The message below is in response to an article in the Mark Twain Annual. I 
felt it needed a timely response but did not warrant more of a response than 
what I've said below. I hope the plain-text appears readable in the Forum! I 
hope Twainians take particular note of the two new discoveries in my 
on-going research into the origins of Sam Clemens' nom de plume. The fact 
that Vanity Fair was being sold from a news-stand in Virginia City and being 
reprinted in a local newspaper in 1861 --a paper quite familiar to Clemens--  
is very strong evidence. Sadly, only a handful of Virginia City newspapers 
before February, 1863 are known to survive, so this is the best evidence we 
have from Virginia City. I have gathered up quite a bit of other evidence as 
well, but will save it for another article when I've finished my research.

***************

Two New Discoveries and a Rehash Refuted



The latest _Mark Twain Annual_ (volume 12, 2014) contains an article
that will be of interest to those who have read about the three
conflicting accounts of how Sam Clemens took hold of his famous _nom
de plume_. In Carolyn Grattan Eichin's "From Sam Clemens to Mark
Twain: Sanitizing the Western Experience," the bar tab story is
presented once more as a viable account of how he took on his
pen-name. The reason given for resurrecting this previously debunked
story is that the motivations and veracity of the three people who
provided similar versions of the bar tab story at different times in
western newspapers (an anonymous writer using the name "Washoe Genius"
in 1866, George W. Cassidy in 1877, and later on a fireman named
Thomas Sawyer) had not been fully and fairly investigated. It's always
useful to re-examine these stories, and this case sounded promising,
and she provides some interesting biographical background on these
people and their accounts, but in the end the bar tab legend arrives
back where it started: a story told (or merely retold) by three
people, none of whom can be demonstrated to have known or even to have
ever met Mark Twain.



The reasons she gives for finding Cassidy a credible witness are
twofold: because he was in Nevada at the same time as Sam Clemens and
because he was an educated and successful citizen (Eichin 117). This
seems too thin an explanation. He was a local politician and later a
member of Congress, the sort of credentials that did not impress Mark
Twain during his Nevada days or later in life, and it adds no
credibility to his story. The account credited to the "Washoe Genius"
is anonymous, so his identity and veracity cannot be proven, and the
veracity of the account by Thomas Sawyer, who also claimed to be the
original source for Mark Twain's famous character, has been debunked
by R. Kent Rasmussen and Barbara Schmidt in a "Briefly Noted" Mark
Twain Forum review of a book about Sawyer, Rpbert Graysmith's _Black
Fire_. Grattan Eichin embraces that book and says that Twain only
"mildly rebuked Sawyer's claim" to be the original Tom Sawyer, but in
fact Twain candidly denied ever knowing anyone by that name and said
"that story lacks a good deal in the way of facts" (Scharnhorst, _Mark
Twain: The Complete Interviews_ 174).

There are other problems with those accounts. The Cassidy account
lists several people who were supposedly witnesses to the bar tab
story, among them Dan de Quille (William Wright), but none of those
named ever confirmed Cassidy's story and Mark Twain emphatically
denied it. The Sawyer account puts Bret Harte and Sam Davis in
Virginia City with Mark Twain, in flagrant defiance of historical
fact. In fact, both the Cassidy and the Sawyer accounts have the tone
of embellishment, with their possible origins in the anonymous 1866
account. Guy Cardwell commented on their folklorish nature when he
debunked the bar tab story, and I recommend his 1975 article as
worthwhile reading.



This rereading of the bar tab stories does not note that in startling
contrast to these three hearsay accounts by unsubstantiated witnesses,
we have no mention of the bar tab story in any of the books, memoirs,
articles, interviews, or correspondence that survive by those who
_did_ know Mark Twain in Virginia City: Dan de Quille, Joe Goodman,
Orion and Mollie Clemens, William H. Clagett, Clement T. Rice, William
M. Stewart, James W. Nye, and many others less known like Rollin M.
Daggett, Robert M. Howland, J. B. Graham, Augustus W. Oliver, John C.
Lewis, G. T. Sewall, et al. The author says the men who provided the
bar tab stories "believed themselves to be truthful" and that "it is
the realm of the academic historian to value those memories within a
context that makes the past useful to the present." (Grattan Eichin
118). Frankly, I don't know what this means, but I'd caution against
trusting bar-room recollections in general, and believing what you
read in newspapers, even old ones.



Grattan Echin proposes that Mark Twain made up the Capt. Sellers story
to hide his embarrassing drinking and sexual exploits during his
Nevada years. But she does not account for why Mark Twain would have
famously asked his western friends to write letters of reference on
his behalf to his future father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, or why he
would have invited former Nevada friends like Joe Goodman and Dan de
Quille to Hartford where they met his wife Olivia and stayed several
months (Goodman in 1871; de Quille in 1875). That's not exactly the
behavior of a newly married man with deep dark secrets to keep from
his family and Nook Farm friends.



The 1975 debunking by Guy Cardwell is attacked, as is Horst Kruse, and
the author seems particularly upset with my article about the probable
origins of Mark Twain's _nom de plume_ that appeared in the _Mark
Twain Journal_ last year, calling it "specious" and based on
"intuition." Oh well, I tried not to be. She is selective and
inaccurate in her presentation of my theory. Frequently demanding
documentary proof--a "smoking gun" she calls it--that does not survive
in the historical record. She berates me for "extrapolating" a 20th
century term ("brand") to Mark Twain's _nom de plume_, but Mark Twain
himself said "If a man puts a certain trademark upon a certain _brand_
of cloth he has no rights to sell the public another sort of cloth
under that same trademark. But authors as a rule do not look upon a
_nom de plume_ as a trademark, do they? Perhaps not, but I do. Mark
Twain is my trademark." (Scharnhorst 229). Clearly, I did not have to
extrapolate very far.



She also misreads my suggestion that _The Silver Age_ was a possible
source where Mark Twain might have seen an exchange file of _Vanity
Fair_, and says flatly that he never wrote for that paper. I never
said he did, but the editors at MTP say he may have helped write a
piece for that paper (_Letters I_:212,n.11) and I do cite them. She
implies that _Vanity Fair_ was a newspaper that would have been too
bulky to store in the "cramped quarters" of a Virginia City newspaper
office, that newspapers were of "limited usefulness" and that they
would have ended up "in the wood stove in all likelihood." (Grattan
Eichin 122). But _Vanity Fair_ was not a multi-column folio daily
newspaper; it was a royal octavo weekly magazine and my article
carefully explained both the exchange system and the difference
between the timely content of a newspaper and the comic "filler"
provided by journals like _Vanity Fair_. A complete run of _Vanity
Fair_ (1859-63), bound in six slender volumes occupies barely 6 1/2
inches of shelf space. Newspapers did indeed retain magazines as
future sources of filler material; I have a volume of _Vanity Fair_
that was retained in the exchange file of the _Boston Daily
Advertiser_ whose editor thought paying 87 1/2 cents to have those 52
issues bound was a good idea. Exchange files were not fuel for fires;
they were valuable resources, and when _The Silver Age reincarnated as
_The Daily Union_, their exchange files would have been considered a
valuable asset and retained. What would those files have contained?



I could give more examples to refute her other criticisms point by
point, but most of her questions and problems with my theory can be
answered by a careful rereading of the factual evidence I presented,
my endnotes, and my references. I could also refute some of her claims
using further evidence I've uncovered, including a news vendor named
J. G. Foxe who advertised issues of _Vanity Fair_ for sale in the
October 2, 1861 issue of _The Silver Age_, and a comic piece reprinted
from _Vanity Fair_ (May 25, 1861) in _The Silver Age_ on July 20,
1861. My conclusion that _Vanity Fair_ was readily available in Virginia
City was based on statistical facts and my knowledge of the exchange
system that placed it there--not intuition or specious reasoning. I
strongly suggest that she read up on the exchange system; at one
point in her piece she actually mistakes an exchange system reprint
as a newspaper article from a newspaper called the _Exchange_
(Grattan Eichin 115).



There are no "smoking guns" for _any_ of the three accounts of how
Twain laid hands on his _nom de plume_, only circumstantial evidence.
The smoking guns for the bar tab story would be documentary evidence
proving personal relationships between Mark Twain and those who told
their bar tab stories in the newspapers, _plus_ a convincing
assessment of their veracity, and a clear demonstration that it wasn't
something that began _after_ he adopted his _nom de plume_, but that
Clemens was using the name for his bar tabs _before_ he adopted the
_nom de plume_ in 1863--or for a convincing account by one of Mark
Twain's many Virginia City friends to suddenly come to light.



The smoking gun for the Capt. Sellers story would be to find a river
report by Sellers signed "Mark Twain" and somehow advance the date of
his death by sixteen months, but those newspaper files (online and
off) have been repeatedly searched and the only Sellers river report
found was signed "I. Sellers." The smoking gun for the _Vanity Fair_
account would be the discovery of a copy of that very issue of _Vanity
Fair_ annotated by Twain himself, or a reprint of that _Vanity Fair_
story with the "Mark Twain" character in a Virginia City newspaper
before February, 1863. It's unlikely that any of these accounts will
ever be proven with a smoking gun, and Grattan Eichin should not be
demanding such evidence when she has no such evidence herself. Often
the historical records yields less than what we all might wish, so we
must apply logic and draw reasonable conclusions using the best
evidence.



It is understandable that some Twainians would be reluctant to give up
mythologies more or less accepted as fact for 150 years in the face of
newly discovered printed evidence like _Vanity Fair_, or that a Nevada
writer might wish to see Nevada lay claim to the origins of Mark
Twain's wonderful _nom de plume_. It's fun to let facts and logic take
a holiday and depend instead on supposition based on unsubstantiated
hearsay evidence, but doing so is engaging in folklore, not recording
history. It's the stuff of spirited collegial banter at conferences
but this re-examination does not advance Twain scholarship.

Kevin
@
Mac Donnell Rare Books
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Austin TX 78730
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