Now I'm mad. Plain Text is supposed to work right. The =20=20C crap is  
really irritating. But with a smile, I try a different approach to getting it 
in  plain text. I hope the host will take the other versions out of the Forum 
 archive and leave a clean one for me. I gues if this doesn't work, you'll 
have  to read it despite the hypertext inserts.
 

Hoping your Thanksgiving today is going better than my emailing, and 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 
is 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 he,  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