The silver state. [volume] (Winnemucca, Nev.) 1909-1925, 1911-08-05
HOW. MARK TWAIN MADE
HIS MANY FORTUNES

W
he was a reporter in Virginia City,
Nevada, and when he was private sec
retary to Snator "Jim" Nye of that
state in Washington in the later six
ties, served to provide an interesting
background for the prosperity which
came to him as soon as "Innocents
Abroad was published. He came to
Hartford to have his books put on the
market, and he was as poor when he
first arrived here as he was rich soon
thereafter. His marriage to Miss
Langon, of Elmira, allied him with
a well-to-do family, and he was in
very comparable circumstances ever
afterward. in spite of the impression
to the contrary which was allowed to
prevail for time after the failure
of his book publishing enterprise
for business reasons.
The eminent humorist built his
home in Hartford in the early seven
ties. and he has told in his reminis
cenees how he started out with the
idea of spending $4,000, and ended
by putting six or seven times as much
into the Pennington avenue estab-
lshment now owned by Mrs. Bissell,
of the Hartford Fire Insurance com
pany. Nothing very beggarly about
that. 1t may be well to add few
facts about his subsequent financial
experiences, since there is so much
careIessness in dealing with the sub
iect in some of the newspaper of
fees.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars
came to Mark Twain in the years he
spent in Hartford-say from 1872
until 1890. His friend, the late
Henry G. Robinson, was fond Of
telling of a game of billiards he
played in Mark Twain 8 house with
the owner of IT, During a game Wis
itor was announced. The servant was
told to show him into the billiard
room. Mr.. Clemens talked with his
visitor without delaying shot on the
billiard table. The errand of the
visitor, who was a publishers agent,
was to offer him $4,000 for a series
of short stories which, as we remem-
Der. COULD be brought into a single
volume, after being published serial
ly. The amount of material asked for
was comparatively small. Clemens re-
iected the offer quickly--almost alb
rubtly. Mr.. Robinson ventured, when
the visitor was gone, to express his
surprise that the humorist could
'turn down what seemed like pro-
digious sum for a small amount of
4" copy" But Mark Twain dismissed
the incident nonchalently.
He had the narrowest kind of an
escape from becoming multimillion-
are He missed his chance to win a
great fortune when he "'put his
ha hu hoa
ing the Paige type-setting machine.
He was besought by men who invested
nltogether 5000. 900 in developing the
linotype idea between 1875 and 1890
to come into that enterprise. But he
thought his judgment was better than
theirs, and he sank $225,000 in the
Paige apparatus for setting up NOV
allie type. The machine was not a
suce ess With the same money he
could have controlling interest in
the linotype company and the invest
ment would have brought an average
annual income of $l,000,000 or more
during the past thirty years. With
that income he might have left as
large an estate when he died as that
Of his friend, Henry II. Rogers.
The Paige illusion was only one Of
the "good things in Hartford that
caught him for round sums. Probably
he sank half million in that way al
together. Then came the Grant book
"a brilliant ideaand the publishing
firm of Webster 4 Co., whose final
failure, together with his other heavy
losses, took all he had and involved
him temporarily in debt. But the
books which he wrote and published
between 1890 and 1900 and the lee
lures he delivered brought him an
other fortune, out of which the obli-
cations of Webster & Co, were easily
taken care Of. As soon as there was
plenty of mony again he repeated his
type setting machine investments in
various ways, very neatly set forth in
an editorial paragraph in the New
York Evening Post:
"Criticism seems almost unani-
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