Mr.Clemens to Mr. Paine(January 9, 1906)

The more I think of this [the biography], the more nearly impossible the project seems. The difficulties of it grow upon me all the time. For instance, the idea of blocking out a consecutive¹ series of events which have happened to me, or which I imagine have happened to me--I can see that that is impossible for me. The only thing possible for me is to talk about the thing that something suggests at the moment--something in the middle of my life, perhaps, or something that happened only a few months ago. It is my purpose to extend these notes to 600,000 words, and possibly more. But that is going to take a long time--a long time.
My idea is this: that I write an autobiography². When that autobiography is finished--or before it is finished, but no doubt after it is finished--then you take the manuscript and decide on how much of a biography to make. But this is no holiday excursion--it is a journey.
We will try this--see whether it is dull or interesting--whether it will bore us and we will want to commit suicide. I hate to get at it. I hate to begin, but I imagine if you are here to make suggestions from time to time, we can make it go along, instead of having it drag.
Now let me see, there was something I wanted to talk about, and I supposed it would stay in my head. I know what it is--about the Big Bonanza³ in Nevada.
I want to read from the commercial columns of the New York Times, of a day or two ago, what practically was the beginning of the great Bonanza in Nevada, and these details seem to me to be correct--that in Nevada, during 1871, John Mackay and Fair got control of the Consolidated⁴ Virginia Mine for $26,000; that in 1873, two years later, its 108,000 shares sold at $45 per share; and that it was at that time that Fair made the famous silver ore find of the great Bonanza. Also, according to these statistics, in November, '74 the stock went to 115, and in the following month--January, '75--it reached 700. The shares of the companion mine, the California, rose in four months from 37 to 780--a total property which in 1869 was valued on the Mining Exchange at $40,000, was quoted six years later at $160,000,000. I think those dates are correct. That great Bonanza occupies a rather prominent place in my mind for the reason that I knew persons connected with it. For instance, I knew John Mackay very well--that would be in 1862, '63, and '64, I should say. I don't remember what he was doing when I came to Virginia in 1862, from starving to death down in the so-called mines of Esmeralda, which consisted in that day merely of silver-bearing quartz--plenty of bearing, and didn't have much load to carry in the way of silver--and it was a happy thing for me when I was summoned to come up to Virginia City to be local editor of the Virginia City Enterprise during three months, while Mr. William H. Wright (Dan de Quille) should go east, to Iowa, and visit his family, whom he hadn't seen for some years. I took the position of local editor with joy, because there was a salary of forty dollars a week attached to it and I knew that that was all of forty dollars more than I was worth, and I had always wanted a position which paid in the opposite proportion of value to amount of work. I took that position with pleasure, not with confidence--but I had a difficult job--a difficult job. I was to furnish one column of leaded nonpareil every day, and as much more as I could get on paper before the paper should go to press at two o'clock in the morning. By and by, in the course of a few months, I met John Mackay, with whom I had already been well acquainted for some time. He had established a

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