May, early – Sam wrote a poem, titled, “Lines Suggested by a Reminiscence, and Which You Will Perhaps Understand,” to Ann Virginia Ruffner (b.1838?) [ET&S 1: 120].

April 20 Sunday – Sam wrote his sister-in-law, Mollie Clemens, a conventional poem titled “To Mollie” [ET&S 1: 118].

January 19 Saturday – The Keokuk Gate City, page 7, reported on Sam’s speech under the headline: “The Printer’s Festival. Birthday of Benjamin Franklin” [Selby 7].

January 17 Thursday – Sam spoke without prepared remarks to the Keokuk printers at a celebration of the 150 th anniversary of Ben Franklin’s birth. It was perhaps Sam’s first after dinner speech, presaging his fame as a platform speaker. Sam Clemens as “Mark Twain” would be a great entertainer, perhaps the first American icon of the twentieth century.

Early months – Sam began to itch to go to South America after reading an account of coca and the money that might be made harvesting the plant and distributing it in the U.S. [Powers, Dangerous 241].  In 1910, in “The Turning Point of My Life,” Sam remembered a two-volume work on the exploration of the Amazon, that it “told an astonishing tale about coca, a vegetable product of miraculous powers…” [MTL 1: 68n7].

October  18 Saturday – Still in St. Louis, Sam wrote the first Thomas  Jefferson Snodgrass letter, burlesquing Shakespeare’s Julius  Caesar [Gribben 626]. Sam used  dialect, and grammatical and spelling errors to characterize a country bumpkin  getting the worst of it in the big city. It was a literary strategy that would  come to fruition in many of his future works. Snodgrass was also the last pen  name Sam used prior to Mark Twain, in Nevada, Feb. 1863.

End of year – Sam probably left Orion’s employ late in the year to set type across the river in Warsaw, Illinois [MTL 1: 59]. Powers claims that “Sam blew up over phantom wages and quit.” Either it was temporary employment or Sam regretted the move, because he was back in Keokuk in the New Year [Powers, MT A Life 70]. After the birth of his daughter, Orion took on the compiling of Keokuk’s first city directory, leaving the rest of the business operations to Sam

November 30 Friday – Sam’s twentieth birthday.

November – Sam’s uncle John Quarles freed his slave, Uncle Daniel, age 50 [Rasmussen 106].

September 14 Friday – Sam became an uncle for the second time with the birth of Jennie Clemens to Orion and Mollie Clemens [MTL 1: 383].