1 This letter is dated on the evidence of other November correspondence between Watterson, Clemens, and Jane Clemens. Its allusion to “a certain mutual kinsman” indicates that it was probably a reply to the now lost letter from Watterson (described by Clemens in his letter to Parish of 10 November) in which he claimed kinship with the Clemens family through James J. Lampton, the prototype of Colonel Sellers. Lampton was one of Jane Clemens’s first cousins: her father, Benjamin Lampton, was the brother of Lewis Lampton, James’s father. James’s mother was the sister of Watterson’s maternal grandmother, Mary Morrison (L5, 372–73 n. 1, 412–13 n. 4).

2 Clemens explained his use of the name “Mulberry” in his preface to The American Claimant (SLC 1892, vii):

Although nothing is known about the “member of the race” who objected to “Beriah,” the history of the objection to “Eschol” is fully documented. In the late 1890s Clemens recalled that Warner named the original character “Eschol” after “a farmer in a cheap & humble way” whom he had met ten years earlier “in a remote corner of the West.” But while the book was still in press, “a college-bred gentleman of courtly manners & ducal upholstery arrived in Hartford in a sultry state of mind & with a libel suit in his eye, & his name was Eschol Sellers!” (SLC 1897–98, 23–24). This Sellers, a member of a wealthy Philadelphia family, happened to be an acquaintance of Warner’s, through a mutual friend. While the book was still in press, this friend saw an agent’s prospectus, and alerted Sellers to the use of his name. Sellers, believing himself to be the namesake of the character, wrote Warner to protest, threatening a lawsuit. (Six letters between Sellers and Warner, all written in January 1874, survive at PPAmP.) Bliss thereupon agreed to substitute “Beriah” for “Eschol” in the plates. An inaccurate newspaper account circulated in 1875 claimed that it was Clemens who had met the Philadelphia Sellers “in the East somewhere, and from the peculiarities of the man was induced to appropriate his name” (“Colonel Mulberry Sellers,” Boston Advertiser, 21 Apr 75, 2, reprinting the Evansville [Wis.] Courier of unknown date). For further discussion, see Lampton 1989, 50–54.