1 Orion responded to his brother on 7 July:

Orion proposed trying to perfect the family’s title by leasing the land in “160 acre tracts and settling immigrants on them with seven or eight years’ leases. . . . How would it do to propose to Mr. Langdon an equal copartnership—we to furnish the land and he the means to colonize?—Provided we make no other disposition of the land before next April, as, until that time, it is locked up in the hands of Merriman & Co.” And he closed by reiterating the terms of his agreement with the St. Louis land agents, which Jervis Langdon had found questionable: “If Merriman & Co. sell for a dollar an acre, we give them 5 pr ct. If they sell for over a dollar we give them half of all over, provided their commission shall not be less than 5 pr ct.” (CU-MARK). Langdon’s response to Orions’s “equal copartnership” proposal is not known. In November 1869, Clemens declined to involve him in any sort of purchase, although he agreed to approach him about mining the coal on the land (see 9 Nov 69 to PAM).

2 In his 7 July letter, Orion promised his brother: “We can fix you a nice, quiet place to write your lecture. A friend, Mr. Woodward, having gone with his family to spend the summer in the North, Mollie and I have taken the house till they come back, about the first of September. It is a three story brick.” On the same day, he wrote Mollie that in offering the room, “I did not say where, meaning to leave that to you. The 2 Second story rooms are Miss Brackett’s” (CU-MARK). The house of Calvin M. Woodward, a professor of geometry and drawing at Washington University, was at 1501 Chesnut Street, where Orion and Mollie stayed until early September, when they moved to Pamela Moffett’s house at 1511 Pine. “Miss Brackett” was probably Anna C. Brackett, a public school teacher (Richard Edwards 1868, 187; Richard Edwards 1869, 87, 829; Richard Edwards 1870, 71, 940; William Stotts to OC and MEC, 5 Sept 69, CU-MARK).