How Not to Get Rich

by Alan Pell Crawford

  These boys were raised in the golden age of the steamboat, which, like many golden ages, was short-lived. In those days, pilots—not captains—commanded the ships they steered. The sons of doctors were happy to become lowly clerks on the river. Liquor dealers’ sons became bartenders in the ships’ saloons. But the pilot had “the grandest position of all,” Twain wrote in his autobiography. “The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary—from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, with no board to pay.”

  But for the two years of his apprenticeship, Twain struggled. When he wasn’t accompanying Bixby on one of his runs, Twain took odd jobs. Once, to make ends meet, he was a night watchman, keeping an eye on cargo piled up on the New Orleans levee.

  Twain was twenty-three when, on April 9, 1859, he finally obtained his license. He made his first run as a fully accredited pilot on the Alfred T. Lacey, enjoying “an income equal to that then earned by the Vice President of the United States.” When Twain steered the City of Memphis, “the largest boat in the trade,” he boasted that he could put away $100 a month, and this was after sending money to support his mother. When he went to pay his dues to the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association, he told brother Orion, he liked “to let the d—d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions, whose faces I do not exhibit! You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a ‘stern joy’ in it.”

  WE KNOW THE ERA of the riverboat as a golden age mostly because Twain told us it was. And it was a spectacular, if somewhat sketchy, business. By the time Twain took the wheel, a thousand such vessels plied the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers, carrying more cargo than all the country’s oceangoing ships put together. The railroads were only getting started and, at that time, could hardly compete for sheer glamour with those “moving mountains of light and flame,” as one account calls them. They were ornate and gaudy, imposing to look at, fun to party on—and extremely dangerous.

  Owners of these riverboats made far more money hauling cargo than entertaining pleasure-seekers (including gamblers and prostitutes) in their saloons. Some carried a thousand tons of cargo at a time, which weighed them down so much they virtually skimmed along the river bottom. The lifespan of these riverboats was less than five years. Many had their hulls ripped open, sometimes by striking the wreck of another steamboat that had met its own disastrous fate and sunk. The boats belched smoke and sparks, and those that did not run aground were likely to catch fire and explode. The year after Bixby and Twain were its pilots, the Colonel Crossman itself blew up.

  Twain clearly enjoyed the work as well as the pay, and a popular image of him to this day is at the wheel of a riverboat, his unruly hair billowing out from beneath a pilot’s cap. But this is misleading. In fact, Twain was a pilot for only about four years—and this part of his life came to a close at the same time the steamboat’s role as a major force in American commerce had begun to wane. The movement of goods by water was about to experience what we would call a “disruption.” The Civil War shut down Southern shipping, and in the postwar years, the government subsidized the railroads with cash and land grants. Besides, the railroads moved goods faster, more economically, and with greater safety than did the steamers.

  Our business culture celebrates disruption—as long as it is confined to industries other than our own. “Disruptive innovation,” as it’s known today, can be disastrous for people whose living depends on the industry whose old ways of doing things is disrupted. In this case, that meant anyone who made his living on the river. But disruption can be a great motivator, as it was for Twain. The turning point, for him as well as for the riverboats, was the Civil War. He was in New Orleans in April 1861, when President Lincoln announced a blockade of the South, including the Mississippi, and Twain was suddenly out of work. While Bixby stayed on throughout the war, piloting an ironclad Union gunboat, Twain, a Southern sympathizer in his early years, had other ideas.

  These ideas were clarified in May 1861, when he was a passenger on the Nebraska, heading north. The Nebraska, piloted by his friend Zeb Leavenworth, had secured clearance to pass through the blockade at Memphis. Unfortunately, an artillery unit from a Union outpost just south of St. Louis seems not to have known this fact.

  Twain was in the pilothouse with Leavenworth when a warning shot from the Union soldiers crashed into the Nebraska’s smokestack, shattering glass and reducing wooden ornamentation to splinters.

  “Good Lord, Almighty!” Leavenworth cried out. “What do they mean by that?”

  “I guess they want us to wait a minute, Zeb,” Twain said.

  Then, with seemingly superhuman aplomb, Twain took the wheel himself and turned the boat around. Eventually allowed to push on, the Nebraska reached St. Louis. By this time, Twain’s momentary bravado (we have only his account of it) appears to have evaporated. He never talked about what he did next. For that, we have to rely on his sister Pamela Moffett’s account.

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  “I Had to Seek Another Livelihood”

  Once the Nebraska reached St. Louis, Twain fled to his sister Pamela’s house. There he hid out, Pamela said, obsessed with the fear that government agents would arrest him. He was convinced they would force him, at gunpoint, to pilot Union ships and shoot him at “the least sign of a false move.”

  So, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, Twain hightailed it back to Hannibal. Although Missouri did not secede from the Union, it was a slaveholding state, full of Southern sympathizers. Like most Americans, north and south, Twain thought the war would be over in a matter of months, and maybe sooner. Always eager for adventure, he served for a few weeks in the Marion Rangers, a volunteer militia unit supposedly dedicated to protecting their native Marion County from invading hordes of Union marauders. There were fourteen members of this outfit, for which the overused word “ragtag” seems especially fitting, and Twain was elected second lieutenant. The Marion Rangers had no uniforms. Their only weapons were whatever was at hand. Mostly, they camped out in the woods.

  Whenever federal troops appeared in the general vicinity, the Marion Rangers would find reasons to camp farther away. Within days, Twain resigned on the grounds that he was “incapacitated by fatigue” from nonstop retreating. But his time with the Marion Rangers was educational, if nothing else. Twain “learned more about retreating,” he said, “than the man that invented retreating.”

  So Twain waited for the war to end. He assumed that when it did, and shipping on the Mississippi resumed, he would go back to piloting—as a civilian. “I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended,” he said. But when the war dragged on for four more years, and “commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone. I had to seek another livelihood.”

  TWAIN’S RESPONSE TO the war was, arguably, both sensible and businesslike. He took measures to avoid getting killed or dying of disease, and in that he was far more successful than some 700,000 of his countrymen. What he did after resigning from the Marion Rangers was to move out West, more than a thousand miles from Antietam, Gettysburg, and Appomattox.

  Of course, not getting killed was easier for some Americans than for others. If you were rich (Twain, recall, was only “prospectively rich”) you could hire a substitute to serve in your stead. John D. Rockefeller did this. So did Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Jay Gould, and Philip Armour the meatpacker. Finding a replacement recruit was perfectly legal and respectable—if you had enough money.

  Those who thought of themselves as the best people paid for replacements (or their brokers did); the richer you were, the more likely you were to do so. Once you didn’t have to fight in the war yourself, you could turn your attention to making money from the war, as some of these shrewd men did. They included John Wanamaker and Clement Studebaker, as well as the Brooks brothers, who made uniforms. Carnegie a
dded to his wealth by speculating in rail and bridge construction, all the while serving as assistant to the assistant secretary of war in charge of military transport. Some, including Elisha Brooks, one of those Brooks brothers, palmed off their shoddy goods on the armies, which outfitted unfortunate soldiers with cardboard shoes, flimsy clothes, and guns that didn’t fire. Twain, by contrast, harmed no one when he avoided military service. He cost the country far less, in fact, than did bounty jumpers and profiteers. And when Twain left for the West, he was actually doing government work, of a sort.

  Twain’s brother Orion Clemens had campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and in early 1861 he was appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory (pop. 6,857). This was “a not negligible position, easily the most prestigious that Orion would ever have,” with a salary of $1,800 a year. When the government studiously ignored Orion’s appeals for an advance to pay his way west, Twain himself agreed to foot the bills. In return, Orion made his brother his secretary—the secretary to the secretary, that is. That’s how the government did things back then. Today, of course, we are more efficient.

  The brothers set off by steam and stage for Nevada on July 11, 1861, taking two days in Salt Lake City so that Twain could gawk at polygamists. On August 14, they arrived in Carson City, the capital of the Nevada Territory. Just two years earlier, the Comstock Lode of gold and silver had been discovered only 200 miles away, at Mount Davidson, giving rise to riches that came and went with astonishing speed. There wasn’t much for the secretary to the secretary to do, so mostly Twain lazed about, except when he went sightseeing.

  In September he visited Lake Tahoe, or, as it was known at that time, Lake Bigler. About fifteen miles west of Carson City, the lake astonished him with its clear, deep waters and surrounding pine forests. Its unspoiled beauty practically intoxicated him, as it would millions of visitors in years to come. There were no casinos there, of course, or ski lodges and vacation homes, though these would come sooner than one might think. Just three years after Twain’s visit, Tahoe City would be founded as a resort for residents of Virginia City, more populous then than Carson City and situated about forty miles northeast of the lake. For now, though, the lakefront was an ideal campsite. Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe, Twain said, “would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.” The air in that high altitude was “pure and fine, bracing and delicious.”

  But Twain also saw commercial possibilities in those forests. As the son of a man who had bought thousands of acres back in Tennessee, Twain had been raised with an awareness of the profits to be had from undeveloped real estate. The land around Lake Bigler, of course, would have to be despoiled for its riches to be realized. Despoiling natural resources was never a goal of any such enterprise, of course—only a consequence or byproduct. By the time Twain laid eyes on the forests around the lake, logging was already supplying timbers to shore up the Comstock mines. The cost of entry in the timber business was negligible. Squatters could do pretty much what they wanted; possession was at least 90 percent of the law. You had to mark your claim, which evidently could be done simply by fencing off the trees you wished to cut down. The fence could take almost any form. It need not be sturdy. You also had to put up some kind of structure to serve as a house. It needn’t be sturdy, either.

  Twain and a friend named John D. Kinney built such a house by the lake that fall. Because they enjoyed sleeping under the stars, they never actually slept in it. Inhabiting their shack “never occurred to us,” Twain said. They did not ask too much of their flimsy structure, which “was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it.”

  One night, after rowing from another camp with a fresh supply of provisions, Twain began to fix dinner. At about 7 p.m., he took bread, bacon, and a coffee pot, put them all under a tree, built a sturdy fire, and went back to the boat for his frying pan. The next thing he knew Kinney was shouting something at him. He turned to see his fire “galloping all over the premises” and Kinney racing through the flames to get back to the water’s edge.

  A good six miles from anyone who might be able to help, the two entrepreneurs stood, as in a daze, watching flames consume the forest. Because the ground was a carpet of dry pine needles, the fire “touched them off as if they were gunpowder,” Twain wrote in Roughing It. In this memoir of his days out West, he claimed to have enjoyed the spectacle.

  It was wonderful to see with what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled! My coffee-pot was gone, and everything with it. In a minute and a half the fire seized upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chaparral six or eight feet high, and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific.

  The intense heat sent them scurrying back to their boat, and there they stayed—and watched.

  Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! It went surging up adjacent ridges—surmounted them and disappeared in the canyons beyond—burst into view upon higher and farther ridges, presently—shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again—flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the mountain-side—threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain fronts were webbing as it were with a tangled network of red lava streams.

  Every so often, Twain or Kinney would remove his pipe from his mouth and exclaim, “Superb, Magnificent! Beautiful!”

  The fire raged for four hours, and by 11 p.m., “the conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and the darkness stole down upon the landscape again.” As for supper, the bread was cooked, the bacon fried, “but we did not go to see. We were homeless wanderers again, and without any property. Our fence was gone, our house burned down; no insurance. Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away. Our blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and went to sleep.”

  The next morning, they roused themselves and gaped again at the surrounding desolation. If they did anything more about the damage they caused, there is no evidence of it, and no expectation that they should have. Innocent of any highfalutin’ notions about “sustainability,” they had simply stood by and watched in wonderment as the wildfire they touched off with such unforgiveable irresponsibility pumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to manmade climate change. (Readers who find the scientific evidence for manmade climate change lacking may express their concerns directly to the publisher.)

  Twain and Kinney did notice, when they saw each other that morning, that they “looked like lava men . . . covered as we were with ashes, and begrimed with smoke.” Then they just shrugged their shoulders, packed up what was left of their belongings, and headed back to Carson City. There, one hopes, they bathed.

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  “All That Glitters”

  After successfully burning down a forest, Twain returned to Carson City, where he was soon “smitten with the silver fever.” This was predictable, as an older and wiser Twain would later realize: “I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest,” he would say in his own defense. Day after day, he’d seen wagonloads of solid silver bricks rolling down the street, and “such sights as that gave substance to the wild talk about me. I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the rest.” The mountains were said to be “literally bursting with gold and silver,” and Twain believed it.

  The rich veins of the Comstock Lode had lured prospectors by the thousands just as the California Gold Rush began to peter out. At its peak, around 1863, the market value of the silver produced by mines in the Comstock was $40 million. Among those who struck it rich in those raw, windswept ranges was George Hearst, the father of William Randolph Hearst. In the winter of
1859 alone, the elder Hearst mined thirty-eight tons of silver.

  It was at the age of twenty-six that Twain decided that silver “was the road to fortune” and set off on that dusty trail with characteristic self-assurance. Over the next four years, from 1861 to 1865, he made several determined forays into the mountains. All the while, he watched as others made their fortunes, some of them literally overnight. Some were foolhardy enough to pocket more money than they’d had in their lives, then drink it all away, realize they were broke again, and have to start all over.

  A quick study, Twain began to speak knowingly of veins, ledges, leads, yields, claims, riffles, screenings, assayers, and assessments, peppering his conversation (and letters home) with other oddments of mining jargon. There was no reason he would not strike it rich in the unspoiled Nevada Territory, he told his mother. Nevada

  is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris, (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, coyote’s [sic] (pronounced ki-yo-ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.

  It was also a forbidding landscape. The birds that fly over it “carry their own provisions with them.”

  How could a young man of ambition and brains not succeed in this wide-open environment?

  TWAIN BEGAN AS a mere prospector, hauling picks, shovels, and other tools into the mountains. He was not at first sure, however, why he and his friends would need this burdensome equipment. From the due diligence that he had conducted, it seemed the precious metals would be practically begging for a good home.