October 28 Wednesday – Sam’s hoax, “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” for which he received a tempest of indignation and protest, ran uncensored in the Enterprise. (Most everything local reporters wrote was uncensored.) This piece was a fiction-hoax of one Pete Hopkins, who’d gone insane and chopped up his wife and seven of his nine children with an axe and club, afterwards riding into Carson City with his throat cut from ear to ear. The story was widely reprinted [Fatout, MT Speaks 15; ET&S 1: 324-6]. The story behind the piece, including Sam’s motivation, is well told by Effie Mona Mack [Ch. 17]. Note: Joe Goodman, in a Dec. 25, 1910 letter to Paine, claimed that Sam named the hoax-man after Pete Hopkins, one of three “celebrated saloon keepers in Carson City at the time” and a great humorist [The Twainian, May-June 1956 p.3].
Sam and Dan De Quille, (William Wright) rented rooms in the new brick Daggett and Myers Building at 25 North B Street, Virginia City. Their rent began this day at $30 per month [Mack 246].
Their parlor-bedroom suite of rooms was across the hall from Tom Fitch and family on the third floor [Fatout, MT in VC 113].
Shortly after this time, but perhaps as late as Feb. 1864, Sam wrote “Letter from Dayton” which ran in the Enterprise [ET&S 1: 418].
The local reporter of the Gold Hill Daily News reported that Sam had proposed marriage to an unidentified young woman. Sam supposedly said he couldn’t “find nary a [girl] to keep house with. Mark says he ‘popped it’ to one the other day, but she couldn’t see it” [Fanning 86]. Note: This sounds more like ribbing than an accurate account of events.