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.
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.
Chapter 54 from Roughing It:
Chapter 52 of Roughing It:
"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.
From Explanatory Notes: Clemens returned to New York “in an express train ... a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the route I came,” He stays at the Westminster Hotel.
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.”
Letter to the Alta California:
St. Louis,
March 15th, 1867.
HAPPY
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:
Flora (sternwheel steamer): The ship was built for the company's trade with Marysville, and thus had an exceptionally shallow draft of 11 inches. She was launched in 1865 then acquired by the California Pacific Railroad Company in 1871.