From The Twainian Volume 8 Number 1 (1949), Editor George Hiram Brownell
Letter From "Mark Twain", Alta California November 15, 1868
Hartford, October 22, 1868
At Large
I have spent six weeks moving from city to city lately, doing nothing whatever but visiting friends. It is very, very pleasant work, and not hard. If there was a salary attached I would never do anything else. What a world of valuable information I could furnish about New York, Brooklyn, Elmira, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis if I had only been on a tour of observation. But I observed nothing, except that Chicago changes so fast that every time you visit it it seems like going to a new city. They are erecting many fine buildings in St. Louis, but they are erecting many more and finer in Chicago. Chicago is a wonderful place. It probably numbers among its citizens more active, bold, thoroughly enterprising men than any city in the Union save New York. It is the centre, as you know, of a vast railway system, which drains the country in every direction. Other communities have what they consider their own legitimate country about them to back them up, and they regard their sovereignty over such regions as unimpeachable.
Chicago recognizes no such sovereignities. She marches right into the enemy’s country with her railroads, with an audacity which is delightful, and in a very short time she breaks down the “divine right” prejudices of that region and takes the trade. It is a maxim in less feverish communities that whenever a railroad to any place makes itself a necessity it will be built —that is, whenever there shall be trade enough to warrant it. Chicago has changed all that. Wherever she finds a place to build a railroad to she builds a railroad to that place. She creates trade there afterwards easily enough. Three out of every five men you meet in Chicago have a live, shrewd, cosmopolitan look in their faces. These are the sort of people who have made the city what it ts, and will yet double its wealth, its population and its importance.
I will remark, in passing, that the Sherman House is a good hotel, but I have seen better. They gave me a room there, away up, I do not know but water boils up there at 168 degrees. I went up in a dumb waiter which was attached to a balloon. It was not a suitable place for a bedchamber, but it was a promising altitude for an observatory. The furniture consisted of a table, a camp stool, a wash-bowl, a German Dictionary and a patent medicine Almanac for 1842, I do not know whether there was a bed or not—I didn’t notice. However, I was glad I got that room, for I stayed there an hour and took notes of an instructive conversation which was going on in an adjoining apartment, I overheard the following …
And so endeth the legend. Perhaps I had no right to listen to it, but I did, anyhow.
I've visited the tomb of Washington, in Chicago, and also the birth places of Homer, and Michael Angelo, and then adjourned to Cleveland, a stirring, enterprising young city of a hundred thousand inhabitants. Did you know that they claim 300,000 for Chicago? Cleveland is the centre of a great coal, iron and petroleum trade, and this is necessarily a great manufacturing town, and also is necessarily bound to move steadily onward, being impelled by such stable and long-winded helpers as commerce and manufactures. Cleveland contains one of the finest streets in America—Euclid avenue. Euclid is buried at one end of it—the old original Euclid that invented the algebra, misfortune overtake him! It is devoted to dwelling houses entirely, and it costs you $100,000 to “come in.” Therefore none of your poor white trash can live in that street. You have to be redolent of that odor of sanctity which comes with cash. The dwellings are very large, are often pretty pretentious in the matter of architecture, and the grassy and flowery “yards” they stand in are something marvellous—being from one to three hundred feet front and nine hundred feet deep!—a front on the avenue and another front on Lake Erie. I had a very good time, visiting. In another city I fell out of a wagon backwards and broke my neck in two places. Another time I fell in the river, and when I was coming up the bank I got kicked by a horse. Altogether I had a splendid time. I have to lecture a great deal in the West this winter, and I expect to have some more fun.