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.”