1. Holograph MS in MTP. The three pages were apparently rejected; they were not transcribed as part of the published book. One of them is discussed in chap. 10.

2. The letters appeared in the Express between 27 September 1869 and 22 January 1870. Several months earlier, in late May 1869, he had written to his agent, James Redpath, to propose a lecture for the 1869-70 season entitled "Curiosities of California." "There is scope to the subject," he urged, "for the country is a curiosity." Among the topics he promised to continue

      treat were "the fluctuations of fortunes in the mines, where men grow rich in a day & poor in another; ... Lake Tahoe, whose wonders are little known & less appreciated here; ... [and] the never-mentioned strange Dead Sea of California." Despite these intentions, Clemens lectured on the Sandwich Islands, not the American West, during the 1869-70 season.

3. The letter was published in the New York Tribune for 14 October 1869 and appeared in the Buffalo Express five days later.

4. Clemens did in fact draw upon his western newspaper exploits in his early "Memoranda" pieces, for example in "The Petrified Man," "My Famous 'Bloody Massacre,'" and "The Facts in the Great Land Slide Case," all of which had to have been prepared by very early May in order to appear in the June 1870 Galaxy .

5. Signed holograph contract in MTP; a transcription of the contract appeared in Mark Twain Quarterly 6 (Summer/Fall 1944): 5.

6. The letter is dated only "Bur., 1870," but was pretty certainly written in July or August of that year because Clemens had asked for the memorandum book on 15 July. Orion's memoranda were a sufficiently valuable and timely aid to his memory to prompt Clemens to promise his brother $1,000 from the new book's royalties in return for his help. Although the memorandum book itself has been lost, a portion of it is preserved—was perhaps transcribed—in a letter Orion wrote his wife, Mollie, on 8 September 1861. The text of the letter is reproduced as "Supplement D" in Roughing It , ed. Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 546-50.

7. "Autobiographical Dictation" for 15 February 1906; original in MTP.

8. "Autobiographical Dictation" for 15 February 1906; typescript in MTP. Other renditions of the map's creation offer interesting variations. Clemens's 1906 version implies that executing the woodcut was a kind of involuntary and irrational response to the torment he was undergoing at the time, a "half insane tempest ... of humorous possession" that caused him to send for the block, which he then apparently carved at home. In 1910 his Express co-editor, Josephus N. Larned, recalled the incident differently: "I doubt if he ever enjoyed anything more than the jacknife engraving that he did on a piece of board for a military Map of the Siege of Paris, which was printed in The Express from his original 'plate,' with accompanying explanations and comments. Half his day of whittling and the laughter that went with it are something that I find pleasant to remember" (Buffalo Express , 26 April 1910; quoted in Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography [New York and London: Harper, 1912], 1: 399). Larned pretty clearly places Clemens in the Express offices during continue

      the map's creation and makes the occasion seem more like a lark than an instance of tempestuous possession.

      A more contemporaneous account of the event casts it in another light still. In 1871 fellow humorist Donn Piatt shared with a reporter the description Clemens had given him of the day the map came into being. "Only think," Platt recalled him saying, "with a dear friend [Jervis Langdon, apparently, given that Emma Nye was still alive at the time] lying dead before me, and my wife half distracted over the loss, I had to get off my articles so as not to disappoint my publishers; and when I sat down with a board and pen-knife to engrave that map of Paris, I did so with a heavy heart and in a house of lamentation" ("Funny in Spite of Himself," Every Saturday 2, no. 71 [6 May 1871]: 415).

9. Holograph letter in MTP. The letter also contains Colfax's tribute to Jervis Langdon. "I heard of the death of your excellent father in law with deepest sorrow," he wrote. "He will long be missed by all."

10. Mark Twain, Roughing It , ed. Franklin R. Rogers, p. 43. Future references to this edition, abbreviated RI , will appear parenthetically in the text.

11. On 4 September Clemens had written Bliss, "During the past week have written first four chapters of the book."

12. See chap. 7.

13. SLC to Orion Clemens, 5 November 1870. Clemens initiated the matter of Bliss's hiring Orion by putting it to his publisher as a pointblank favor: "Say, for instance—I have a brother about 45—an old & able writer & editor," he wrote. "Have you got a place for him?" (31 October 1870). Bliss responded on exactly those terms: "You see we have no real place for him just now, but would like for your sake to create a position for him if possible—would this do?" (2 November 1870; holograph letter in MTP). Clemens did not hesitate to burden Orion with a sense of obligation, pointing out that Bliss's whole purpose in undertaking the arrangement was to win his—Clemens's—gratitude and loyalty. "But all right," he grumbled to his brother, ''I am willing" (5 November 1870).

14. The line is from Mark Twain's "Valedictory" in the Galaxy "Memoranda" for April 1871. Of the engraving Clemens himself later admitted to Webb, "Yes sir —King William was a mistake & a big one, for it was repeating a joke" (14 January 1871).

15. For a discussion of the diamond-book agreement and its collapse, see Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals , Volume 2: 1877-1883 , ed. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1975), p. 291 n 4. The story is also told in Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), pp. 124-28. break