To Pamela A. Moffett
20 and 21 August 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS and MS facsimile: NPV and Davis, UCCL 00336)

Buffalo, Aug. 20.

My Dear Sister—

I have only time to write a line. I got your letter this morning & mailed it to Livy.1 She will be expecting me to-night & I am sorry to disappoint her so, but then I could not well get away. I will go next Saturday.

I have bundled up Livy’s picture & will try & recollect to mail it to-morrow. It is a porcelaintype & I think you will like it.2

I am sorry I never got to St Louis, because I may be too busy to go for a long time. But I have been busy all the time & St Louis is clear out of the way, & remote from the world & all ordinary routes of travel.3 It You must not place too much weight upon this idea of moving the capital from Washington. St. Louis is in some respects a better place for it than Washington though there isn’t more than a toss-up between the two after all. One is dead & the other in a trance. But Washington is in the centre of population & business, while St Louis is far removed from both. And you know there is no geographical centre any more. The railroads ‸& telegraphs‸ have done away with all that. It is no longer a matter of sufficient importantce to be gravely considered by thinking men. The only centres, now, are narrowed down to those of intelligence, capital & population. As I said before Washington is the nearest to those—& you don’t have to paddle across a river on ferry boats of a pattern popular in the dark ages to get to it, nor have to clamber up vilely paved hills in nasty rascally omnibuses along with a herd of all sorts of people after you are [there. Secondly], The removal of the capital is one of those old, regular, reliable dodges that are the bread & meat of back country congressmen. It is agitated every year. It always has been, it always will [be. Thirdly ] It is not new in any respect. Thirdly, The Capitol ‸has‸ cost $40,000,000 already & lacks a good deal of being finished, yet. There are single stones in the Treasury building (& a good many of them,) that cost twenty-seven thousand dollars apiece—& millions were spent in the construction of that & the Patent Office & the other great government buildings. To move to St Louis the country must throw away a hundred millions of capital invested in these buildings, & go right to work to spend a hundred millions on new buildings in St Louis. Shall we ever have a Congress a majority of whose members are hopelessly insane? Probably not. But it is possible—unquestionably such a thing is possible. Only I don’t believe it will happen in our time, & I am satisfied the capital will not be moved until it does happen. But if St. Louis would donate the ground & the buildings, it would be a different matter. It [would] take the “helft” of St Louis to be worth the money, though. No, Pamela, I don’t see any good reason to believe you or I will ever see the capital moved.4

I have twice instructed the publishers to send Ma a book—it was the first thing I did—long before the proofs were finished. Write me if it is not yet done.

Livy says we must have you all at our marriage,—& I say we can’t. It will be at Christmas or [New Years], when such a trip across the country would be [equivalent] to murder & arson & everything [else. And] it would cost five hundred dollars—an amount of money she don’t know the value of now, but will before a year is gone. She grieves over it, poor little rascal, but I it can’t be helped. She must wait awhile, till I am firmly on my legs, & then she shall see you. She says her father & mother will invite you just as soon as the wedding date is definitely fixed, anyway—& she thinks that’s bound to settle it.5 But the ice & snow, & the long hard journey, & the injudiciousness of laying out any money except what we are obliged to part with while we are so much in debt, settles the case differently. For it is a debt. Mr. Langdon is just as good as bound for $25,000 for me, & has already p advanced half of it in cash. I wrote & asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due-bill, or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record—& he answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly but never replied to that at all. Still, I shall give my note into the hands of his business agent here,6 & pay him the interest as it falls due. We must “go slow.” We are not in the Cleveland Herald. We are a hundred thousand times better off, but there isn’t so much money in [it. I] have partners I have the a strong liking & the highest respect for. I am well satisfied.

Do you receive the paper? Have ordered it sent to you.

I enclose the key of the trunk, & Mollie is welcome to all the shirts she can find in it or in the valise—but I do not think there are any. I do not want any of the clothing, Pamela, except the summer clothing—I mean the white linen vests & pants & coats (for if they ain’t there I don’t know what has become of them. I had to buy a lot new lot of vests this summer.) Lay the [ ◇◇ ] summer clothing to one side till next summer.

Don’t tumble the manuscripts any more than you can help—but search out & send me my account of the Deluge (it is a diary kept by Shem). There are 70 or 80 pages of it. It [is no] account now, but I shall make it so before I am done with it—there is substance there for a telling article.7

The family all seem to know & like Orion particularly well, & want to see him. They naturally want to see all of you. Livy has an adopted sister (Mrs. Crane,) who is the counterpart of Livy in purity of heart, goodness, unselfishness & thorough loveliness of character. I suppose, some day, you will do as everybody else does, worship Susie Crane. From morning till night that little woman is busy—& always for somebody else: making bouquets for the poo church, or a corp[s]e—visiting the poor & relieving them—nursing the sick—hunting up the needy & the suffering—thieving Livy’s work clandestinely & doing it for her—decking the house with flowers when I am coming, or at least managing to gouge more than half the labor out of Livy’s hands—forever doing something for somebody, & withal so quietly, & so daintily & secretly, that you only detect her late presence that she has been about [ w ] by a sort of nameless exquisite grace that in her handiwork leaves in the ordering & arrangement of inanimate things—a charm, a something that is suggestive of a fragrance still haunting a spot where a bouquet has been. Twenty-three years those girls have lived together without a bitter thought or a harsh word toward each other, & yet no blood relationship existing between them.

But I must go to bed. I always get up at 7 now, & breakfast at half-past. It is toward 2 in the morning at this moment. Give my love to all the household, & tell Margaret I didn’t mean to disappoint her & behave so badly, but I got bothered & delayed.

Affectionately

Sam

[new page, in ink: ]

morning express $10 per annum.office of the express printing company

evening express $8 per annum.no. 14 east swan street.

weekly express $1.50 per annum.

buffalo, Aug. 21 186 9.

P.S.—

T I forgot that this letter of my publisher a week ago, explains where you are to get that book if Hutchinson has not already sent it to you. Show Hutchinson this note from Bliss.8

Sam.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Pamela’s letter has not been found. Clemens must have enclosed it in one of two letters to Olivia, docket numbers 102 and 103, now lost.

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2 Probably a copy of one of the porcelaintypes Clemens had received earlier in the year (see 22 Jan 69 to OLL, n. 1, and 15 May 69 to OLL [2nd of 2], n. 2). The likeness was to be his family’s introduction to Olivia, a reenactment of his own first glimpse of her (see L2, 145 n. 3).

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3 Clemens had sent his baggage to St. Louis on 24 June, expecting to follow shortly (see 26 June 69 to JLC and PAM).

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4 On 5 July the Chicago Tribune had begun, in concert with other midwestern newspapers and local politicians, to urge the removal of the capital, not to Chicago, but to St. Louis, exciting the hopes of residents there. By 13 August supporters of the move had called for a national convention in St. Louis on 20 October. Two of the matters under general discussion were the value of existing government buildings and the cost of removal. Clemens evidently got his estimates from the Buffalo Express’s newspaper exchanges. He concluded here that it would take the “Hälfte,” or half, of St. Louis to make the move financially feasible. The day after Clemens wrote this portion of his letter, the Express published an editorial probably written by him, perhaps in collaboration with Josephus Larned (see 21 Aug 69 to OLL), that echoed these remarks to his sister:

The “question” of removing the national capital (together with its seventy-five millions of dollars’ worth of national buildings, of course,) is again being discussed by some of the country papers in the back settlements, incited to it by the St. Louis papers. There is nothing to be alarmed about in this thing. The question of removing the capital of the nation out in the woods somewhere comes up regularly once a year, and will continue to do so until the final judgment. (SLC 1869)

(Chicago Tribune: “Removal of the Capital,” 5 July 69, 2; “The National Capital,” 11 Aug 69, 2; “The National Capital Movement,” 13 Aug 69, 1; Buffalo Express: “Removal of the Capital,” 17 Aug 69, 2.)

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5 Within a day, however, Clemens named a wedding date (though, as it turned out, not the actual one) in his letter to Henry Abbey. It seems likely that he here intentionally withheld it from his family.

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6 John D. F. Slee.

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7 In late July 1866, Clemens recorded in his notebook his earliest known plan for a “Deluge” piece, a project he returned to recurrently throughout his life: “Conversation between the carpenters of Noah’s Ark, laughing at him for an old visionary—his money as good as anybody’s though going to bust himself on this crazy enterprise” (N&J 1, 147). This letter is the first evidence of his having written a substantial portion of the narrative. Pamela evidently complied with his request for the manuscript and within five months Clemens decided he had the material for more than just a “telling article”: “I mean to take plenty of time & pains with the Noah’s Ark book—maybe it will be several years before it is all written—but it will be a perfect lightning-striker when it is done” (22 Jan 70 to Elisha Bliss, Jr., CU-MARK, in MTLP, 29). In late 1870 he included a part of the manuscript, known only as “Pre-flood show,” in the printer’s copy for a sketchbook he wanted Bliss to publish but later abandoned (ET&S 1, 574–75, 584–85). Seventeen years later he described as still “unfinished” a narrative, all of whose action “takes place in Noah’s ark,” which he then thought had occupied him for “sixteen years” (14 May 87 to Jeannette Gilder, unmailed letter, CU-MARK, in MTL, 2:486–87), and in 1909 he recalled, again somewhat inaccurately: “As to that ‘Noah’s Ark’ book, I began it in Edinburgh in 1873; I don’t know where the manuscript is, now. It was a Diary, which professed to be the work of Shem, but wasn’t. I began it again several months ago, but only for recreation; I hadn’t any intention of carrying it to a finish—or even to the end of the first chapter, in fact” (SLC 1909, 6–7). Fragments of this long-germinating book survive in the Mark Twain Papers and portions were included by Bernard DeVoto in “Papers of the Adam Family” (LE, 57–114).

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8 The enclosed letter from Bliss, evidently written on 14 August, does not survive. Francis A. Hutchinson of F. A. Hutchinson and Company, subscription book publishers, handled sales of The Innocents Abroad in St. Louis (“The Innocents Abroad,” St. Louis Central Baptist, 19 Aug 69, 1; Richard Edwards 1869, 431; Richard Edwards 1870, 461, 1066).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, pages 1–8 and 13, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV), is copy-text for ‘Buffalo ... strong’ and ‘morning ... Sam.’ (310.1–311.34 and 313.2–10). MS facsimile, pages 9–12, is copy-text for ‘liking ... Sam’ (311.34–312.35). The editors have not seen this portion of the MS, but in 1977 Chester L. Davis, Sr., then executive secretary of the Mark Twain Research Foundation in Perry, Mo., provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers.

Previous publication: L3, 310–314; MTB, 1:386, brief excerpt; MTL, 160–62, with omissions; MTMF, 102, brief excerpt; Davis 1978, with omission.

Provenance:for MS pages 1–8 and 13, see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 583–85. Pages 9–12 were evidently returned to Clemens by Pamela Moffett, for they survived in the Samossoud Collection at least until 1947: sometime between then and 1949 Dixon Wecter saw them and had a typescript made (now in CU-MARK). Davis afterwards acquired the pages directly from Clara Clemens Samossoud (see Samossoud Collection, p. 586).

Emendations and textual notes:

there. Secondly • there.—Secondly

be. Thirdly • be.—| Thirdly

New Years • [sic]

equivalent • equvivalent

else. And • else.—|And

it. I • it.—|I

◇◇ • [possibly ‘tru’; partly formed ‘u’]

is no • is ‸of‸ no [insertion not in Clemens’s hand]

w • [possibly ‘m’ or ‘in’]