July 1 Tuesday – Frank E. Bliss of American Publishing Co. wrote to Sam enclosing a check for $263.29 to settle all royalties from sales of his books to this date. [MTP].
John M. Knight for Manning Collegiate Institute wrote to thank Sam for gift copies of CY and HF for their library [MTP].
James B. Pond wrote to Sam: “Your kind letter is received. Many thanks. I know you will live until Nov. 18th & go to Boston with our crowd. I have sent your letter to Stanley. I know he will appreciate it” [MTP].
Webster & Co. sent Sam a statement of account for CY to July 1 showing a gross profit of $12,097.98 (encl. in Hall Aug. 8, 1889); this statement covers 12 legal-sized ledger pages [MTP].
Dr. Clarence C. Rice receipted $78 for “Mrs Clemens & Miss Susie; Jany, Feby & June 90”.
Hansel, Sloan & Company, successors to D.H. Buell, fine jewelry, Hartford, billed $8.55 for purchases & repairs for: Jan 14, Mch 18, apr 11, May 1, 9, 28, June 14, 18, 28; Paid July 16.
Wm. G. Simmons & Co, Fine Boots, Shoes & Rubbers, Hartford billed $23.85 for purchases & repairs from Apr 21, 26, 28 30, May 14, 20, 28, June 10, 23, 26, 30; Paid July 16 [all MTP].
July 1-2 Wednesday – Instead of a summer trip to Europe, the Clemens family opted to take Candace Wheeler up on her many past invitations to revisit her Catskills retreat at the Onteora Club near Tannersville, New York. They arrived sometime before the holiday (July 1-2; Hall had found they’d left the hotel by July 2) and would stay till mid-September, though Sam would make trips to Washington and New York on business. Brander Matthews called the park there a “newly founded settlement of artists with pen and pencil” [Salsbury 278]. Candace Wheeler wrote about the retreat and the Clemens’ summer there:
It was generally our particular friends who came in to stay for longer or shorter periods at the Inn — those who had visited us in our cabin and eaten our roasted corn between rocks, or sat in the moonlight on my brother’s broad piazza, listening to wonderful music played upon the piano which toiling oxen had brought along the steep zigzag heights of the old Catskill road. Friends who had spent the days with us in the open, playing with our tamed fox cubs or climbing mountains by day and sleeping away at night the tire of tramping days in our little bedrooms.
The Clemenses…came to the Inn for the season — the father and mother, and Clara, Susy, and “Little Jean.” They took “Balsam,” a bit of cottage across the road from the Inn, and it became a sort of jewel-box for the summer — a thing that held values untold [278].
Robert Underwood Johnson remembered Onteora’s cabins:
At first the houses were chiefly log cabins and an inn built for warm weather. Of the latter Mark said that “the partitions were so thin that one could hear a lady in the next room changing her mind”; but later the construction was more substantial [Remembered Yesterdays 324].
Paine writes of the week:
The Clemenses secured a cottage for the season. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence Hutton, Carroll Beckwith, the painter; Brander Matthews, Dr. Heber Newton, Mrs. Custer, and Dora Wheeler were among those who welcomed Mark Twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet.
It was the beginning of a happy summer. There was a constant visiting from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the Bear and Fox Inn, their general headquarters. There were pantomimes and charades, in which Mark Twain and his daughters always had star parts. Susy Clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning to rival her father as a leader of entertainment. Her sister Clara gave impersonations of Modjeska and Ada Rehan. … Matthews also remembers Jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and to go barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a favorite of the colony [MTB 900]. (Editorial emphasis.)
Note: Paine also gives an account of Brander Matthews teaching Sam piquet, a card game in vogue, and of Sam sitting for his portrait smoking a corncob pipe. Carroll Beckwith was the artist [900-1]. Several photographs were taken of Sam and some of the guests during this retreat. They also met Miss Jessie Pinney (later Baldwin) in Onteora who agreed to give Clara piano lessons twice a month in New York [MTNJ 3: 580n27].
July 1 Tuesday ca. – In Onteora Park, near Tannersville, New York shortly after this date, Sam wrote a long letter to the editor of Free Russia who had recently invited Sam to say something on the objects of several Russian liberation groups.
When one reads that paragraph [sent] in the glare of George Kennan’s revelations, & considers how much it means; considers that all earthly figures fail to typify the Czar’s government, & that one must descend into hell to find its counterpart, one turns hopefully to your statement of the objects of the several liberation-parties — & is disappointed. Apparently none of them can bear to think of losing the present hell entirely, they merely want the temperature cooled down a little.
I now perceive why all men are the deadly & uncompromising enemies of the rattlesnake: it is merely because the rattlesnake has not speech. Monarchy has speech, & by it has been able to persuade men that it differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it somewhere, something worth preserving, something even good & high & fine, when properly “modified,” something entitling it to protection from the club of the first comer who catches it out of its hole. It seems a most strange delusion & not reconcilable with out superstition that man is a reasoning being. …
If I am a Swinburnian — & clear to the marrow I am — I hold human nature in sufficient honor to believe there are eighty million mute Russians that are of the same stripe, & only one Russian family that isn’t [MTP].