March 7 Thursday – The New York Weekly announced it would print (re-print) a series of Mark Twain’s “inimitable papers.” The weekly reprinted five of Sandwich Islands Letters to the Union, but without mention of the prior publication [MTL 2: 12n3].
March 6 Wednesday – Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne) died of tuberculosis after his last performance on Jan. 23 in London. Ward was 33. He was interred near London but his body was later shipped back to America to be buried at Waterford, Maine. It arrived in New York in May, when Sam noted the event in one of his Alta letters.
March 5 Tuesday – The New York Saturday Evening Express published “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress,” by Mark Twain, on page one [MTL 2: 11-12n3]. Sam arrived in St. Louis at midnight after sitting up for two nights in coach due to full sleeping cars. Sam was returning home after six years and four months. He went directly to his sister Pamela’s house at 12 Chestnut Street, where he “sat up till breakfast time, talking and telling lies.” Sam’s niece, Annie Moffett, was almost fifteen and his namesake nephew, Sammy, was six [Sanborn 320-21; MTL 2: 18n1].
March 3 Sunday – On a snowy night Sam left New York for St. Louis on the 8 o’clock New Jersey Central. It was a 52-hour rail connection. On the same day the New York Sunday Mercury published “The Winner of the Medal,” by “that prince of humorous sightseers, Mark Twain, whose contributions to California light-literature has gained him a front-rank position among the sparkling wits of the Land of Gold” [MTL 2: 11n3, 18n1].
March 2 Saturday – Sam telegraphed the proprietors of the San Francisco Alta California (Fred MacCrellish, William Augustus Woodward (1829?-1885), Orlando M. Clayes (1837-1892), and John McComb). “Send me $1,200 at once. I want to go abroad.” Although the owners were skeptical, it was McComb who argued and won the day for Sam to travel abroad in exchange for letters to the Alta [MTL 2: 17].
March 1 Friday – Sam was invited and attended the opening of the spring season for the grand Bal d’Opera at the new Academy of Music. Sam dressed up in “flowing robes, and purported to be a king of some country or other” [Sanborn 320]. He would become famous for such sartorial exuberance.
February 24 Sunday – Alta California prints Sam’s “Letter from Mark Twain” number 3, dated Dec. 23, 1866, with article “Steamer COLUMBIA at sea” [Schmidt; Camfield bibliog.].
February 23 Saturday – Sam’s Alta letter with this date complained of suffering from “the blues” and that his “thoughts persistently ran on funerals and suicide” [MTNJ 1: 301].
Edward P. Hingston, agent for Artemis Ward. wrote to Sam, letter not extant but referred to in Sam’s Feb. 23 to the Alta. “He is rusticating at the seaside. The hope is that he will be well in a week or two and able to reappear.” [MTP]. Note: the article ran in the Alta on 5 Apr 1867.
February 21 Thursday – This announcement appeared in the editorial column of Street and Smith’s New York Weekly, p. 4:
February 19 Tuesday – At Cooper Hall in New York City, Sam was impressed by the platform speaking of 24-year-old Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932), a Quaker girl who had been speaking for five years. Sam was in the audience at Dickinson’s lecture, “Something To Do, or Work for Women.” Dickinson was a force in the suffrage movement, and instrumental in adoption of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.