The find came in the form of letters discovered by the Mark Twain Project at the University of California. They date to 1865, when 29-year-old Samuel Clemmons was paid $100 per week to write for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada.
"He's utterly free," project manager Bob Hirst told Sky News. "He's not encumbered by a marriage or much of anything else, and he can speak his mind and does speak his mind."
Hirst says Clemmons “compared the city's police chief to a dog chasing its tail and accused the city government of rascality.
Samuel Clemens died in 1910.
Hirst called it “a very special period in his life, when he's out here in San Francisco.” Some of the letters were lost in a fire but researchers say the surviving transcripts “are wonderful to read.”