Mr. Frank Fuller and his enthusiastic launching of Mr. Clemens’s first New York lecture. – Results not in fortune, but in fame. – Leads to a lecture tour under direction of Redpath. – Clipping in regard to Frank Fuller, and Mr. Clemens’s comments.
I am not glancing through my books to find out what I have said in them. I refrain from glancing through those books for two reasons: first – and this reason always comes first in every matter connected with my life – laziness. I am too lazy to examine the books. The other reason is – well, let it go. I had another reason, but it had slipped out of my mind while I was arranging the first one. I think it likely that in the book called Roughing It I have mentioned Frank Fuller. But I don’t know, and it isn’t any matter.
When Orion and I crossed the continent in the overland stagecoach in the summer of 1861, we stopped two or three days in Great Salt Lake City. I do not remember who the Governor of Utah Territory was at that time, but I remember that he was absent – which is a common habit of territorial Governors, who are nothing but politicians who go out to the outskirts of countries and suffer the privations there in order to build up States and come back as United States Senators. But the man who was acting in the Governor’s place was the Secretary of the Territory, Frank Fuller – called Governor, of course, just as Orion was in the great days when he got that accident-title through Governor Nye’s absences. Titles of honor and dignity once acquired in a democracy, even by accident and properly usable for only forty-eight hours, are as permanent here as eternity is in heaven. You can never take away those titles. Once a justice of the peace for a week, always “judge” afterward. Once a major of militia for a campaign on the Fourth of July, always a major. To be called colonel, purely by mistake and without intention, confers that dignity on a man for the rest of his life. We adore titles and heredities in our hearts, and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.
Well, Fuller was acting Governor, and he gave us a very good time during those two or three days that we rested in Great Salt Lake City. He was an alert and energetic man; a pushing man; a man who was able to take an interest in anything that was going – and not only that, but take five times as much interest in it as it was worth, and ten times as much as anybody else could take in it – a very live man.
I was on the Pacific coast thereafter five or six years, and returned to the States by the way of the Isthmus in January, ’67. In the previous year I had spent several months in the Sandwich Islands for the Sacramento Union, and had returned to San Francisco empty as to cash, but full of information – information proper for delivery from the lecture platform. My letters from the Islands had given me a large notoriety – local notoriety. It did not extend eastward more than a hundred miles or so, but it was a good notoriety to lecture on, and I made use of it on the platform in California and Nevada and amassed twelve or fifteen hundred dollars in the few nights that I labored for the instruction and amusement of my public. Fifteen hundred dollars was about half – the doorkeeper got the rest. He was an old circus man and knew how to keep door.
When I arrived in New York I found Fuller there in some kind of business. He was very hearty, very glad to see me, and wanted to show me his wife. I had not heard of a wife before; had not been aware that he had one. Well, he showed me his wife, a sweet and gentle woman with most hospitable and kindly and winning ways. Then he astonished me by showing me his daughters. Upon my word, they were large and matronly of aspect, and married – he didn’t say how long. Oh, Fuller was full of surprises. If he had shown me some little children, that would have been well enough, and reasonable. But he was too young-looking a man to have grown children. Well, I couldn’t fathom the mystery and I let it go. Apparently it was a case where a man was well along in life, but had a handsome gift of not showing his age on the outside.
Governor Fuller – it is what all his New York friends called him now, of course – was in the full storm of one of his enthusiasms. He had one enthusiasm per day, and it was always a storm. He said I must take the biggest hall in New York and deliver that lecture of mine on the Sandwich Islands – said that people would be wild to hear me. There was something catching about that man’s prodigious energy. For a moment he almost convinced me that New York was wild to hear me. I knew better. I was well aware that New York had never heard of me, was not expecting to hear of me, and didn’t want to hear of me – yet that man almost persuaded me. I protested, as soon as the fire which he had kindled in me had cooled a little, and went on protesting. It did no good. Fuller was sure that I should make fame and fortune right away without any trouble. He said leave it to him – just leave everything to him – go to the hotel and sit down and be comfortable – he would lay fame and fortune at my feet in ten days.