Casey at the Bat
about it during the years intervening. I subsequently learned that Will Valentine died of typhoid fever while an employee of the New York World a few months after I met him.
This is a clear-cut narrative, but it is modified a little in Mr. Wilstach's second letter, in which he says:
This matter of "Casey at the Bat" is so nebulous that I would really like to withdraw from it. However, I am certain of two things: first, that I suggested to Will Valentine that he write a burlesque of Macaulay's "Horatius at the Bridge"; second that he did write this burlesque and that it was called "Casey at the Bat." I was present in the room when he wrote it. I haven't seen his copy since that afternoon, or a day or two afterwards, when it appeared in the Tribune. Whether the present "Casey at the Bat" is a re-write of Valentine's I can't say.
An inquiry of the Sioux City Tribune had previously elicited the information that Mr. Valentine had indeed been employed on the paper in 1887, but that there was no apparent foundation for the statement that he had written "Casey at the Bat." It was also stated (by Mr. Thayer) that Mr. Valentine's claim had been investigated about 1905 by the San Francisco law firm of Lent & Humphrey, who had
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