In addition to The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Gilded Age, and Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, Clemens ordered the following American Publishing Company books, issued between 1865 and 1874: Everybody’s Friend, by Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) (1874); Unwritten History: Life amongst the Modocs, by Joaquin Miller (1874); and The Secret Service, The Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape, and Beyond the Mississippi, both by Albert Deane Richardson (1865, 1867). Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians, by Fanny Kelly, was issued in 1871 by the Mutual Publishing Company of Hartford, a subsidiary of the American Publishing Company (2 Dec 1867 to Bliss, L2, 120–21 n. 4; 16 July 1873, L5, 417 n. 2; Hill 1964, 16).

Hastings had written (CU-MARK):

UCLC 32290

A National Asylum of Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, for Union veterans, was established by Congress in March 1865. Its name was changed in 1873 to substitute “Home” for “Asylum.” Originally there were Eastern, Central, and Northwestern branches; a fourth, Southern, branch opened in 1870. While accepting any soldiers who required a temperate climate, that branch was particularly intended to serve African American veterans and probably was “the first Federal facility specifically planned and established as an integrated facility” (National Home 2017a-b). The managers of the National Home were: President Ulysses S. Grant; Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite (1816–88); Secretary of War William W. Belknap (1829–90); Benjamin F. Butler (1818–93), Union general and former Republican Congressman; John H. Martindale (1815–81), lawyer and Union soldier; Frederick Smyth (1819–99), former governor of New Hampshire; Lewis (not Louis) B. Gunckel (1826–1903), lawyer and former Republican congressman; John S. Cavender (1824–86), Union soldier; Hugh L. Bond (1828–93), lawyer, advocate of education for blacks, and federal judge; Erastus B. Wolcott (1804–80), military and civilian surgeon and Wisconsin railroad pioneer; Thomas O. Osborn (1832–1904), lawyer, Union soldier, and current minister resident to Argentina; and James S. Negley (1826–1901), Union soldier and former Republican congressman. Philip Thrasher Woodfin (1826-1901) served as deputy governor and governor of the Southern branch from 1873 until his death in 1901 (Patterson 2017). Wright and Keyes, the other officers of the Southern branch, have not been further identified. Hastings’s previous contributors of books were: William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, author and Harper’s Weekly editor George William Curtis, and author and Unitarian minister Thomas W. Higginson, former colonel of the first black regiment in the Union army. On Hastings’s envelope Clemens wrote: “Wants some books——sent a lot. SLC.” On 17 February, he informed Hastings that the books were ordered (see UCCL 12943). Hastings replied, on the National Home letterhead (CU-MARK):

UCLC 32293

On the envelope of that letter Clemens wrote, “Acknowledging receipt of lot of books.”