Hannibal - By A Native Historian

Hannibal has had a hard time of it ever since I can recollect, and I was "raised" there. First, it had me for a citizen, but I was too young then to really hurt the place. Next, Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, reformed, and that broke up the only saloon in the village. But the temperance people liked it; they were willing enough to sacrifice public prosperity to public morality.

California Climate

We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California. And I will remark here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm.

Flush Times in Virginia City

Try a Few"Six months after my entry into journalism the grand “flush times” of Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three years. All difficulty about filling up the “local department” ceased, and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every day.

Lectures in the Midwest 1867

Mark Twain explained, in another Alta dispatch, that on 17 March he had been asked to “make a few remarks” to a Sunday school, and that he “told that admiring multitude all about Jim Smiley’s Jumping Frog,” which in turn led to a more formal invitation. “I did not intend to lecture in St. Louis, but I got a call to do something of that kind for the benefit of a Sunday School.” 

New York to St Louis: March 1867

Railroads from New York to St. Louis, 1867:

Scharnhorst ( The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871, page 383) has Twain entering St. Louis after a transfer of trains in Terre Haute.   These seems unlikely as the only line to East St. Louis from the east in 1867 was the Ohio and Mississippi.  The Indianapolis and St. Louis was the second line to reach St. Louis and it was not completed until 1870.

A View of the Future

On the point of departing San Francisco and a return to New York, Twain in his farewell to the west coast offered an image of what he thought the future would bring. It also provides a window on his view of the industrialization occurring in the world around him.  From his impromptu farewell address to San Francisco:

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