January 31 Saturday – Sam was in Carson City to send news back to the Territorial Enterprise. He sent at least three letters back, including the first article known to be signed “Mark Twain” [MTL 1: 245-6]. Throughout his life, Sam stuck to the story that he’d taken the name from Captain Isaiah Sellers, but researchers have never found any use of that name by Sellers. Another story ascribes the name to a barroom handle given to Sam when he ordered two drinks on credit. Of course, the term was a steamboat designation for twelve feet of water, barely enough for passage of a large steamboat. It was a call often heard on the river, and one Sam would have heard many times as a boy.

Notes: For an interesting and in-depth analysis of how Sam acquired his pseudonym, see Cardwell’s “Samuel Clemens’ Magical Pseudonym,” The New England Quarterly (June, 1975) p 175-93. Cardwell notes that the date given by Paine in the Biography and widely used, Feb. 2, 1863 is “almost surely wrong.” At the 2013 Mark Twain Convention in Elmira, Kevin Mac Donnell presented another theory, that of the “Mark Twain” name being in the Jan. 26, 1861 Vanity Fair article of “Phunny Phellow” that Twain could have seen in 1861 or, more likely at Carson in 1863, where copies of comedy sketches were archived and sometimes used as filler for local papers. Did Sam see the article? If so, did he decide to use it as his “brand” without disclosing the source? Years later he falsely claimed it was used by Capt. Isaiah Sellers after his death, but no evidence of Sellers using the handle has been found and Sam’s first known use of the name was a year before Seller’s death. For Mac Donnell’s full report see [Bibliography Number 6, Mark Twain Journal Spring/Fall 2012 50: 1 & 2, pp. 9-47].

Sam probably finished this third known “Letter from Carson City,” on this date, first using “Mark Twain” [ET&S 1: 192]. Painting a hilarious scene of a party at the Governor’s house, Sam thwacked the “Unreliable” mercilessly:

…he eluded me and planted himself at the piano; when he opened his cavernous mouth and displayed his slanting and scattered teeth, the effect upon that convivial audience was as if the gates of a graveyard, with its crumbling tombstones, had been thrown open in their midst… [Smith 52].