Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To John Henry Riley
4 January 1872 • Dayton, Ohio
(MS: NN-B, UCCL 00706)

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Dayton, O., Jan. 4.1

Friend Riley—

Heaven prosper the Minister to S. A! Amen.2

“This is my thought”—as the Injuns say (but only in novels.)3 The first day of March—or the 4th or 5th at furthest—I shall be ready for you.4 I shall employ a good, appreciative, genial phonographic reporter who can listen first rate, & enjoy, & even throw in a word, now & then. Then we’ll all light our cigars every morning, & with your notes before you, we’ll talk & yarn & laugh & weep over your adventures, & the said reporter shall take it all down—& so, in the course of a week or so, we’ll have you & Du Toits Pan5 & Du Toits other household & kitchen furniture all pumped dry—& away you go for Africa again & leave me to work up & write out the book at my leisure (of which I have abundance—very.)

How’s that?

Don’t say any thing about the book.

Never mind [ Baby Babe]—the his book won’t hurt—opposition’s the life of trade—but of course I’d rather be out first. Why didn’t you get my letter & stay there longer.6

Mark.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens lectured in Logansport on 2 January and in Richmond, Indiana, on 3 January. His 4 January lecture in Dayton elicited “hearty laughter and frequent applause” from a “full house,” according to the Dayton Journal, which also described the speaker as “slightly awkward in his movements,” with a

slow-tongued and droll manner, which seem to be rather natural with him than put on for the occasion. His wit runs into the extravagant style, consisting of exaggerated facts, nonsense and absurdities; but to use his own expression, he tacks on the nonsense to make the facts take. (“Mark Twain’s Lecture,” 5 Jan 72, no page)

A Dayton correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette noted on 4 January:

Mark Twain arrived here this afternoon, putting up at the Beckel House, and writing in the register, in a tolerable hand “Sam’l L. Clemens, Hartford, Conn.” He was assigned to room 169, and not a few admirers of the genial humorist passed the door, and gazed wistfully at it. Mark Twain had a whopping house to-night. He announced this as “my first and last appearance in Dayton,” from which it may be inferred that he is going out of the lecture or show business. (“From Dayton,” letter dated 4 January, 5 Jan 72, 1)

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2 Riley was Clemens’s intended collaborator on a book about the South African diamond fields (L4, 168 n. 2, 252–53 n. 1). By October 1871 he had returned from South Africa with a commission as consul general from the Orange Free State to the United States. He wrote Clemens from Washington on 3 December:

I returned to Phila from California on the 23d ult., and remained there till over Thanksgiving Day, and then on the 1st inst came back here. I just missed your ev’g of lecture at the Academy of Music, Phila [on 20 November], but bro Charlie and sisters Mary & Sophie were there.

I have perfected my idea of a Diamond sifting and washing machine but have done nothing yet towards getting it patented.

I am here doing nothing but corresponding for the Alta Have not yet been to the State Depart to be recognized as Consul Gen., but will attend to that the coming week. Cole says a mission to the Dutch Republics of S. A. must be created and that I must go out as U.S. Minister.

We shall see but I’d like to know what I am to do in the meantime and when you are going to be ready for the book work. I am pretty nearly [at] the end of the money that old Sutro gave me in San Fran and will get nothing from the Alta till the end of the present month. Let’s hear from you. Direct to Lock-box 78 P.O. Washington. ... You know that I have no Com. clerkship this session. (CU-MARK)

Senator Cornelius Cole of California was known to both Riley and Clemens. Riley was again corresponding for the San Francisco Alta California, but had not regained his position as clerk for a senate committee and was running out of money, despite what Adolph Sutro had given him (see also 11 June 72 to Sutro, n. 2). By 16 December Riley’s credentials as consul general had been “recognized by the President” and “by the State Department” (“Telegraphic Notes,” New York Tribune, 16 Dec 71, 1; “Washington Correspondence,” letter dated 16 December, Carson City State Register, 3 Jan 72, 2). Riley explained to a correspondent of the Chicago Times that

he accepted the commission tendered to him for the purpose of being able to speak officially for that government while here. Instead of retaining it, he will probably transfer it to the proper hands here, and return to Africa clothed with diplomatic authority to establish such relations with Orange as shall result in securing a lasting friendship with the United States, if not an alliance that will eventually give us a permanent foot-hold in the “diamond republic.” (“South African Diamonds,” dispatch dated 18 December, Chicago Times, 21 Dec 71, 1)

Clemens was replying not just to Riley’s 3 December letter, but to a follow-up letter (now lost), sent because he had failed to reply sooner.

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3 Although this remark appears to refer to James Fenimore Cooper, the quotation has not been found in his works.

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4 A concession to Riley’s urgency, since Clemens had previously put off beginning their book until May (L4, 467). Work did not, after all, begin as planned (see 27 Mar 72 to Riley).

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5 Du Toit’s Pan was among the largest and best-known mining camps in the newly discovered diamond fields. It lay a few miles southeast of what is now Kimberley, South Africa, in the province of Griqualand West, just over the border from the Orange Free State. In less than a year’s time it had acquired a population of sixteen thousand (Albert E. Coleman, 333; Annual Cyclopaedia 1871, 2).

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6 In 1871, Jerome L. Babe’s “letters from the diamond fields of South Africa” to the New York World “first made the American people aware of their immense importance” (“Literary Notes,” New York World, 1 July 72, 2). Babe’s South African Diamond Fields (New York: David Wesley and Co.) would be just over a hundred pages long, in paper covers, when it was published in late June 1872. Since Riley did not mention Babe on 3 December, he must have done so in the missing follow-up letter. Clemens’s letter urging Riley to prolong his stay in Africa is also lost. “Opposition (or competition) is the life of trade” was clearly proverbial for Clemens, yet this letter precedes by more than thirty years what had been identified as the first American use of the phrase (Mieder, Kingsbury, and Harder, 109, 441).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).

glyph Previous publication: L5, 2–4.

glyph Provenance:The MS was offered for sale in 1924 as part of the collection of businessman William F. Gable (1856–1921) (AAA 1924, lot 94). It later belonged to lawyer and corporate official Owen D. Young (1874–1962), whose collection NN acquired in about 1940 through purchase and donation.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

Baby Babe • Babye