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

To William Wright (Dan De Quille)
14 July 1865 • San Francisco, Calif.
(MS: Morris and Anderson, UCCL 11610)

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San francisco
July 14, 1865

Dear Dan—

This is to make you acquainted with Dan Setchell, Esq. You are to do anything & everything you can to secure his comfort & forward his interest—especially the latter.1

By order of

Sam. L. Clemens.

Why don’t you write me.

P.S. Jo is at the Warm Springs.2

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 Daniel E. Setchell (1831–66), an actor and comedian, made his debut in Boston in 1853, thereafter performing in New York with great popular success, primarily in comic roles, until August 1863. He arrived in San Francisco on 27 April 1865, and appeared from 8 May through 24 June at Maguire’s Opera House as a featured player with a theatrical troupe that included the popular actor Frank Mayo, earning for the most part highly favorable notices. On 27 May Clemens published an endorsement of Setchell in the Californian, which stated in part:

I have experienced more real pleasure, and more physical benefit, from laughing naturally and unconfinedly at his funny personations and extempore speeches than I have from all the operas and tragedies I have endured, and all the blue mass pills I have swallowed in six months. As a comedian, this man is the best the coast has seen, and is above criticism; and therefore one feels at liberty to laugh at any effort of his which seems funny, without stopping to undergo that demoralizing process of first considering whether some other great comedian, somewhere else, hasn’t done the same thing a shade funnier, some time or other, years ago. (SLC 1865)

Setchell arrived in Virginia City on 17 July, and presumably hand delivered Clemens’s letter to Wright. He appeared with his traveling company at Maguire’s Virginia City Opera House from 18 through 28 July, and left the following day. The files of the Territorial Enterprise—where Wright served as the local editor—are lost, so any plug he might have given Setchell in his column has not been preserved. After a return engagement in San Francisco in early 1866, Setchell sailed for New Zealand, but his ship disappeared en route, and he was presumed dead. In 1895 Clemens again praised him, noting that he had perfected the technique that Artemus Ward (and later he himself) adopted, of telling a humorous story “gravely”: “then when the belated audience presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wondering what they had found to laugh at” (SLC 1895; T. Allston Brown, 333; Ireland, 2:661; ET&S2, 169–71; “Opera House,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 9 May 65, 3; San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle: “Maguire’s Opera House,” 25 May 65, 3, and 24 June 65, 2; San Francisco Alta California, 22 Jan 66, 1; Gold Hill [Nev.] Evening News: “Arrivals and Departures,” 17 July 65, 3; “Opera House,” 19 July 65, 3; “Opera House,” 28 July 65, 3; “Arrivals and Departures,” 29 July 65, 2; Berkove, 6; see L1, 277 n. 4).

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2 No response from Wright has been found. Joseph T. Goodman, chief editor and Wright’s boss at the Territorial Enterprise, had evidently been visiting San Francisco. Warm Springs (now Fremont), in Alameda County, was thirty-seven miles from San Francisco by ferry (Gudde, 108, 340; Appletons’ Hand-Book, 242).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is owned by Rosemary Morris and Marjory Anderson, descendants of William Wright. With the permission of their brother, the late Evans Morris, a photocopy was provided to the Mark Twain Papers in October 1988. Preserved with the letter, but no doubt not originally enclosed with it, is Setchell’s calling card, on which was written “Barnum’s Hotel”—presumably by Setchell. The inscription has not been explained: no hotel of that name is listed in either the San Francisco or the Virginia City directories of the period.

glyph Previous publication: L5, 679–680; Berkove, 7.

glyph Provenance:The MS is one of nine letters from Clemens to Wright which after Wright’s death “were left with his daughter, Mell Evans. She, in turn, passed them on to her daughter, Irma Evans Morris. Effie Mona Mack learned of them while doing research for Mark Twain in Nevada (1947), and purchased photographic negatives of them. . . . When Mrs. Morris died, she passed the letters on to her son, Evans Morris.” Copies of the collection are on deposit in the Morris Family Collection of De Quille Papers at the State Historical Society of Iowa (IaHi) (Berkove, 4, 18 n. 1).