Moving to another computer, I will try this one last time: 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 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