Marsh had his own form of shorthand, which I believe he shared with Clemens. By the early 1880s Marsh had polished it enough to write a book on it. As a result Marsh's system was widely used by 1900. Rice's background was as a clerk in a Buffalo, N.Y. newspaper, not as a reporter there. I doubt he knew shorthand, but as a reporter who didn.t know shorthand I can assure you from my reporter jobs that we quickly find our own ways of taking good notes. Rice came West hoping to be Gov. Nye's private secretary, but Nye had brought along, for that post, his next door neighbor in New York City, Sam Gallagher, who didn't stay West all that long after getting lost for a few days in the dry west-central Nevada hills. (Orion Clemens was Secretary of the Territory, not the governor's secretary.) One report said Gallagher had been with the New York Press, but he did not take a reporting job while here in Nevada Territory. There is no clear answer to the question of which house Marsh spent the most time covering.
When Miller was compiling the First Constitutional Convention articles for the book you mention, he compiled the thick pile of notes left by the secretary in a single file. That stack of paper is in the Nevada State Archives. I have the only known Xerox copy of those pages, courtesy of a now-deceased friend who was involved.
--------------------------------------------
On Sat, 3/9/19, Benjamin GRIFFIN <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Subject: Re: special correspondent from Carson City for Sacramento Daily Union
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Saturday, March 9, 2019, 10:45 AM
The most substantial source of information is
*Letters from Nevada
Territory 1861-1862* (by Marsh) and
*Reports of the 1863 Constitutional
Convention* (by Clemens, Marsh and
Bowman) (Reno: Legislative Council
Bureau, 1972).
On Sat, Mar 9, 2019 at 8:44 AM Kit
Farwell <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Thank you
Benjamin and Robert! It makes sense that Andrew J.
Marsh
> was correspondent as the very
detailed reporting must have been from
> shorthand and he wrote Marsh' New
Manual of Reformed Phonetic Shorthand.
> I see that Mark
Twain of the Enterprise has a long section on the
> legislative reporters; Sam
attending the House and Clement T. Rice
> (Virginia City Daily Union)
attending the Council sessions and
> collaborating, along with Marsh
(Sacramento Daily Union).
> Did Rice know
shorthand? It would be hard to report on both houses
if
> he didn't write shorthand.
> I wonder if Marsh
attended mostly the House or the House sessions?
>
> Thanks - Kit
> Kit Farwell
> [log in to unmask]
>
--
Benjamin Griffin
Associate Editor, Mark Twain Project
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
94720-6000
(510) 664-4238
|
