August 14 Wednesday – In New Whatcom, Wash., Sam’s notebook:
Aug. 14. Left the ladies there with Sam. Moffett, & Pond & I came on to / New Whatcom. Such a fearful hoarseness I could scarcely talk. We stopped at a fine hotel in Fairhaven, & went over in the trolley. Reception — the line stood, I moved along it.
These 2 towns are in effect one — & it makes a large one. But they are melancholy, for the boom is passed, & they have slumped. They have a trade by sea with the Orient for their fine lumber, & they will come up again….
In some of the towns, besides the public gambling, they used to have big whore-signs, “Dolly,” “Mattie,” &c, & the whs sitting under them. The signs remain, but not the women [NB 35 TS 24].
J.B. Pond’s diary reports Sam’s bronchial problems were returning:
Wednesday, August 14th, Seattle to Whatcom.
“Mark’s” cold is getting worse (the first cold he ever had). He worried and fretted all day; two swearing fits under his breath, with a short interval between them, they lasted from our arrival in town until he went to sleep after midnight. It was with great difficulty that he got through the lecture. The crowd, which kept stringing in at long intervals until half-past nine, made him so nervous that he left the stage for a time. I thought he was ill, and rushed back of the scenes, only to meet him in a white rage. He looked daggers at me, and remarked:
“You’ll never play a trick like this on me again. Look at that audience. It isn’t half in yet.”
I explained that many of the people came from long distances, and that the cars ran only every half hour, the entire country on fire causing delays, and that was why the last installment came so late. He cooled down and went at it again. He captured the crowd. He had a good time and an encore, and was obliged to give an additional story. [Eccentricities of Genius 220]. Note: Sam later wrote to Rogers that he’d “had great difficulty in pumping out any voice at all” in Whatcom – Aug. 17 to Rogers.
The New Whatcom Reveille reviewed Sam’s lecture on Aug. 16, noting Sam’s cold and severe manner and the large audience [Tenney 24].
In New Whatcom, Sam wrote a letter intended for publication to his nephew, Samuel E. Moffett, editor of the San Francisco Examiner. The letter was an attempt to explain why he was “going lecturing around the world.” Sam explained how he’d put up the capital for Webster & Co., and how after it became indebted how he and Livy had tried their best to save it from collapse. “By the advice of friends” (principally H.H. Rogers, though unnamed here) he turned over all his copyrights to the wife, since she was the major creditor; that every creditor save one was against her putting up the Hartford house, and that one (Thomas Russell, again unnamed here) had “made a neat little fortune out of Webster & Co., but that didn’t signify” and over $5,000 that creditor “persecuted me with the law.” Sam added that he’d earned a lot of money the year before and left it all in New York to pay for about half the debts. Now, after his lecture tour across the country, he wrote,
I find I have twenty-five friends in America where I thought I had only one. Look at that house in Cleveland, in the dead middle of July, with the mercury trying to crawl out of the top of the thermometer. That multitude has repeated itself in ever big town clear across to the Pacific. Did those unknown friends troop to my houses in this perditionary weather to hear me talk? No; they came to shake hands and let me know that they were on deck and all was well. I shall be out of debt a long way sooner than I was supposing a month ago…
I shall be sixty years old in November. A month ago it grieved me to be under this load of debt at my time of life, but that feeling is all gone now. Such a burden is a benefaction, a prize in the lottery of life, when it lifts a curtain and shows you a continental spread of personal friends where you had supposed you had merely a good sprinkling of folks friendly to your books but not particularly concerned about their author. … The other day in Montana a stranger sent me this word: “You can draw on me for five dollars a day until you are out of debt.”
When our firm broke, Poultney Bigelow mailed me his check for a thousand dollars, and didn’t want to take it back again; Douglas Taylor, printer, New York, said “Draw on me for a thousand dollars; and if you think you can’t find a hundred men to do the like, make me a bet, and you will see.” One-dollar bills came in letters from here & there and yonder — from strangers — and I had to send them back [MTP].
J.B. Pond quoted the last two paragraphs of this letter in his diary:
Before sailing “Mark Twain” wrote a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner, from which I quote:
“Now that I reflect, perhaps it is a little immodest in me to talk about my paying my debts, when by my own confession I am blandly getting ready to unload them on the whole English-speaking world. I didn’t think of that — well, no matter, so long as they are paid.
“Lecturing is gymnastics, chest-expander, medicine, mind healer, blues destroyer, all in one. I am twice as well as I was when I started out. I have gained nine pounds in twenty eight days, and expect to weigh six hundred before January. I haven’t had a blue day in all the twenty-eight. My wife and daughter are accumulating health and strength and flesh nearly as fast as I am. When we reach home two years hence, we think we can exhibit as freaks.” Mark Twain. Vancouver, B.C., August 15, 1895 [Eccentricities of Genius 225].