January 17 Sunday – In Hartford Sam wrote to George Henry Himes (1844-1940), about old Hannibal fellow printers Urban E. Hicks, Thomas P. (Pet) McMurray, and Wales R. McCormick. He thanked Himes for sending a text (unspecified) and mentioned he was to speak at the printers’ dinner in New York.

We led such a rushing life in Virginia City, & made such an innumerable host of acquaintances, that that existence is all a foggy confusion in my mind, & I cannot name twenty people of that day & district with certainty; but in Hannibal, thirty-five years ago, the new acquaintances averaged only about one a year…I remember Urban E. [Hicks] vividly & pleasantly…if I could see Hicks here I would receive him with a barbeque & a torchlight procession, & put the entire house at his disposal [MTP].

Note: Himes migrated with his parents in 1853 (the same year young Sam Clemens left Hannibal) to the Puget Sound country near Olympia, Wash. He was loudly proud of his pioneering background and often claimed to have walked from Illinois to Washington. Like Sam, he became a printer at a young age, working at age seventeen for the Washington Standard. In 1864 he signed on with the Portland Oregonian and became a pioneer book publisher in Oregon. He wrote an extraordinary diary of 60 volumes covering a period of over 80 years starting with 1858. His lasting achievement was the establishment of the Oregon Historical Society in 1898. Himes lived to the ripe age of 95.

Sam also sent a letter to an unidentified bookseller asking for a copy of French Meisterschaft. This book may have inspired Sam’s Jan. 1888 comedy in three acts, Meisterschaft.

Courtlandt Palmer wrote inviting Sam to appear on Tuesday, May 4 at the Nineteenth Century Club in N.Y. to speak on the subject of American humor. Sam wrote on the envelope: “Distinctly no sir!” [MTP].