To the Editor of the San Francisco Alta California
3 December 1872 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: MH-H, UCCL 00837)

Hartford, Dec. 3, 1872.

Sir: Certain gentlemen here in the east have done me the honor to make me their mouthpiece in a matter which should command the interest & the sympathy of many Californians. They represent that the veteran Capt. Ned Wakeman is lying paralyzed & helpless at his home near your city,2 & they beg that his old friends on the Pacific coast will take his case do toward him as they would gladly do‸, themselves,‸ if they were back, now, in San Francisco—that is, take the old mariner’s case in hand & assist him & his family to the pecuniary aid they stand in such sore need of. His house is mortgaged for $5,000 & he will be sold out of h & turned shelterless upon the world in his broken in January unless this is done. I have made voyages with the old man when fortune was a friend to him, & am aware that he gave with a generous heart & a willing hand to all the needy that came in his way;3 & now that twenty years of rough toil on the watery highways of the far west find him wrecked & in distress, I am sure that the splendid generosity which has made the name of California to be honored in all lands will come to him in such a shape that he shall confess that the seeds he sowed in better days did not fall upon unfruitful soil.

Will not some of the old friends of Capt. Wakeman, in your city, take this matter in hand and do by him as he would surely do by them were their cases reversed?4

Very Truly Yours,

Mark Twain.

Hartford, Conn., Dec. 3.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens intended this letter to be published in the San Francisco Alta California, where it appeared on the front page of the 14 December issue under the headline “Appeal for Capt. Ned Wakeman—Letter from ‘Mark Twain.’” If Clemens also sent a covering letter to his friend John McComb, supervising editor on the Alta, it does not survive.

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2 The appeal for aid for Edgar (Ned) Wakeman came from Vernon Seaman of Newburgh, New York, “an old friend and former purser with Captain Wakeman” (Wakeman-Curtis, 376). Wakeman was stricken suddenly by paralysis in July 1872 while at sea. Over the next several months, he made a partial recovery at his home in Oakland, California, but never regained his health; he died in 1875 at age fifty-seven (Wakeman-Curtis, 361, 377; Vernon Seaman to SLC, 7 Jan 73, CU-MARK).

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3 Clemens made only one voyage with Captain Wakeman, traveling from San Francisco to Nicaragua in December 1866 aboard the steamer America under Wakeman’s command. He encountered Wakeman only one other time, in July 1868 in Panama while en route from San Francisco to New York. Finding Wakeman’s America anchored in the harbor, Clemens spent a convivial evening in his company, entertained by some of his imaginative yarns. He later described Wakeman:

He was a great, burly, handsome, weatherbeaten, symmetrically built and powerful creature, with coal black hair and whiskers, and the kind of eye which men obey without talking back. He was full of human nature, and the best kind of human nature. He was as hearty and sympathetic and loyal and loving a soul as I have found anywhere; and when his temper was up he performed all the functions of an earthquake, without the noise. . . . He had never had a day’s schooling in his life, but had picked up worlds and worlds of knowledge at second-hand, and none of it correct. He was a liberal talker, and inexhaustibly interesting. In the matter of a wide and catholic profanity he had not his peer on the planet while he lived. . . . He knew the Bible by heart, and was profoundly and sincerely religious. (AD, 29 Aug 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 244–45)

Wakeman’s place in Mark Twain’s imagination and in his writing is thoroughly examined in N&J1, 241–43 (RI 1993, 677–78; L1, 370 n. 8; L2, 242 n. 1 top; SLC 1868).

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4 Clemens’s appeal “set the ball in motion,” and over the next two weeks, $4,750 was raised to liquidate the Wakemans’ mortgage. The donors included Darius O. Mills and William C. Ralston (“Captain Wakeman’s Decks Cleared,” San Francisco Chronicle, 28 Dec 72, 3). Mary L. (Mrs. Edgar) Wakeman wrote gratefully to Clemens on 19 January 1873, “Our home is once more our own, and we feel the kind and prompt assistance extended by the Capt’s. California friends, is to be attributed to that letter” (CU-MARK).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H). The MS was annotated in pencil, apparently by someone on the Alta editorial staff: at the top of the first page was written “City lx” “x” was added to Clemens’s own page numbering on the next two pages. Also at the top of the first page was written “Appeal for Capt. Ned Wakeman,” the title under which the letter was published in the newspaper, and Clemens’s “To the Editor of the Alta:” was revised to read “Editors Alta:”—again matching the published text.

Previous publication: L5, 233–234; “Appeal for Capt. Ned Wakeman—Letter from ‘Mark Twain,’” San Francisco Alta California, 14 Dec 72, 1.

Provenance:bequeathed to MH by Evert Jansen Wendell (1860–1917), a Harvard alumnus and collector of theater memorabilia (Dickinson, 332–33).

Emendations and textual notes:

S • [partly formed; possibly ‘E’]