In 1865 Sam seems to have had a reputation that was less than flattering. In November of that year he was writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. Some miles away, in Sacramento, there is a story in the November 17, 1865, Sacramento Daily Union (p.2, col. 4) telling a confusing tale of an incident in a boarding house in which ". . . a tall but distinguished looking gentleman entered the office, holding a carpet sack in his left hand, and two junk bottles and a Westphalian ham in his right, and approached the [boarding house manager] in a confidential manner. " For some reason, unclear to this reader, things went weird and the stranger ends up fleeing. Then the last bit of the Sacramento article gives us a humorous hint at Mark Twain's reputation in Sacramento in 1865: " The police are on the track of the stranger, but he has not yet been found, and all surmises as to who he is fall idly to the ground. The hypothesis that it was only Mark Twain stepping up to pay his board bill is scouted as too monstrously improbable to be worthy of a moment's consideration." Bob Stewart Carson City The article is on cdnc.ucr.edu/, but unfortunately they are having a problem at the moment with newspaper images, so for the time being you can read the OCR text, which is somewhat clean, but you cannot at this time see the image of the actual newspaper article or the illustration accompanying the article.