April 7 Friday – Returning from a trip to Spain, Lucius Fairchild stopped to visit Sam on the way to see his brother Charles Fairchild. He left an umbrella at the Clemens home (see Apr. 8 entry) [Rees 9; MTNJ 2: 513n267].
April 8 Saturday – Lucius Fairchild wrote from Boston to Sam, thanking him for the “pleasant talk” and mentioning the umbrella he gave Livy [Rees 9]. Sam probably received the note on Apr. 10 [MTP].
James R. Osgood wrote to Sam, offering a list of sketches that Howells advised cutting from the Library of Humor, which left 18 pieces at about 80,000 words [MTP].
April 9 Sunday – The Lotos Club, New York receipted Sam $6.25 for dues [MTP].
April 10 Monday – Sam wrote from Hartford to reply to the Apr. 6 compliments from Rutherford B. Hayes, who had expressed a “happy reception” for P&P at his house. After explaining the receipt of his letter came just when their dinner friends were discussing the potential greatness of the Hayes administration (to Sam another example of “Mental Telegraphy”), and being “deeply gratified” by Hayes’ letter, Sam added after his signature:
April 11 Tuesday – Office of the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army per H.M. Adams wrote to advise that “a copy of a map of the alluvial basin of the Mississippi River and 16 sheets of the new map …have been sent by today’s mail” [MTP].
April 12 Wednesday – Roswell Phelps mailed Sam a contract for his employment, which Sam signed. Phelps was to receive $100 per month for “at least four weeks” work, all traveling and living expenses and for transcribing notes made on the trip by June 1, one dollar per thousand words. The contract is in the MTP [MTNJ 2: 517].
April 13 Thursday – Karl & Hattie J. Gerhardt wrote to Sam and Livy, delighted with the Clemenses letters even though typed. He’d sent Sam’s last letter to a London Publisher and rec’d a valuable dictionary in return. A detailed page or two of their expenses [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env., “Gerhardt / Part of Expense a/c for 17 ½ months—Mc 17 ’81 to Sept. 1 ’82–/ $900 a year
April 14 Friday – Sam wrote from Hartford to James R. Osgood, arranging dates for the first leg of the Mississippi River trip.
“All right, call in Apl. 17—and start from New York, at 6 P.M., Pennsylvania road (ain’t it?) Hotel car all the way to Chicago—dam sight better than a mere dam sleeping car. How does this strike you?” [MTLTP 155].
April 15 Saturday – Sam gave a talk at Boston’s Saturday Morning Club. Fatout designates this as “Advice to Youth” [MT Speaking 169-71] but Fatout prefaces this as “date and time uncertain,” the 1882 written later on Sam’s manuscript. Gribben notes that Sam urged youth to read only “good” books, such as Robertson’s Sermons, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, and Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad [583].
April 16 Sunday – Sam returned to Hartford, where he wrote Howells.
O dear! I came home jubilant, thinking that for once I had gone through a two-day trip & come out without a crime on my soul: but it was all a delusion, nothing but a delusion—as I soon found out as I glided along in my narrative of how Aldrich—but no, I have suffered enough already, though Mrs. Clemens’s measureless scorn & almost measureless vituperation.
April 17 Monday – Sam left Hartford with 37-year-old Hartford schoolteacher Roswell Phelps, hired stenographer. Phelps was to take down Sam’s impressions of the trip, and also letters of Sam’s ongoing business matters [Kaplan 244]. The men were bound for St. Louis and the Mississippi River, where Sam’s decade-old dream (since at least Jan.
April 18 Tuesday – At 8 AM, Sam, Osgood, and Phelps left New York on the Pennsylvania Railroad. They would travel through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, then St. Louis. Sam noted in the evening:
“Speaking of dress. Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from New York” [Ch. 22, LM].
April 19 Wednesday – “This morning struck into the region of full goatees—sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally” [Ch. 22, LM].
Noon: Sam changed trains in Indianapolis.
Afternoon: “—At the railway-stations the loafers carry both hands in their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore, that one hand was sometimes out-of-doors—here, never. This is an important fact for geography.”
April 20 Thursday – From Ch. 22, LM:
Next Morning we drove around town in the rain. The city seemed but little changed. It was greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can’t persuade a thing to look new; the coal-smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of four hundred thousand inhabitants.
April 21 Friday – The Gold Dust finally got underway at 2 AM and at 6 AM paused at Menard, Ill. to let off passengers near St. Genevieve. Sam enjoyed the scenery, passing Chester, Ill., Grand Tower, Ill., and Cape Girareau, Mo., stopping at Cairo, Ill., some 200 miles from St. Louis. It was night when the Gold Dust made Cairo [Ch.
April 22 Saturday – The Gold Dust left Cairo early in the morning. When Sam “turned out” the packet had passed Columbus, Ky. and was approaching Hickman. Sam noted the damage that the “flood of 1882” had caused to New Madrid, Mo. and the unprotected lowlands from Cairo south.
April 23 Sunday – Sam and party toured Memphis in the morning.
“A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi: has a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops, and manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil; and is shortly to have cotton-mills and elevators” [Ch 29 LM].
From Sam’s notebook:
April 24 Monday – At about noon, the Gold Dust passed Napoleon, Ark., which used to be a thriving town but now was all but gone due to the shifting Big Muddy.
April 25 Tuesday – Sam wrote aboard the Gold Dust to Livy. He’d been on deck at 4 AM and watched the sun come up, complete with “cluttering” bullfrogs, aromas of dead fish on the ground, and “marvels of shifting light & shade & color & dappled reflections…bewitching to see” [Powers, MT A Life 460]. The writing would find itself in Huckleberry Finn.
April 26 Wednesday – The Gold Dust arrived at Vicksburg, Miss., where Sam, Osgood and Phelps boarded the Charles Morgan [MTNJ 2: 436]. A notebook entry for the date at 11 AM may be the time of the Morgan’s departure [462]. Before boarding, the party took a ride to the National Cemetery, where Sam jotted the motto over the gateway:
April 27 Thursday – The Charles Morgan stopped a half an hour at Baton Rouge, La. [MTNJ 2: 546].
“Baton Rouge was clothed in flowers, like a bride—no, much more so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now—no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant…” [Ch.40 LM].
April 28 Friday – At 8 AM, the Charles Morgan arrived at New Orleans. Sam stayed at the St. Charles Hotel [MTNJ 2: 458n84]. While in the city, he met up with George W. Cable. From Sam’s notebook:
April 29 Saturday –Sam’s notebook records a mule race staged to benefit the Southern Art Union, a group promoting New Orleans artists:
Mule race with Burke & Houston. Later mentioned the Voudoo superstitions. Among old creoles if one meets a funeral he removes his hat & walks back with procession one block.
April 30 Sunday – 7 AM at the train depot, Sam met Joel Chandler Harris, who’d traveled from Atlanta. Harris registered at the St. Charles Hotel, where Sam was staying; the two then met George Cable and attended church services of the Prytania Street Presbyterian Church, Rev. J.H.
May – Sam’s notebook carries an entry to “see Dickens for a note on Cairo [Illinois]” [Gribben 187]. In LM Sam focused on the improvements in Cairo, no longer the place Dickens had described, a:
“…hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise.”