he bowels
of those hills this fall, I will come up and clerk for you until I get
money enough to go over the mountains for the winter.

Yr. Bro.
SAM.

The Territorial Enterprise at Virginia City was at this time owned
by Joseph T. Goodman, who had bought it on the eve of the great
Comstock silver-mining boom, and from a struggling, starving sheet
had converted it into one of the most important--certainly the most
picturesque-papers on the coast. The sketches which the Esmeralda
miner had written over the name of "Josh" fitted into it exactly,
and when a young man named Barstow, in the business office, urged
Goodman to invite "Josh" to join their staff, the Enterprise owner
readily fell in with the idea. Among a lot of mining matters of no
special interest, Clemens, July 30th, wrote his brother: "Barstow
has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at $25
a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail,
if possible."

In Roughing It we are told that the miner eagerly accepted the
proposition to come to Virginia City, but the letters tell a
different story. Mark Twain was never one to abandon any
undertaking easily. His unwillingness to surrender in a lost cause
would cost him more than one fortune in the years to come. A week
following the date of the foregoing he was still undecided.

To Orion Clemens, in Carson City:

ESMERALDA, Aug. 7, 1862.

MY DEAR BRO,--Barstow wrote that if I wanted the place I could have
it. I wrote him that I guessed I would take it, and asked him how long
before I must come up there. I have not heard from him since.

Now, I shall leave at mid-night tonight, alone and on foot for a walk of
60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely
possible that mail facilities may prove infernally "slow" during the few
weeks I expect to spend out there. But do you write Barstow that I have
left here for a week or so, and in case he should want me he must write
me here, or let me know through you.

The Contractors say they will strike the Fresno next week. After fooling
with those assayers a week, they concluded not to buy "Mr. Flower"
at $50, although they would have given five times the sum for it four
months ago