A very early letter as a riverboat pilot - photo 1
A very early letter as a riverboat pilot - photo 2

A very early letter as a riverboat pilot

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Auction dateClassic
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -04:00
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CHRISTIE'S
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ID 967532
Lot 148 | A very early letter as a riverboat pilot
A very early letter as a riverboat pilot

Mark Twain, 1859

CLEMENS, Samuel ("Mark Twain," 1835-1910). Autograph letter signed ("Sam. Clemens") to Elizabeth W. Smith ("Aunt Betsey"), St. Louis, "Thursday," [13?] October 1859.



Two pages, 198 x 122mm (light scattered foxing, contemporary ink smudges).



The earliest Mark Twain letter remaining in private hands. A spectacular letter by a 23-year old Clemens plying the Mississippi as a riverboat pilot, written to Elizabeth Smith, a family friend from St. Louis, lovingly addressed as "Aunt Betsey." After advising her on the best riverboat to take to St. Louis, he writes that "Ma" had not written because, "she did not know when I would get started down the river again—and I could not write, because … for once in my life I didn't know more than my own mother—she could not tell when she and the coal-tinted white tom-cat might hope to get rid of me, and I was in the same lamentable state of ignorance myself." After piloting the steam-packet Edward J. Gay on a round-trip from St. Louis to New Orleans, Clemens had expected "to remain at home awhile," but reports that he had just learned that he had been assigned to the steamer A. B. Chambers bound for New Orleans in about two weeks time. He then digresses to quote some of the ship's promotional literature, which describes the vessel as a "fine, light-draught, swift running passenger steamer—all modern accommodations and improvements—though with dispatch—for freight or passage apply on board to," but then catches himself, "but … as I was saying." He closes with his typical, self-deprecating humor, reporting that "All the family are well except myself—I am in a bad way again—disease, Love, in its most malignant form. Hopes are entertained for my recovery, however. At the dinner-table,—excellent symptom," And then quoting from the Song of Solomon, "I am still as 'terrible as an army with banners.'''



Years later Clemens reminisced about Aunt Betsey: “She wasn’t anybody’s aunt in particular, she was aunt to the whole town of Hannibal … She and my mother were very much alive; their age counted for nothing; they were fond of excitement, fond of novelties, fond of anything that was of a sort proper for members of the church to indulge in … any and every kind of dissipation that could not be proven to have anything irreligious about it—and they never missed a funeral.” Aunt Betsey figured in his writings for decades. She and the author’s mother appear together as Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale in "Those Extraordinary Twins" (1894), and Aunt Betsey appears as "old aunt Betsy Davis" in the unfinished "Hellfire Hotchkiss" (1897), and once more as the ‘widow Dawson’ in the "Schoolhouse Hill" version of The Mysterious Stranger (1898).



Not only is this the earliest Mark Twain letter in private hands, it is also the seventh earliest complete Twain letter in any collection, public or private.

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