February 16 Monday – Sam wrote from Virginia City to his mother, Jane Clemens, and sister Pamela Moffett.

My Dr Mother & Sister:

I suppose I ought to write, but I hardly know what to write about. I am not in a very good humor, to-night. I wanted to rush down and take some comfort for a few days, in San Francisco, but there is no one here now, to take my place. They let me go, about the first of the month, to stay twenty-four hours in Carson, and I staid a week. Perhaps they haven’t much confidence in me now. If they have, I am proud to say it is misplaced. I am very well satisfied here. They pay me six dollars a day, and I make 50 per cent. profit by only doing three dollars’ worth of work.

Well, I have no news to report, unless it will interest you to know that they “struck it rich[”] in the “Burnside” ledge last night. The stock was worth ten dollars a foot this morning. It sells at a hundred to-night. I don’t own it, Madam, though I might have owned several hundred feet of it yesterday, you know, & I assure [you] I would, if I had known they were going to “strike it.” None of us are prophets, though. However, I take an absorbing delight in the stock market. I love to watch the prices go up. My time will come after a while, & then I’ll rob somebody. I pick up a foot or two occasionally for lying about somebody’s mine. I shall sell out one of these days, when I catch a susceptible emigrant. If Orion writes you a crazy letter about the “Emma Gold & Silver Mining Company,” pay no attention to it. It is rich, but he owns very little stock in it. If he gets an eighth share in the adjoining company, though let him blow. It will be all right. He may never get it, however.

What do you show my letters for? Can’t you let me tell a lie occasionally to keep my hand in for the public, without exposing me?

I advertised for Mrs. Hubbard’s brother & David Anderson’s son. Mr. Dreschler called on me two days afterward. He was in robust health; lives in Steamboat Valley, near here; I promised to visit him. He owns ranch & city property, & is well off. Mr. Ellison called on me the same day. He said John Anderson was on his ranch at the Sink of the Carson, 60 miles from here. Anderson will return to St. Louis in the Spring to go to the wars. I sent him some late St. Louis, Louisville and New Orleans papers, & promised to visit him some day. Remember me kindly to Mrs. Hubbard & Fannie.

Pamela, you do not say whether you are getting well or not? I think you will have to spend next Summer at the Fountain of Youth—the fabled spring which the weary Spaniards sought with such a hopeful yearning, and never found. But I have found it, and it is Lake Bigler. No foul disease may hope to live in the presence of such beauty as that. I send the paper to Moffett & Scroter every day; you will find in it all that you do not find in my letters.

I inclose a picture for Margaret Sexton. Had your letter arrived a little sooner, I could have sent it to her myself, as a Valentine.

Yrs affctnly

Sam. L. Clemens

Remember me to all [MTL 1: 244-5].

Note from source notes #4: “William H. C. Nash of Hannibal (b. 1829) was a childhood friend of Clemens’s and brother of Mary Nash Hubbard. Nash emigrated to the West in 1849 and remained twenty years, after which he returned to Hannibal and became a merchant; in later years he was city assessor and president of the board of education (Greene, 281; Hannibal Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935,7 B). None of the other people mentioned in this paragraph has been identified.”