To the California Pioneers
11 October 1869 • Elmira, N.Y.
(New York Tribune, 14 Oct 69, UCCL 00363)

Elmira, Oct. 11, 1869.

To the California Pioneers.1

Gentlemen: Circumstances render it out of my power to take advantage of the invitation extended to me through Mr. Simonton, [& ]be present at your dinner in [New York].2 I regret this very much, for there are several among you whom I would have a right to join hands with on the score of old friendship,3 & I suppose I would have a sublime general right to shake hands with the rest of you on the score of kinship in Californian ups & downs in search of fortune. If I were to tell some of my experiences, you would recognize Californian blood in me, I fancy. The old, old story would sound familiar, no doubt. I have the usual stock of reminiscences. For instance: I went to Esmeralda early. I purchased largely in the “Wide West,” the “Winnemucca,” & other fine claims, & was very wealthy.4 I fared sumptuously on bread when flour was $200 a barrel, & had beans every Sunday when none but bloated aristocrats could afford such grandeur. But I finished by feeding batteries in a quartz-mill at $15 a week, & wishing I was a battery myself & had somebody to feed me.5 My claims in Esmeralda are there yet. I suppose I could be persuaded to sell. I went to the Humboldt District when it was new. I became largely interested in the “Alba Nueva,” & other claims with gorgeous names, & was rich again—in prospect. I owned a vast mining property there. I would not have sold out for less than $400,000, at that time—but I will now. Finally I walked home—some 200 miles—partly for exercise & partly because stage fares were expensive.6 Next I entered upon an affluent career in Virginia City, & by a judicious investment of labor & the capital of friends, became the owner of about all the worthless wildcat mines there were in that part of the country. Assessments did the business for me there. There were 117 assessments to one dividend, & the proportion of income to outlay was a little against me. My financial thermometer went down to 32 Farenheit, & the subscriber was frozen out. I took up extension[s] on the main lead—extensions that reached to British America in one direction & to the Isthmus of Panama in the other—& I verily believe I would have been a rich man if I had ever found those infernal extensions. But I did n’t. I ran tunnels till I tapped the Arctic Ocean, & I sunk shafts till I broke through the roof of perdition, but those extensions turned up missing every time. I am willing to sell all that property, & throw in the improvements. Perhaps you remember the celebrated “North Ophir?” I bought that mine. It was very rich in pure silver. You could take it out in lumps as large as a filbert. But when it was discovered that those lumps were melted half-dollars, & hardly melted at that, a painful case of “saltin” was apparent, & the undersigned adjourned to the poor-house again.7 I paid assessments on “Hale & Norcross” till they sold me out, & I had to take in washing for a living—& the next month that infamous stock went up to $7,000 a foot.8 I own millions & millions of feet of affluent silver leads in Nevada—in fact I own the entire undercrust of that country, nearly, & if Congress would move that State off my property so that I could get at it, I would be wealthy yet. But no, there she squats—& here am I. Failing health persuades me to sell. If you know of any one desiring a permanent investment, I can furnish him one that will have the virtue of being [eternal].

I have been through the Californian mill, with all its “dips, spurs, & angles, variations, & sinuosities.”9 I have worked there at all the different trades & professions known to the catalogue. I have been everything, from a newspaper editor10 down to cowcatcher on a locomotive, & I am encouraged to believe that if there had been a few more occupations to experiment on, I might have made a dazzling success at last, & found out what mysterious design Providence had in view in creating me.

But you perceive that although I am not a pioneer, I have had a sufficiently variegated time of it to enable me to talk pioneer like a native, & feel like a Forty-Niner. Therefore, I cordially welcome you to your old remembered homes & your long-deserted firesides, & close this screed with the sincere hope that your visit here will be a happy one, & unembittered by the sorrowful surprises that absence & lapse of years are wont to prepare for wanderers; surprises which come in the form of old friends missed from their places; silence where familiar voices should be; the young grown old; change & decay everywhere; home a delusion & a disappointment; strangers at the hearth-stone; sorrow where gladness was; tears for laughter; the melancholy pomp of death where the grace of life had been!

With all good wishes for the Returned Prodigals, & regrets that I cannot partake of a small piece of the fatted calf (rare & no gravy),11 I am, yours cordially,

Mark Twain.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Approximately two hundred members of the Society of California Pioneers (individuals who emigrated to California before the end of 1849) arrived in New York City by overland railway on 23 September, having departed Sacramento one week before (“Home Again,” New York Times, 23 Sept 69, 2). On 22 September and again on 27 September, Clemens had reported on their trip in his “People and Things” column in the Buffalo Express: “The California Pioneers are on their way to the Atlantic States”; “The Pioneers have arrived in New York” (SLC 1869 [MT00830], 1869 [MT00835]). And he published the following item in the Express on 29 September:

THE CALIFORNIA PIONEERS.

These gentlemen, being an association of persons who went to California with the first gold excitement, hold an anniversary meeting on each 9th of September, and over their champagne recount the stirring deeds of the “Early days.” Apropos of the excursion party of a hundred of them, which reached New York overland, a day or two ago, we drop in this gently sarcastic paragraph from the Overland Monthly:

One can not but admire, on the whole, the heroic manner in which the Society of California Pioneers grapple with the Past, Present and Future of the State annually on the ninth day of September. The prospect of yearly going over the same field of retrospect—not in itself very wide or very long—would, we think, deter any but really very courageous or very self devoted men from the task. This year they got through it very creditably, with the usual prophecy of a brilliant future, and the usual bland indorsement of every thing and every body connected with the State.

Of course these anniversaries are stimulating to patriotism and local pride; but we have yet to learn that California patriotism and local pride require any stimulating, and are doubtful whether a Society for the Suppression of Local Pride would not, on the whole, be more truly beneficial to a State whose natives think nothing of seriously asking strangers “if this is not the most wonderful country on the globe?”—and who write indignant and provincial letters to the newspapers when lecturers do not flatter them. And we confess to indulging in a fond and foolish dream of the future—based not so much upon the Pioneers’ oration as upon the Pioneers’ projected excursion over the Pacific Railroad to their old Eastern homes—when California Pioneers shall be able to see that the world has not stood still, outside of California, for the last twenty years; that there are cities as large as San Francisco much more cleanly in aspect and tasteful in exterior; that there are communities as young as ours in which there is a greater proportion of public spirited and generous men, and public spirited and generous works; that there are cities of half our wealth that, boasting less and doing more, would be ashamed to keep their public library for twelve months before the world in the attitude of bankruptcy, and that there are countries less self-heralded for their generosity and charity that would not dare to invite immigration to their doors without a public hospital to take care of their sick and suffering. (SLC 1869 [MT00837])

The two “gently sarcastic” paragraphs, by Bret Harte, had appeared in the Overland Monthly for October 1869 (Harte 1869, 383; Thomas, 1:114, 143–44).

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2 On the evening of 13 October about one-fourth of the party of pioneers attended an elaborate banquet, at Lorenzo Delmonico’s restaurant at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, given by some seventy to one hundred New York residents formerly of California. James William Simonton (1823–82), who read Clemens’s letter at the banquet, had become a proprietor of the New York Times soon after its founding in 1851 and then served as its Washington correspondent until he went to California, where in 1859 he became a co-owner of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. In 1867, while retaining his interest in the Bulletin, he returned to New York to become general agent of the Associated Press, a position he held for fourteen years. Late in 1869 Simonton also became a co-owner of the San Francisco Morning Call (“The California Pioneers,” New York Times, 14 Oct 69, 7; “The California Pioneers,” New York Tribune, 14 Oct 69, 5; Lloyd Morris, 28; Gody, Harvey, and Reed, 200, 206; Mott 1950, 278; “General Telegraphic News,” New York Tribune, 7 Dec 69, 7).

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3 Clemens had probably seen the New York Times article of 23 September that identified the excursionists (“Home Again,” 2), including at least four whom he knew personally: Sacramento lawyer James W. Coffroth and, from San Francisco, undertaker Atkins Massey, physician Stephen R. Harris, and policeman Henry H. Ellis (L1, 313; CofC, 234, 273; Branch 1959, 143).

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4 The celebrated Wide West and Winnemucca mines were located in the Esmeralda mining district, an area claimed by both Esmeralda County, Nevada Territory, and Mono County, California, when Clemens was there in September 1861 and then from April to September 1862. He and his brother Orion purchased feet nominally worth $5,000 in at least thirty different ledges in the region, including an extension of the Winnemucca. There is no record of his having “purchased largely,” if at all, in the Wide West. Ultimately, the fabulous riches he anticipated from his Esmeralda claims eluded him (L1, 187 n. 2, 217 nn. 2, 3; mining deeds in CU-MARK; Branch 1985).

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5 For a week in June 1862, Clemens worked at Clayton’s Mill, near Aurora, in the Esmeralda district, in hopes of learning the process for reducing silver ore developed by its proprietor, Joshua E. Clayton. In chapter 36 of Roughing It, he described the “tedious and laborious” routine of the mill (L1, 188 n. 9, 193, 216, 219, 225).

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6 Clemens explored the mining area of Humboldt County, Nevada Territory, in the winter of 1861–62. He and Orion eventually owned feet in at least fifteen mining claims there, including the Alba Nueva. For his accounts of his Humboldt experiences, which did not include a walk “home” to Carson City, see his letter of 30 January 1862 to his mother (L1, 146–52) and chapters 27–33 of Roughing It (L1, 167 n. 2, 190, 191 n. 5; mining deeds in CU-MARK).

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7 Clemens alluded to this incident of “salting” in a letter to the Chicago Republican in May 1868 (SLC 1868). Four years later he told about it again in chapter 44 of Roughing It. There is no record that he actually purchased an interest in the North Ophir, which was near Virginia City, but in July 1863 he received five feet in that mine, evidently in exchange for “puffing” it in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (L1, 260).

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8 The Hale and Norcross Silver Mining Company frequently assessed its shareholders in order to raise capital to work its claim near Virginia City. In the mid-1860s Clemens had difficulty meeting assessments of $25, and sometimes $50, per share every two months: in October 1864 four shares he had put in his brother’s name were advertised as delinquent before he managed to pay the assessed $100 himself, and in May 1865 two shares in his own name evidently were auctioned to pay off a delinquent $50. Nevertheless, he may have realized something from his Hale and Norcross investment, for when he left San Francisco temporarily in December 1864 he had $300 that possibly came from sale of that stock. And in May 1868 he told the Chicago Republican: “Hale & Norcross, whereof I sold six feet at three hundred dollars a foot, is worth two thousand, now, and was up to seven thousand during the winter” (SLC 1868; L1, 300–301 n. 4, 309 n. 5, 316 n. 5, 319 n. 5, 320).

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9 The formulaic language used in recording a mining claim (see Roughing It, chapter 29), and also in deeds to claims.

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10 Clemens was local reporter, or editor, of the San Francisco Morning Call from June to October 1864 (CofC, 1–2).

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11 The Prodigal Son “took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living,” but returned to his father’s house, where he was forgiven and was fed on “the fatted calf” (Luke 15: 11–32).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

“The California Pioneers,” New York Tribune, 14 Oct 69, 5. The Tribune was most likely typeset directly from the MS. Another printing in the Buffalo Express (“Mark Twain. His Greeting to the California Pioneers of 1849,” 19 Oct 69, 2) differs from the Tribune in ten readings, only one of them substantive (‘big’ for ‘large’ at 371.8). While the Express might conceivably have had an independent source, perhaps a marked copy of the Tribune sent by Clemens himself, the variation between the two printings is slight, and the revisions well within the province of a typesetter or newspaper editor. Collation shows that all other known printings are derivative.

Previous publication: L3, 370–374; see Copy-text and “Mark Twain. His Greeting to the California Pioneers of 1849,” (Elmira Advertiser, 25 Oct 69, 3); Mark Twain’s Letter to the California Pioneers (Oakland, Calif.: DeWitt and Snelling, 1911); MTL, 1:163–65; Davis 1950.

Provenance:The MS may have been kept by the Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco, but by 1983 it could not be found.

Emendations and textual notes:

& • and [also at 370.7, 9, 13 (twice), 15, 17 (twice), 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30; 371.1, 2, 4, 6, 10 (twice), 12 (twice), 13, 14, 15, 17, 22 (twice), 23, 25, 27, 31, 32 (twice), 33, 34, 37; 372.1, 4, 5]

New York • New-York

eternal • external