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June 19, 1885:  The Clemens family took a special car from New York to Elmira,

June 27, 1885:  In the morning, the Clemens family left Mrs. Langdon’s home for Quarry Farm.

June 29, 1885:  Sam left Quarry Farm at 6 AM. Traveling all day to Mt. McGregor, New York, in the Adirondacks, and arriving at 8.40


In late spring [General] Grant's health had so deteriorated—his weight had dropped below 125 pounds—that his physicians urged him to escape the city for the summer. On June 16 the Grants moved into a bungalow owned by the banker and philanthropist Joseph W. Drexel adjacent to the Balmoral Hotel on Mount McGregor, a summer resort in the Adirondacks twelve miles north of Saratoga Springs, New York. The general summoned Sam to the resort by telegraph on June 27—less than a week after the Clemens family arrived in Elmira for the saummer—for what would be a final visit and, after an all-day journey, he arrived after dark on June 29, Grant's family was “all full of apprehensions with regard to the General; & I think that from what I hear the apprehensions are just,” he wrote Livy, “yet the General is as placid, serene, & self-possessed as ever, & his eye has the same old humorous twinkle in it, & his frequent smile is still the smile of pleasantness & peace. Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great & brave man.” Sam stayed at the Worden Hotel in Saratoga Springs and rode in a buggy an hour each way to the bungalow for a couple of days, Grant’s granddaughter Julia remembered that Sam with his frowzled hair and strict mien “frightened me dreadfully.” Once, she noted, “he came upon me in the garden where I was playing and as he spoke to me I turned” and “fled screaming to the cottage-door without replying." Though the general was unable to speak above a whisper, Sam thought “he would live several months. He was still adding little perfecting details to his book—a preface, among other things.” Sam even found time for a little sightseeing between visits with Grant. The view from the mountain— "wide & level, & green, & checkered with farms & splotched with groves like cushions of moss"—reminded him of the panorama of the Rhine valley from the Schloss-Hotel in Heidelberg.”

Grant “made no braver fight in the field than he made on his death-bed,” Sam averred. The general finished polishing the manuscript of his memoirs on July 19 and died five days later.

[From page 471-2 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]


July 2, 1885:  Sam left Mt. McGregor and went to New York City, returning to Hartford on the 3rd.

July 11, 1885:  Sam left for New York, where he stayed two days.

Livy wrote in her diary on July 26:  "Since I wrote in my journal on the 12th we have all had a pleasant trip to the soft-coal regions with Charley [Langdon] and his family. Charley, Ida, Julia, Jervis, Josie Clark, Mr. Clemens, Susy, Clara and I made up the party." [MTP].   No mention is made of just where they went.  Soft-coal is a descriptive term for bituminous coal.

July 23, 1885:   General Ulysses S. Grant died. Sam took a ten-hour train ride to New York City, arriving in the early evening.


On board a train in Binghamton, New York, Sam learned the news two hours after Grant's death. “I think his book kept him alive several months,” he observed in his journal. “He was a very great man—& superlatively good.” In an elegiac tribute to the general he penned that day for the Hartford Courant, Sam quoted Thomas Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), comparing Grant to Sir Lancelot, “the flower of Christian Chivalry, the knight without a peer, citing a passage in his honor “whose noble and simple eloquence had not its equal in English literature until the Gettysburg Speech took its lofty place beside it”: “thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword” and “thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest."

[From page 472 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]


July 24, 1885:  Sam went to Hartford for undisclosed business. 

July 26, 1885:  Sam returned to New York City, from whence he traveled back to Elmira,

August 1, 1885:  New York City, returning home August 10th.

August 10, 1885:  Returned to Elmira.

August 24, 1885:  Sam and Livy left the children with the Cranes at Quarry Farm and took a trip to Albany, where they stayed at the home of Dean Sage

August 25, 1885:  Sam, Livyand the Sages traveled to Mt. Onteora, New York in the Catskills near Tannersville to visit Candace Wheeler (Mrs. Thomas M. Wheeler), mother of Dora Wheeler Keith, the artist. 


Between August 24 and 29, 1885, accompanied by Dean Sage and his wife Sara, Sam and Livy visited Onteora Park, a restricted (i.e., closed to Jews) artists colony in the Catskill Mountains near Tannersville, New York, founded by the textile designer Candace Wheeler. Among their fellow guests there was Elizabeth Custer, who later commended Sam’s “genial flow of characteristic speech.” She likewise admired his “lovely wife”: “It is a relief when we know a genius to whom a whole continent is indebted to find that his wife is an ideal wife for any man.’ Sam enjoyed this visit to the Catskills, where there was “just enough rain, just enough sunshine; Just enough people, & just the right kind; just enough exercise, just enough lazying around,” In all, “it was a good time we had there,” though he later joked that the walls in the cabins “were so thin that one could hear a lady in the next room changing her mind.” The family returned to Quarry Farm for two weeks before leaving on September 15 for New York, where they lingered a few days at the Normandie Hotel before landing back in Hartford on September 18.  [From page 487 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891]


 

August 28, 1885:  Sam and Livy traveled from Onteora back to New York City, and then on to Quarry Farm the next day. 

September 15, 1885:  The Clemens family left Elmira and Quarry Farm and traveled to New York City.

Start Date
1885-06-24
End Date
1885-09-15
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