public speaker. There, Ludlow again found himself in a vibrant literary community, this time centred around the Golden Era, which published Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte. Twain was at the time still a virtual unknown (he had first used the pen name “Mark Twain” in a published piece a few months before). Ludlow wrote that “[i]n funny literature, that Irresistable [sic] Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position… He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself.” Twain reciprocated by asking Ludlow to preview some of his work, and wrote to his mother, “if Fitz Hugh Ludlow, (author of ‘The Hasheesh Eater’) comes your way, treat him well… He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain, (the same being eminently just & truthful, I beseech you to believe) in a San Francisco paper. Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself…” Ludlow also observed the ravages of opium addiction among the Chinese immigrant population in San Francisco: I shall never forget till my dying day that awful Chinese face which actually made me rein my horse at the door of the opium hong where it appeared, after a night’s debauch, at six o’clock one morning… It spoke of such a nameless horror in its owner’s soul that I made the sign for a pipe and proposed, in “pigeon English,” to furnish the necessary coin. The Chinaman sank down on the steps of the hong, like a man hearing medicine proposed to him when he was gangrened from head to foot, and made a gesture, palms downward, toward the ground, as one who said, “It has done its last for me — I am paying the matured bills of penalty.” From San Francisco, Bierstadt and Ludlow ventured to Yosemite, then to Mount Shasta, and then into Oregon, where Ludlow was struck “by a violent attack of pneumonia, which came near terminating my earthly with my Oregon pilgrimage” and which stopped their wandering for the better part of a week. By late in 1864, after Ludlow's return to New York City, his marriage was in trouble. The reasons for the strife are unknown, but surviving letters suggest a mutual and scandal-provoking flood of infidelity. Rosalie obtained a divorce in May 1866. She would, a few months later, marry Albert Bierstadt. Ludlow meanwhile was again trying