"San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently. Even the kindly climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by, and then when the longed for rain does come it stays. Even the playful earthquake is better contemplated at a dis—

"Six months after my entry into journalism the grand “flush times” of Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three years. All difficulty about filling up the “local department” ceased, and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every day. Virginia had grown to be the “livest” town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced. The sidewalks swarmed with people—to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter to stem the human tide.

"We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. It was a “wooden” town; its population two thousand souls. The main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high enough. They were packed close together, side by side, as if room were scarce in that mighty plain.

Samuel L. Clemens and Richard Burton both took a steamboat from St. Louis to St. Joseph and neither had much to say about the trip. Burton does address the physical characteristics of the Mississippi River drainage basin and presents arguments as to why the Missouri River should not be considered as the Mississippi's headwaters.

From The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871, page 128

From The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871, pp127-8

Steamboat: SUNSHINE
Built: 1860
Tonnage: 354
Clemens' Service: 6 December 1860 - 8 January 1861
Pilot: Capt. George W. Willard in 1860; Absalom Grimes in 1861
Captain: Henry G. Carson
Fate: burned 13 July 1864 in St. Louis by Confederates