1 The letter that Clemens answered is not known to survive. He probably replied soon after his return to Hartford from Boston late on the night of 16 November. For his response to accusations that he did not write the Gilded Age play, see 3 Nov 74 to the editor of the Hartford Evening Post.

2 Jane Clemens had written to Watterson after reading his comments to Clemens about his connection with the Lampton family (see 8? Nov 74 to Watterson). Watterson now replied, sending his answer first to Clemens, with a cover letter asking him to “re-post” it to Jane. Only the cover letter is known to survive and is transcribed here because Clemens wrote a brief note to his mother on the back. This document was among his papers when he died, suggesting that it may never have been sent, or if sent, was eventually returned to him. Clemens certainly did send the enclosure, Watterson’s letter containing the “geneological revellations.” The exact sequence is not known, but he could have sent the letter first to Orion in Keokuk, who in turn wrote a note to their mother on the back and sent it to her, or Jane could have sent it independently to Orion, who returned it with his note. Watterson’s original was in the Samuel C. Webster Collection in the 1940s, and Orion’s note on it was transcribed from the original, probably by Bernard DeVoto’s assistant, Rosamond H. Chapman. If Chapman also transcribed Watterson’s note, her typescript has been lost, but she did clearly describe Orion’s note as “on back of letter from Henry Watterson to Mrs. Jane Clemens, written on 1/h of Courier-Journal, Louisville.” The original is not now in the inventory of the Webster Collection, which was given to Vassar College in 1977 as part of the Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers. As transcribed, Orion’s note to Jane reads:

Someone in the Clemens family eventually provided this correct information to Watterson, whose later explanation of the relationship conformed with Orion’s (Watterson 1910, 372).

3 Probably Mitchell Mortimer Lampton (1819–85), the younger brother of James Lampton, and therefore also a first cousin to Jane Clemens. “Crow-whiskey” was the popular sour-mash bourbon first produced in Kentucky in the 1820s by Scottish-born physician and chemist James C. Crow (1789–1856), and later marketed as “Old Crow” (Lampton 1990, 4, 140; Carson, 46–47; Cowdery, 3–4).