The Sacramento Union - Founding - Mark Twain and The Sacramento Union

Mark Twain and The Sacramento Union

The Missouri-born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who is better known by his nom de plume of Mark Twain, is remembered most for his contributions to The Union. This point was evident through the large bronze bust of Twain, which sat just west of the State Capitol in the lobby of The Union’s latter building at 301 Capitol Mall.

Inscribed on the bust were Twain’s words: “Early in 1866, George Barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper, the San Francisco Morning Call, and for some months thereafter, I was without money or work; then I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the Sacramento Union, a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars a piece. I was there for four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known man on the Pacific Coast.”

Twain dispatched a series of articles on Hawaii for The Union in 1866. These were very popular, and many historians credit the series with turning Twain into a journalistic star. Because many people thought that Twain wrote in The Union building, whenever The Union was struggling financially during the turn of the 20th century, the owners would drag out an old desk and sell it for a princely sum as "the desk where Mark Twain sat."

Unfortunately, said Charlotte Gilmore, former head of The Union’s “morgue” or bound volumes collection, the original Twain articles were cut out and stolen from The Union’s bound volumes during the 1970s.

“Sometime after I left in the summer of 1971, it happened,” Gilmore said. “It’s a very disappointing situation, but at least the (Twain) articles were photographed (for microfilm) before this happened.”

The Union’s bound volumes, as well as the bronze bust of Twain, are now in the possession of the Shields Library at UC Davis, having been donated by the Danel and Reboin families, owners of the Herald Printing Co. The Twain articles can be viewed on microfilm at the Sacramento Public Library’s central location at 828 I St.