SLC’s older brother Orion (pronounced O´-ree-ən) was born in Gainesboro, Tennessee. After the Clemens family’s move to Hannibal, Missouri, he was apprenticed to a printer. In 1850 he purchased the Hannibal Western Union, and the following year became the owner of the Hannibal Journal as well, employing SLC and Henry, their younger brother, as typesetters. In 1853, shortly after SLC left home to travel, he moved with his mother and Henry to Muscatine, Iowa. There he married Mary (Mollie) Stotts, who bore him a daughter, Jennie, in 1855. He campaigned for Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860, and through the influence of a friend was rewarded with an appointment as secretary of the newly formed Nevada Territory (1861). Mollie and Jennie joined him there in 1862; Jennie died in 1864 of spotted fever. That year Nevada became a state, and Orion could not obtain a post comparable to his Territorial position. Over the next two decades he struggled to earn a living as a proofreader, inventor, chicken farmer, lawyer, lecturer, and author. From the mid-1870s until his death in 1897, Orion was supported by an amused and exasperated SLC, who said that “he was always honest and honorable,” but “he was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth.”