February 13? Saturday – In Hartford Sam wrote to Strother Nimrod Wiley (1815-1899), a famous pilot on the Mississippi during the 1850s. Wiley had read an excerpt from Sam’s Atlantic articles, reprinted in the St. Louis Times for Jan. 24, and recognized himself as “Mr. W——” in the second article. Wiley wrote to Sam who sent the letter on to Howells, and answered Wiley that he planned to be back in St. Louis on his New Orleans trip to look at the old river once more [MTL 6: 385].

Note: Wiley was one of the most colorful steamboat pilots Sam had known. He appears in Chapters 8, 14, and 17 of LM. He was a great and colorful storyteller and could play the fiddle. He had the unparalleled respect of fellow pilots; he became the first president of the St. Louis and New Orleans Pilots’ Assoc. in 1857. See Edgar Branch’s article in the Mark Twain Journal, Fall 1986, titled “A Proposed Calendar of Samuel Clemens’s Steamboats 15 April 1857 to 8 May 1861, with Commentary.”