For more than a year there is not a line that has survived. Yet it had been an important year; the jumping frog story, published in New York, had been reprinted East and West, and laughed over in at least a million homes. Fame had not come to him, but it was on the way.
Yet his outlook seems not to have been a hopeful one.
To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:
San Francisco, Jan. 20, 1866. My Dear mother and sister,—I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.
To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.
But no matter. His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers.
This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco Alta:
(Clipping pasted in.)
“Mark Twain’s story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, called ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,’ has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. It is voted the best thing of the day. Cannot the Californian afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the California press.”
The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co. gave the sketch to the Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book.
Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed
of scribblers in this part of the country, the place
properly belongs to Bret Harte, I think, though he
denies it, along with the rest. He wants me to
club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of
his, and publish a book. I wouldn’t do
it, only he agrees to take all the trouble. But
I want to know whether we are going to make anything
out of it, first. However, he has written to
a New York publisher, and if we are offered a bargain
that will pay for a month’s labor we will go
to work and prepare the volume for the press.
Yours
affy,
Sam.