October  18 Saturday – Still in St. Louis, Sam wrote the first Thomas  Jefferson Snodgrass letter, burlesquing Shakespeare’s Julius  Caesar [Gribben 626]. Sam used  dialect, and grammatical and spelling errors to characterize a country bumpkin  getting the worst of it in the big city. It was a literary strategy that would  come to fruition in many of his future works. Snodgrass was also the last pen  name Sam used prior to Mark Twain, in Nevada, Feb. 1863. Sam  earned five dollars each for these letters, his first payments for freelance  writing [MT  Encyclopedia, Abshire 694].  “It is likely that he departed on Oct. 18 and arrived in Keokuk the following day” [MTL 1: 69-70].