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Twain, already a celebrity, was nearing the end of a celebrated voyage which began in June. He had held jobs as a printer, steamboat pilot and miner and had become a popular humorist. When the cruise enced, he set to work transforming travel letters about the trip into a book, The Innocents Abroad, and winning the affections of Olivia Langdon. In February of 1969 they announced their engagement. A conjoining of fateful elements brought Twain to the Buffalo Express. To read more of Tom Reigstad's story, see page 8 of the Fall 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!
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"Yes! I did know Mark Twain, as one comes to know another in working by his side day by day; I was there on the Express when he came and while he gradually withdrew - drawn away by the growing demand that called him to wider fields - I observed him as one could not help doing, studied him, was in consultation with him about those illustrations he let me make for the sketches and stories - that there his only but very ample contributions to the columns from week to week. I liked him very much, and the liking has grown into the universal love for him. It is a great pleasure to recall what I can that will be of interest to the readers of the News, of a kind with the many recollections that will be gleaned here and there among the hundreds whose relations with him were like mine - merely passing." To read the rest of the excerpt from John Harrison Mills' reminiscences and the article by William H. Loos, and the see page 14 in the Fall 2002 issue. Subscribe now!
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William G. Fargo arrived in Buffalo at the age of 25 to assume the duties of freight agent for the Auburn & Syracuse Railroad Company. Although lacking formal schooling, the farmer's son had demonstrated ambition and dependability in various occupations at which he tried his hand as he made his way westward from his native Town of Pompey in Onondaga County. After beginning work as apprentice to a tanner and shoemaker, Henry Wells spent time as a steamboat runner and ticket agent on the Erie Canal. Twelve years' Fargo's senior, Wells was also self-educated and ambitious. A native of Vermont and son of a minister, Wells' early career in transportation propelled him, too, to the western gateway. Before long, the two men would be in business together as pioneers in one of the young nation's msot important commercial enterprises... To read more of Jacek A. Wysocki's story, see page 24 of the Fall 2002 Heritage Magazine. Subscribe now!
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The
path that brought Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) to Buffalo began
in September of 1867 in a stateroom on board the steamer Quaker
City in the Bay of Smyrna, off the shore of western Turkey. It
was here that Charley Langdon of Elmira, New York, showed his fellow
passenger an ivory miniature of his older sister, Olivia. Twain was
hooked. 
[from
John Harrison Mills' article for the Buffalo Times, 1910]
It
was a rite of passage during the middle years of the nineteenth century
for young men to head toward the western frontier in search of adventure
and their fortune. Unitl the railroads replaced the Erie Canal as the
principal east-west artery of commerce, Buffalo was the gateway to the
West, the place where travelers from the east became pioneers, and where
raw materials and finished goods of all kinds would pass on their ways
to east and west. As Henry Wells would observe in 1863, in remarks to
the Buffalo Historical Society, "Buffalo was, as it yet remains,
the Great Gateway" of the West. In 1842, that Great Gateway beckoned
William G. Fargo and Henry Wells.
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