Day By Day Dates

Day by Day entries are from Mark Twain, Day By Day, four volumes of books compiled by David Fears and made available on-line by the Center for Mark Twain Studies.  The entries presented here are from conversions of the PDFs provided by the Center for Mark Twain Studies and are subject to the vagaries of that process.    The PDFs, themselves, have problems with formatting and some difficulties with indexing for searching.  These are the inevitable problems resulting from converting a printed book into PDFs.  Consequently, what is provided here are copies of copies.  

I have made attempts at providing a time-line for Twain's Geography and have been dissatisfied with the results.  Fears' work provides a comprehensive solution to that problem.  Each entry from the books is titled with the full date of the entry, solving a major problem I have with the On-line site - what year is the entry for.  The entries are certainly not perfect reproductions from Fears' books, however.  Converting PDFs to text frequently results in characters, and sometimes entire sections of text,  relocating.  In the later case I have tried to amend the problem where it occurs but more often than not the relocated characters are simply omitted.  Also, I cannot vouch for the paragraph structure.  Correcting these problems would require access to the printed copies of Fears' books.  Alas, but this is beyond my reach.

This page allows the reader to search for entries based on a range of dates.  The entries are also accessible from each of the primary sections (Epochs, Episodes and Chapters) of Twain's Geography.  

Entry Date (field_entry_date)

March 3, 1870 Thursday

March 3 Thursday  Sam and Livy (in shaded text) finished their letter to Jervis Langdon.

Your two letters came this morning, father, & your dispatch yesterday afternoon. (Mem.—Ellen’s in the stable & the horse in the attic looking at the scenery.)

March 4, 1870 Friday

March 4 Friday – In Buffalo Sam replied to Lewis Frank Walden (whose letter not extant) explaining why he wasn’t lecturing:

“I was married a month ago & so have cast away the blue goggles of bachelordom & now look at the world through the crystal lenses of my new estate” [MTL 4: 86].

March 6, 1870 Sunday

March 6 Sunday – Sam wrote from Buffalo to Robert and Louise Howland (b. 1848?) with a note to James Warren Nye. Howland was a former mining buddy and partner of Sam’s in 1861. Nye was the former governor of Nevada and now Senator.

March 12, 1870 Saturday 

March 12 Saturday  Sam’s article, “A Big Thing,” was printed in the Buffalo Express. Commenting on an article from the Louisville Journal, Sam wrote:

How familiar that old gushing, tiresome bosh is!…I wish to ask the Louisville reporter the old familiar question, so common among reporters in the mines: “How many ‘feet’ did the doctor give you?” (“Feet are shares.) We always got “feet,” in Nevada, for whooping about a Nearly-Pure-Silver-National-Debt-Liquidator in this gushing way” [McCullough 166].

March 15, 1870 Tuesday 

March 15 Tuesday  Sam accepted an invitation from a Mr. Nicholls to read for the G.A.R. [MTL 4: 92]. Note: Reigstad credits Martha Gray (Mrs. David Gray) with persuading Twain to speak as part of the Grand Army of the Republic’s lecture series. Reigstad writes:

March 19, 1870 Saturday

March 19 Saturday  Sam’s article, “A Mysterious Visit,” a delightful spoof on income taxes and deductions, was printed in the Buffalo Express [McCullough 166]. A second article attributed to Sam, “Literary Guide to Williams & Packard’s System of Penmanship,” also was printed in the Express [McCullough 170].

March 21, 1870 Monday 

March 21 Monday  Sam wrote from Buffalo to James T. Fields, senior partner in Fields, Osgood & Co., a prestigious Boston publishing company. Fields preceded William Dean Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

March 22, 1870 Tuesday

March 22 Tuesday – Sam wrote from Buffalo to James Redpath, his lecture circuit agent.

“Dear Red: I am not going to lecture any more forever. I have got things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it will cost us to live & I can make the money without lecturing. Therefore old man, count me out” [MTL 4: 94].

March 26, 1870 Saturday 

March 26 Saturday  In the morning Sam looked out his master bedroom window and saw flames on the roof of 455 Delaware Street. He and Patrick McAleer (1846-1906), his coachman for many years, raced to help. McAleer rang fire-alarm box 62 at the corner of Virginia and Delaware. Reigstad writes:

March 27, 1870 Sunday

March 27 Sunday  Sam and Livy wrote in the afternoon from Buffalo to Jervis & Olivia Lewis Langdon.

“It is snowing furiously, & had been, the most of the day & part of the night…albeit snow is very beautiful when falling, its loveliness passes away very shortly afterward. The grand unpoetical result is merely chilblains & slush” [MTL 4: 98-100].

April 1870

April  Sam sent a spoof to be inserted in a copy of Innocents Abroad for Jane L. Stanford, wife of the ex-governor of California. The note claimed he was the source for “E pluribus Unum” [MTL 4: 103-4].

April 1, 1870 Friday 

April 1 Friday – Sam & Livy wrote from Buffalo to Jervis & Olivia Lewis Langdon. There was the usual horseplay and teasing (she was on his lap) and announcements that they were getting ready to go to England. Jervis and wife were to hurry to visit them before they left. Sam wrote:

April 2, 1870 Saturday

April 2 Saturday  Sam’s article, “The Facts in the Great Land Slide Case,” about his days in Washoe, was printed in the Buffalo Express. “Each new witness only added new testimony to the absurdity of a man’s claiming to own another man’s property because his farm had slid down on top of it” [McCullough 172].

Jervis Langdon wrote to Sam and Livy:

Richmond April 2d 1870

Dear Children

April 10, 1870 Sunday

April 10 Sunday – In an exchange of pulpits, Rev. Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira Congregational Church came to Buffalo and preached at Grosvenor W. Heacock’s Lafayette Presbyterian Church. In his April 16 & 17 to Jervis and Olivia Lewis Langdon, Sam noted Beecher’s morning and evening sermons: “…the evening sermon, to a crowded house, was received with prodigious favor…” [MTL 4: 110; Reigstad 131-32].

April 12, 1870 Tuesday

April 12 Tuesday  “Mark Twain on Agriculture” ran in the Buffalo Express.

(I can never touch the subject of Agriculture without getting excited. But you understand what I mean.) Under the head of “Memoranda” I shall take hold of this neglected topic, and by means of a series of farming and grazing articles of blood-curdling interest will proceed to lift the subject of Agriculture into the first rank of literary respectability [McCullough 176].

April 13, 1870 Wednesday 

April 13 Wednesday – In Buffalo, Sam wrote to his brother Orion, who had asked if Sam could write him a letter of introduction to a Mr. Webster of the Republican [St. Louis?]. Sam could not remember the man. He also arranged to give Orion a credit at a St. Louis book dealer.

April 15, 1870 Friday

April 15 Friday – Livy fired Harriet the maid. Sam wrote on Apr. 16: “I had rather discharge a perilous & unsound cannon than the soundest servant girl that ever was” [MTL 4: 110].

Sam received a letter (not extant) from Thomas A. Kennett asking if Sam might pay something now. The first payment on purchase of the Express wasn’t till August [Apr. 16 to Jervis Langdon].