The Press: Letter to the Editor

Mark Twain was so casual a writer that 33 years after his death chunks of his enormous output are still being discovered. Latest Twain student to strike pay dirt is Lowry Charles Wimberley, English professor at the University of Nebraska. In an article in the November Atlantic Monthly he unveils a rare, neglected sample of Twain’s rollicking burlesque, which he found in Nebraska’s State Historical Society files.

Explains Wimberley: In September, 1880, the New York Post printed a dispatch from the old San Francisco Call reporting the discovery, by one Anson Tichenor, of “gold-bearing waters” at Calistoga, Calif. Said the dispatch: “[Tichenor] has succeeded in extracting $1,060 from ten barrels of water. The gold is of the highest grade.”

From his home in Hartford, Conn., Mark Twain promptly wrote the Post a letter:

“It does not surprise me, for I once owned those springs myself. What does surprise me, however, is the falling off in the richness of the water. In my time the yield was a dollar a dipperful. … It may be the proprietor’s process is an inferior one.

“Yes, that may be the fault. Mine was to take my uncle — I had an extra uncle at that time . . . and fill him up and let him stand 15 minutes to give the water a chance to settle well. Then I inserted him in an exhausted receiver, which had the effect of sucking gold out through the pores. I have taken more than $11,000 out of that old man in a day and a half. . . .

“I consider gold-yielding water in many respects remarkable, and yet no more so than the gold-bearing air of ‘Catgut Canon.’. . . This air, or this wind, for it is a kind of trade wind which blows steadily down 600 miles of rich quartz croppings during an hour and a quarter every day, except Sundays, is heavily charged with exquisitely fine, impalpable gold.

“Nothing precipitated and solidified this gold so readily as contact with human flesh heated by passion. The time that Wm. Abrahams was disappointed in love he used to step outdoors when the wind was blowing, and come in again and begin to sigh & sigh, and his brother and I would extract over $1.50 out of every sigh. . . .

“I did not suppose a person could buy a water privilege at Calistoga at any price, but several good locations along the course of the . . . gold-bearing trade winds are for sale.”