October 31 Wednesday – Sam gave one performance in Virginia City—the “Sandwich Islands” lecture at Maguire’s Opera House. It was a glorious homecoming. The Enterprise wrote, “an immense success” [Sanborn 302]. Sam met with old friends, Dan De Quille, Joe Goodman and Steve Gillis. Gillis urged Sam to speak again at the Opera House, but Sam did not want to repeat himself in any one town. Steven hatched a plot to pull a fake robbery of Sam in Gold Hill as a way of getting Sam to lecture again on a new topic [303].
The Longmont, Colo. Ledger of Oct. 10, 1879 ran a story in “Mark Twain’s Testimonial,” in which Sam was greeted before his lecture by a committee of three, that asked him to meet at the “old place,” a saloon, after the lecture. Supposedly he did go and was presented with a silver brick, which stunned him with gratitude until he discovered it was covered with tinfoil [MTJ, Spring 1989 p 33]. Note: This story was not confirmed with other sources, and due to the newspaper article coming twelve years after, may be apocryphal.