To Catherine C. (Kate) Lampton
and Annie E. and Samuel E. Moffett
2? November 1866 • Virginia City, Nev.
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00111)

[first four MS pages (about 400 words) missing] 1

will all come straight anyway. How is old Moses that was rescued from the bulrushes & keeps a [second-hand ]clothing-store in Market Street?2

Dear Sammy—Keep up your lick & you will become a great minister of the gospel some day, & then I shall be satisfied. I wanted to be a minister myself—it was the only genuine ambition I ever had—but somehow I never had any qualification for it but the ambition. I always missed fire on the ministry. Then I hoped some member of the family would take hold of it & succeed. Orion would make a preacher, [& I am ready to swear he will never make anything else in the world. But he won’t touch ]it. I am utterly & completely disgusted with a member of the family who could [ be carry ]out my old ambition & won’t. If I only had his chance, I would make the abandoned sinner get up & howl. But you may succeed, & I am determined Pamela shall make you try it anyhow.

Yrs Affly

Sam.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 This is almost certainly the letter to “Annie & Sammy & Katie” mentioned in the next letter. Kate Lampton (b. 1856), Clemens’s first cousin, was the daughter of James A. H. Lampton and Ella Hunter Lampton (Inds, biographical directory). She may have kept some or all of the pages missing here.

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2 Annie Moffett later recalled this long-standing joke, dating from Clemens’s piloting days:

I was very fond of Uncle Sam, but I did not think he was the genius of the family. I remember when I was about eight I thought he needed a little religious instruction and started to tell him the story of Moses. Uncle Sam was strangely obtuse, and finally I went to my father and said, “Papa, Uncle Orion has good sense and Mama has good sense, but I don’t think Uncle Sam has good sense. I told him the story of Moses and the bullrushes and he said he knew Moses very well, that he kept a secondhand store on Market Street. I tried very hard to explain that it wasn’t the Moses I meant, but he just couldn’t understand.” (MTBus, 38–39)

In the model letter attributed to her in “An Open Letter to the American People,” Annie assures her uncle: “If you was here I could tell you about Moses in the Bulrushers again, I know it better, now” (New York Weekly Review, 17 Feb 66).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, pp. 5–6, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV). MS pages 1–4 are lost. The extant MS is a single leaf inscribed on both sides and numbered ‘5’ on the recto.

Previous publication: L1, 367–368.

Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.

Emendations and textual notes:

second-hand • second-|hand

& I . . . touch • [crossed out with a large penciled X, probably by Orion Clemens; the letter was written in ink]

be carry • [‘ca’ over ‘be’]