of 1878. The recent letter from Raymond that Clemens evidently answered, which proposed a meeting to discuss a revised contract for Colonel Sellers, has not been found. But Clemens also readdressed some of the issues that Raymond had raised in an earlier letter (CtHMTH):

UCLC 32423

Clemens’s 20 September 1876 letter and enclosed contracts are not known to survive. His answer, also lost, to Raymond’s 25 September letter presumably left unsettled just the two issues that he now attempted to resolve: the “Laura clause” and a commitment to prosecute piracies—that is, unauthorized Gilded Age plays. He had stopped one such piracy, in Salt Lake City, in February 1875 (see see 6 or 7 Feb 1875 and 8 Feb 1875 to Tilford and Hagen [1st, 2nd, and 3rd of 3], L6, 371–76). Unauthorized productions had continued, however. For example, on 29 September 1876, “Mark Twain’s Gilded Age” was performed at the Opera House in Warsaw, Indiana, with the husband and wife team of James A. Lord and Louie Lord as Colonel Sellers and Laura Hawkins (playbill in CU-MARK, courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell; Malin 1956, 251, 255, 257–58). It is not known if Raymond was aware of that performance. The Colonel Sellers contract actually in force by the early fall of 1877 gave Clemens 50 percent of the play’s profits. By the terms of a contract of 11 March 1878, however, his share was reduced to 20 percent (agreement with H.W. Bergen dated 21 Sept 1877, CU-MARK, transcribed in 21 Sept 1877 to Perkins, n. 1; 16 Mar 1878 to Raymond).