Hoping your Thanksgiving today  is full of family, food and friends, I 
offer the following diversion, dubbed by  my granddaughter as "Funny how people 
don't change despite modern  technology." 
It is a runaway  husband anecdote, peripherally involving Sam Clemens. It’s 
a  piece of Twain-related "gossip" from 1861. 
In researching people and  places in 1861 Nevada Territory, I ran across a 
journal by sketch artist Joseph  Lamson, of Maine, and obtained photocopies 
from Lamson's journal at  CalHistSoc. 
Lamson writes of hiking north  along the east shore of Lake Tahoe in May, 
1861. He spent time  exploring Cave Rock, then hiked north until he came to a 
“house,” an occupied  log cabin, where he spent the night. 
He writes of "small  squirrels" [chipmunks] scampering in through the 
chinking of the house, and  the daughter of the unnamed "lady of the house" 
chasing them off. He names his  host as "Mr. Walker," and writes of a visitor, 
"Mr. Patterson" also being there.  Lamson mentions Shakespeare rock, and the 
meadow, where "Walker" is  planting grain. 
It is clear he is at  Glenbrook Bay, then called Walton's Landing where 
four men (Capt. A.W.  Pray, Rufus Walton, George Warren, and Nelson E. Murdock) 
had formed a sawmill  company. Capt. Pray lived in Virginia City. Walton 
owned the Clear Creek  toll road from there to a point just north of Carson 
Valley. He collected toll  where hr lived half-way along that road, near "Mr. 
Jones'"  sawmill. Warren and Murdock lived at the site.  Numerous records  
identify Nelson Eliphalet Murdock as a  "millwright.”  
Lamson's journal begs the  question: "Mr. Walker and Mr. Patterson"? No 
records have been found  of a man named Walker at the Lake in 1861, and there 
was only the  one cabin/house at Walton's Landing on the November 1861 
General Land  Office original survey. But Lamson was specific about the occupants’ 
 names.  
In the September,  1861 letter by Sam Clemens, he writes that a few days 
earlier he and  John Kinney had arrived at the “lower camp” at the Lake, then 
they  ".  . . set out for the only house on this side of the Lake—three 
miles from  there, down the shore" on a stormy day in September 1861 afternoon. 
In  Roughing It he writes it had been "a three mile pull" to reach the “
Brigade”  camp on first arrival. It becomes clear from the “three miles” that  
they considered the brigade camp to be their “lower camp” and they were 
now back  at the point of beginning. Sam does not name or directly mention 
people  there. 
In the 1861 letter Sam specifies  “lower camp”, three miles “down the shore
”, and “this side of the lake.” Four of  his roommates at Mrs. Murphy’s—
Capt. John Nye, William Wagner, Johannes Slott  and James Coulter—were 
partners in a Tahoe timber claim. From a description of  the claim by Will Wagner 
in 1861, and the 1862 claim survey and plat by the  Ormsby County Surveyor, 
we know their “John Nye & Co.” camp was three miles  north of the 
Warren/Murdock cabin. All of which suggests Clemens’ “lower camp”  was at the “
Brigade Claim” of Roughing It. 
A few weeks later, in November  1861, surveyor Butler Ives wrote in the 
Land Office survey of  the Glenbrook area, that the house was that of "Messrs. 
Warren and  Murdock." (The draftsman didn’t include the names on the plat of 
Ives’  survey.) Ives also notes the nearby "…sawmill, just built". 
(Roughing  It specifies "a saw-mill and some workmen", not a working sawmill.) In  
December 1861, George Warren and Nelson Eliphalet Murdock filed a claim on 
the  land under both the house and sawmill. In it they state they have lived 
there  since May, 1860. 
So, OK, who is this “Walker”  fellow that Lamson tells us lived there in 
May, 1861? I mentioned my  quandary to a historian who retired from Law 
Enforcement. He asked about  Lamson, and then the occupants--two men, a woman and 
a girl—and then  promptly said " Murdock didn't want folks back home to 
find him",  adding that Murdock was neither the first nor the only man to use  
the Gold Rush to skip out on his family.  
A Murdock family  genealogist in New York confirmed that Nelson Eliphalet 
Murdock, born  1810, was a millwright from New York who left his wife and 
three children  in the East in 1852 for California--and was never heard from 
again. (The term is  “grass Widow.”) 
Whether Lamson knew the true  names of his host or not is unknown. It's 
possible he was covering for  Murdock, and equally possible they gave Lamson 
aliases. Same goes for Sam  Clemens. 
Bob Stewart 
All documents mentioned above,  excepting the Lamson Journal, are in the 
online package at  https://futureboy.us/twain/2014Version6Total.pdf