November 8 Thursday – Sam gave the “Sandwich Islands” lecture at Dayton, Nevada, probably at the Odeon Hall Saloon, where Sam sometimes drank and played billiards. He arrived in Virginia City “about 12 in the evening…from Dayton” [Clark 903].
November 7 Wednesday – Sam gave the “Sandwich Islands” lecture at Washoe City, Nevada sometime between these dates [MTL 1: 366n3; MTPO “Mark Twain on the Platform”]. “Card from Mark Twain” dated Nov. 1 ran in the Enterprise [Camfield bibliog.].
November 1 Thursday – Sam sent a telegraph to Abraham V.Z. Curry (1815-1873), John Neely Johnson (1825-1872), Robert M. Howland and others to confirm he would be in Carson City the next day to speak there on Saturday evening. Howland had sent Sam a letter dated Oct. 30 with over 100 signatures of prominent Carson City citizens who wanted to hear Sam’s “Sandwich Islands” lecture. The list included Henry Goode Blasdel (1825-1900), Governor of Nevada. Sam wrote to him, agreeing to speak on the stage of the Carson Theatre and:
October 27 Saturday – Sam and McCarthy arrived back at Virginia City about ten p.m.
October 23 Tuesday – Sam gave the lecture “Sandwich Islands,” in the Nevada Theatre in Nevada City, California, a short distance from Grass Valley. Sam stayed at the National Exchange Hotel. The local newspaper Transcript wrote: “Mark Twain” as a lecturer is far superior to “Artemus Ward” or any of that class….We bespeak for him large audiences wherever he goes [Sanborn 300].
October 20 Saturday – Sam and McCarthy traveled by stage through gold boomtowns, Timbuctoo, Smartsville, and Rough and Ready (in modern days nearly empty). Sam gave the lecture “Sandwich Islands” in Hamilton Hall, Grass Valley, California. The Grass Valley Daily Union reported:
October 11 to November 27 Tuesday – Sam and Denis McCarthy, former part-owner of the Territorial Enterprise, (who Sam now labeled “The Orphan,” quickly organized a lecture tour in California and Nevada. (Lorch gives strong reasoning that the subsequent lecture tour was most likely organized well before this Oct. 2 debut [35-6]). The lecture, titled “Sandwich Islands” made sixteen engagements between these dates at locations where Sam was well known [Sanborn 298-9]. Dates in Silver City, Dayton, and Washoe were canceled.
October 6 Saturday – Sam’s article, MARK TWAIN ON ETIQUETTE, was reprinted in the Daily Hawaiian Herald. (See May 22 entry for excerpt).
September, mid to late – Although they’d traveled in the same regions, from the Mediterranean to the Mississippi to Washoe mining camps, there is no record before this month that Sam and J. Ross Browne ever met. Browne was a humorist in the Western vein of John Phoenix, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. He was also an excellent travel writer, currently collecting mining statistics in the West for the U.S. Treasury Department. He was living with his family in Oakland.
September 29 Saturday – Sam’s article, “Origin of Illustrious Men,” ran in the Californian:
You have done fair enough about Franklin and Shakespeare, and several parties not so well known—parties some of us never heard of, in fact—but you have shirked the fellows named below. Why this mean partiality?