July 28 Sunday – The Clemens party rested a day in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Sam was interviewed by a traveling correspondent, Marie Jousaye, who authored a book of poetry earlier in the year. Her interview appeared in the Toronto Globe on Aug. 10, p.11 “Mark Twain Interviewed,” and may be found in Scharnhorst p.168-171. From Sam’s notebook:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, July 28, Sunday morning. An hour’s talk with a bright girl — part Indian, with French name — correspondent of Toronto Globe. Has been a factory girl. Was president of a “combine” of 500 working girls who appealed to the electric car Co for a Sunday car service; the year before that, the pulpits had pulled in 5,000 majority against it; the 500 girls reduced that to 750 majority, two years ago. The pulpit got the next struggle put off 3 years. It occurs a year hence; then the thing will be carried the other way.

Toronto is 12 miles long, one way, within the city limits; the poor live at one end and work at the other — and not a car on Sunday! These families are as exiled as if the Atlantic flowed between them. But as long as God & the clergy are gratified what of it [?] [NB 35 TS 16].

Note: see Taylor Roberts’ “Mark Twain and Sunday Streetcars: An Interview in Winnipeg.” MTJ 28.2 (1990): 15-20.

Allingham writes of an encounter with a reporter “held in the railway car after the Winnipeg engagement”:

…a reporter for the Grand Forks Herald quotes a conversation with Twain…which suggests that until this trip the American writer had been a total stranger to the region:

“This country of yours out here,” he said, “astonished me beyond all imagination. Never in my life have I seen such fields of grain extending in all directions to the horizon. The country appears to me to be as if were a mighty ocean; my conception of it is the same as that of a man who has never seen the ocean before; he sees nothing but water as far as the eye can reach; here I see nothing but oceans of wheat fields. Why it is simply miraculous” (Grand Forks Herald). [2: citing Winnipeg Daily Tribune, July 30, 1895 p.5; see also in Scharnhorst 164-5];.

Edward Beecher (1803-1895) died. One of nine children of Lyman Beecher and brother of Henry Ward Beecher, Andrews lists Edward as: “preacher, educator, editor, scholar, feminist, believer in the preexistence of souls” [17]. And: “Edward Beecher used Biblical evidence and complicated metaphysics to reject his father’s teaching; he asserted no predisposition to evil hindered man’s evolutionary progress toward utter saintliness” [34]. Note: Sam was well acquainted with the Beecher clan; his neighbor was Edward’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Sam’s notebook:

Crookston, Minn., July 29. / Left Winnipeg at 1.20 yesterday [July 28] & came down again through that wonderful wheat ocean — by gracious it is bewitching; there is the peace of the ocean about it, & a deep contentment, a heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness & all small thoughts & tempers must be out of place, not suited to it, & so not intruding. The scattering far-off homesteads, with trees about them were so homelike & remote from the warring world, so reposeful & enticing [NB 35 TS 17].

The Clemens party took rooms at the Crookston Hotel.