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New York and the Mid West: 1867 - Day By Day

March 25 - April 9 - Midwest Lecture Tour: 5 engagements - "Sandwich Island

From San Francisco Alta California, May 26, 1867

UP THE MISSISSIPPI

I went up to Hannibal, Quincy and Keokuk, on the Upper Mississippi. The first and the last named are enjoying a season of rest, but not refreshment - the railroads have stricken them dead for a year or two, and I cannot help fearing for Quincy also, now that she is going to build a bridge and let her trade cross the Mississippi, and go through without stopping. St. Louis is doing the same, and somebody has got to suffer for it some day, no doubt.

The railroads have badly crippled the trade of the Keokuk packets, too. They used to go crowded with passengers and freight all the time, but they have room and to spare now. And they don't set a good table any more, either. They never did set a very good table, for that matter, but it was at least better than it is now. Their officers are princes, though.

KEOKUK AND QUINCY:

The ups and downs I have exaggerated a little in Hannibal's case will fit a good many towns in the Mississippi Valley, and Marysville and one or two others on the Pacific Coast. Keokuk, Iowa, was one of the most stirring and enterprising young cities in America seven years ago, but railroads and land speculations killed it in a single night, almost, and for six years it has been sleeping. It is reviving, now, though, and a new and vigorous prosperity is promised it. Its chances are more to be depended upon than Hannibal's, I think.

But Quincy is a wonderful place. It has always thrived - sometimes slowly and steadily, sometimes with a rush - but always making an unquestionable progress. It claims a population of 25,000 now, and it looks as if the claim were well founded. It is the second city of Illinois, in population, business, activity and enterprise, and high promise for the future. I have small faith in their project of bridging the Mississippi, but they ought to know their own business.

I spent a night at General Singleton's - one of the farmer princes of Illinois - he lives two miles from Quincy, in a very large and elegantly furnished house, and does an immense farming business and is very wealthy. He lights his house with gas made on the premises - made from the refuse of petroleum, by pressure. The apparatus could be stowed in a bath-room very conveniently. All you have to do is to pour a gallon or two of the petroleum into a brass cylinder and give a crank a couple of turns and the business is done for the next two days. He uses seventy burners in his house, and his gas bills are only a dollar and a quarter a week. I don't take any interest in prize bulls, astonishing jackasses and prodigious crops, but I took a strong fancy to that gas apparatus.

Following the  Midwest lectures  Clemens returned to New York “in an express train ... a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the route I came,” probably arriving on the day before he wrote this letter.    SLC to Jane Lampton Clemens and Family, 15 Apr 1867., New York, N.Y. (UCCL 00122), n. 1. 

Scharnhorst writes that Twain departed Quincy on the express train and traveled through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and into New York, arriving on the 15th of April.  Page 386  The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871

 

New York to St Louis: March 1867

Railroads from New York to St. Louis, 1867:

Scharnhorst ( The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871, page 383) has Twain entering St. Louis after a transfer of trains in Terre Haute.   These seems unlikely as the only line to East St. Louis from the east in 1867 was the Ohio and Mississippi.  The Indianapolis and St. Louis was the second line to reach St. Louis and it was not completed until 1870.

Lectures in the Midwest 1867

Mark Twain explained, in another Alta dispatch, that on 17 March he had been asked to “make a few remarks” to a Sunday school, and that he “told that admiring multitude all about Jim Smiley’s Jumping Frog,” which in turn led to a more formal invitation. “I did not intend to lecture in St. Louis, but I got a call to do something of that kind for the benefit of a Sunday School.” On 25 March he delivered his Sandwich Islands lecture before an overflow crowd of about one thousand at Mercantile Library Hall, for the benefit of the South St. Louis Mission Sunday School. The St.

Sandwich Islands Lectures in New York - 1867

From Explanatory Notes:  Clemens returned to New York “in an express train ... a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the route I came,”  He stays at the Westminster Hotel.

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