April 19 Friday – Sam wrote from New York to Jane Clemens, his mother and family in St. Louis. Direct my letters to this hotel [Westminster] in future. I am just fixed, now. It is the gem of all hotels. I have never come across one so perfectly elegant in all its appointments & so sumptuously & tastefully furnished. Full of “bloated aristocrats” too, & I’m just one of them kind myself—& so is Beck Jolly. The book will issue the 25. James Russell Lowell [1819-1891] says the Jumping Frog is the finest piece of humorous writing ever produced in America [MTL 2: 27-28].

April 15 Monday – Sam wrote from New York to Jane Clemens, his mother and family in St. Louis. Sam discovered he didn’t have to rush back to New York because an agent for the Alta had been there and took care of the passage for Sam by this deadline date. He wrote his mother to send letters to the Metropolitan Hotel. He also had seen the steamer Quaker City: “She is a right stately-looking vessel” [MTL 2: 23].

April 14 Sunday – Sam arrived back in New York.

April 13 Saturday – The New York Eagle announced that Henry Ward Beecher would not go on the Quaker City excursion. Forty of his parishioners then decided not to go. General Sherman also would bail out, citing Indian wars [MTL 2: 25n3; MTNJ 1: 303].

April 12 Friday – Before leaving the city, Sam petitioned the Polar Star Masonic Lodge Number Seventy-nine of St. Louis for readmission. He was duly reinstated on April 21, 1867, by which time he was in New York [Jones 365].
Sam left St. Louis for New York “in an express train…a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the route I came” [MTL 2: 23n1].

April 11 Thursday – Sam wrote from St. Louis to Howard Tucker, treasurer of the Keokuk Library Association, which sponsored Sam’s lecture, confirming receipt of $35 as his fee [MTL 2: 20].

April 9 Tuesday – From the Keokuk Constitution:

It has been many a day since our ribs were tickled so much as at listening to Sam Clemens’ lecture last evening upon the Sandwich Islands….Those of our citizens who did not hear the lecture missed one of the richest treats of their lives [Lorch 57-8].

Sam lectured – “Sandwich Islands” – at the National Hall, Quincy, Illinois, where Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) had spoken in February. Lorch points out, “relatives of the family were living there in 1867 who may have arranged an invitation” [57].

April 8 Monday – Sam lectured at the Chatham Square Methodist Episcopal Church in Keokuk, Iowa to about 140 persons – “Sandwich Islands” [MTL 2: 20].

April 7 Sunday – Sam’s article “Female Suffrage” ran in the New York Mercury [Budd, “Collected” 1007].

February 22 Friday – Alta California p. 1, col. 4, ran Sam’s “Letters from Mark Twain” Number 2, dated Dec. 20, “On board steamer COLUMBIA,” [Schmidt; Camfield bibliog.].