To William Dean Howells
22 February 1877 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS, correspondence card: OFH, UCCL 01533)

‸P.S.—I suppose you got our letter about the March visit a week or two ago?‸1

Hartford, Feb. 22.

slc

My dear Howells:

Here’s a shout for Hayes! The fact is I was afraid to shout by telegraph last Sunday, I have been fooled so often.2 I hope he will put Lt. Col. Richard Irwin Dodge (Author of “The Great Plains & their Inhabitants”) at the head of the Indian Department.3 There’s a man who knows all about Indians, & yet has some humanity in him——(knowledge of Indians, & humanity, & ‸are‸ seldom found in the same individual). Come!—it is high time we were fixing up this cabinet, my boy.

Look here—send postal to say you & the madam will be he [here] 2d or 3d of March—do, now, please. The play is done. We are plotting out another one.4

Yrs Evrer

Mark.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1No such letter is extant. See 26 Feb 1877 to Howells, n. 1.

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2Presumably “last Sunday” (18 February) was when Clemens learned that the Electoral Commission had awarded Louisiana’s eight electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes. The commission was still investigating the disputed votes of Oregon and South Carolina, and did not declare Hayes the winner of the election until 28 February (“Louisiana for Hayes,” New York Tribune, 17 Feb 1877, 1; 9 Aug 1876 to Howells, n. 1; 9 Nov 1876 to Howells, n. 1).

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3In January, Richard Irving Dodge (1827-95) had published The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. Clemens’s copy, with his marginalia, is in the Mark Twain Library, in Redding, Connecticut. It was one of his sources in 1884 when he wrote “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians.” Howells wrote to President Hayes on 24 February, enclosing Clemens’s recommendation with the comment, “Here is Mark Twain’s contribution to your cabinet-works” (OFH). Dodge, a career army officer, was probably not seeking, nor did he receive, a government appointment (Dodge 1877; Kime 1990; Inds, 33-81, 271-72, 275; MTHL, 1:172-73 n. 2). See also Driscoll 2018, 195-96.

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4The finished play was Clemens’s and Bret Harte’s Ah Sin. The plotted second collaboration never came about. In a late February 1877 letter (which is not known to survive), Clemens, after denying Harte a loan, made an offer that Harte rejected in an angry letter of 1 March. For a transcription of Harte’s letter see 27 Feb 1877 to PAM, n. 3.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, correspondence card, OFH.

Previous publication:

Richardson 1942, no page; Davis 1950, 2.

Provenance:

Opened in 1916, bib13793 preserves President Rutherford B. Hayes’s “12,000 volume personal library along with archival material from his military and political career, particularly his presidency, 1877-1881.”

Emendations and textual notes:

here • he here [corrected miswriting]