On August 13 Sam’s traveling party crossed its last no-man’s-land before Carson City. This was Forty Mile Desert, covered with “bottomless sand” into which their wagon wheels sank as deep as a foot in places. “The desert,” Twain wrote in chapter 20, “was one prodigious graveyard” of the breakdowns of previous travelers’ wagons. But by the next morning they had finally reached the territorial capital of Nevada, a beehive of activity that sat at the base of the beautiful Sierra Nevada. Twain described Carson City as a “wooden” town with a population of two thousand. “The main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores,” he wrote in Roughing It. Named for the Indian scout Kit Carson, it had begun as a stage coach stop in 1851. With the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859, it had lost much of its business to nearby Virginia City. Yet Carson City remained the territorial capital and thus was Mark Twain’s first destination in Washoe, the nickname given to Nevada because of the native Washoe Indians.
Before he knew it, he began a third career as a silver miner, since there was no set pay in being Orion’s secretary and hardly any compensation when he clerked that fall in the territorial government’s first assembly. His future and Orion’s fortune lay in the mines, he thought, but he was already honing his skill as a writer of wit and originality in letters home. In October 1861, he told his mother that the country was “fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris, (gypsum,) thieves, murderers, desperadoes, . . . poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.” 10
There was no fanfare over Orion’s arrival in the city. The two brothers quietly took up residence in the front bedroom of the Ormsby House, which doubled as Orion’s office during the daytime. The territorial governor was James W. Nye, an experienced politico who had been a district attorney and judge in New York City as well as the first president of that city’s metropolitan police board. He saw the territorial governorship merely as a stepping stone to a Senate seat when Nevada became a state. As a result, he would be absent from the state for much of the time that Orion was in office, so that Orion often served as the acting governor. 11
Nye, Orion, Sam, and other members of the government mission all ate at Margaret Murphy’s boardinghouse. Around its table, as Effie Mona Mack observes, Sam “found his future companions in play, in work, and in adventure.” 12 That adventure may have included girls of dubious status, the sort he had no doubt encountered during his steamboat days, even as he wrote letters to marriageable women. This activity, interestingly enough, was not exactly treated as confidential. Bachelorhood had privileges in the Clemens clan that were nothing to be ashamed of—at least among married adults, and as long as marriage itself was regarded as sacredly monogamous. In January 1862 he told his sister-in-law Mollie, whose sister Belle Stotts he had flirted with before her marriage, that he didn’t “mind sleeping with female servants as long as I am a bachelor—by no means—but after I marry, that sort of thing will be ‘played out,’ you know.” He closed by urging his sister-in-law not “to hint this depravity to the girls.” 13 But bachelors needed money, and the silver mines of Nevada beckoned.
10 A Millionaire for Ten Days
Two years after “Silverado”—the silver rush to Washoe—Sam Clemens entered the still-promising field. Henry Tompkins Paige Comstock had put his name on the Lode in 1859, but as with so many turns of fate in the mining business, his “discovery” had originally been the property of someone else, in this case two unlucky brothers from Pennsylvania, Ethan Allen and Hosea Ballou Grosh, sons of a Universalist minister. Following the accidental death of Hosea, his brother set out in November 1857 to cross the Sierra. He put his cabin in the charge of Comstock, a Canadian. Ethan Grosh left in the company of another Canadian, Richard Maurice Bucke. A storm overtook them on their journey, and the two became lost in the mountains. Grosh died of frostbite, and Bucke lost most of one foot and part of another to amputation. Before he died, Grosh hid the map to his silver mines in a tree that was never found, but Comstock eventually figured out their location in what became known as Gold Hill, adjacent to Virginia City, and the rest is history. 1 Bucke returned to Canada, studied medicine, and ultimately became superintendent of an insane asylum in London, Ontario. He also became a good friend of Walt Whitman, whose biography he wrote in 1883.
By that time Mark Twain would already be more famous than the Good Gray Poet, but in 1861 the prospects for even moderate success for Sam were remote. He thought of returning home in two or three months because “I was private secretary to his majesty the Secretary and there was not yet writing enough for two of us.” 2 The Nevada silver mines seemed his only chance while he still had some of his piloting savings left. Before going there, however, he set out in September with John D. Kinney, an Ohio native who had arrived in Virginia City about the same time as the Clemens brothers reached Carson City, to see the beauty of Lake Bigler, poised in a piney forest more than six thousand feet above sea level. It sat on the California border and was named for one of the state’s governors, John Bigler. During the war it reverted to its Indian name of Tahoe because of Bigler’s secessionist sympathies. While there Clemens and Kinney got the idea of staking out a timber claim on its surrounding banks. One could do that in those days by simply chopping down a few trees to indicate the location of a claim. Unfortunately they set fire to the woods with a campfire that ignited the pine needles around it, and—even though they may have staked out a second claim—never got rich in lumber. 3
Opportunities to get rich quick seemed to abound in Nevada at the time. Besides his temporary “day job” earning forty dollars a week as Orion’s legislative clerk during the territorial government’s first assembly that fall (a salary that would cease with the close of the session in January or February), Sam purchased five hundred “feet” (or shares) of a silver mine near the town of Aurora in the Esmeralda mining district, located some 125 miles southeast of Carson City. It sat in the Sierra foothills on the still disputed border between California and Nevada (ultimately adjudged to be part of Nevada in 1863). The shares were valued at ten dollars a foot, but Clemens probably did not have to pay the full price at the time of purchase because most shares were sold on margin. The immediate expense lay in the actual mining of the claim, but more often, as he soon learned, the “real secret” was not to mine the claims at all but to merely pretend to work them and sell the ledges off for a quick profit. Here it took an entrepreneur, and Sam twice urged his uncle James Lampton (the model for Colonel Sellers in The Gilded Age) to come out and help them get rich. “Orion and I,” he told his sister and mother in a letter of October 25, 1861, “have confidence enough in this country . . . if the war will let us alone.” As he acknowledged in Roughing It, “By and by I was smitten with the silver fever.” 4
The talk was hot with stories of even common loafers getting rich overnight. And according to Twain in Roughing It, news of fresh mine fields was heard “every few days.” After making a brief visit to Esmeralda in September, he focused again on the Humboldt region, which was beginning to “shriek for attention.”5 Around 175 miles northeast of Carson City, in a territory crisscrossed with toll roads, this mining district was near the town of Unionville. In December, Sam and William E. Clagett, a lawyer he had known as a student in Keokuk, set out for the Humboldt mining fields. Clagett’s wife would accompany Mollie Clemens when the two women rejoined their husbands in Nevada in the fall of 1862.
In 1869, in declining an invitation to speak before the California Pioneers of New York City, he wrote: “I entered upon an affluent career in Virginia City, and . . . became the owner of about all the worthless wildcat mines there were in that part of the country.” He called up the exaggeration of the tall tale in saying, “I ran tunnels till I tapped the Arctic ocean, and I sunk shafts till I broke through the roof of perdition.” 6 Much of the excitement had been the result of earlier tall tales about the potential of alleged discoveries, many of which were “salted” with
melted half dollars and little else. Later as a reporter for the Enterprise, Twain himself occasionally picked up shares by “lying about somebody’s mine.” 7
Clemens described his trip to Humboldt in chapters 27–33 of Roughing It. While there, he wrote in chapter 30, “I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand ‘feet’ in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars—and as often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in the world.” Sam spent seven weeks or so on his unsuccessful excursion to Humboldt, where he had no more good luck than the others he described. It required an arduous trip across the alkali wastes of Forty Mile Desert in the winter cold. His trip back to Carson City in February 1862 wasn’t any easier. He and his companions endured rainstorms, flooded streams, and finally a snowstorm. Here, however, Twain struck literary gold a decade later in Roughing It by turning the snowstorm incident into one of his most humorous anecdotes about the hypocrisy of reformers.
The anecdote foreshadows his brilliant masterpieces of human folly and fraud in the characterizations of Pap Finn, Tom Driscoll of Pudd’nhead Wilson, and the nineteen families in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” The narrator, along with characters named Ballou and Ollendorff, becomes snowbound and lost. After failing to build a fire, they bundle themselves up and prepare to freeze to death. “Poor Ollendorff” breaks down and cries. He swears that “whether he lived or died” he would never touch another drop of whiskey. Ballou throws away his pack of greasy playing cards and swears never to gamble again. As for the narrator, “I threw away my pipe, and in doing it felt that at last I was free of a hated vice and one that had ridden me like a tyrant all my days.” (Actually, to please his wife, Twain had quit smoking—once and only once—as he began Roughing It in 1870.) When the three reformers wake up the following morning and find that they are only “fifteen steps” from one of the frame buildings of a stagecoach stop, “the joy in our hearts at our deliverance,” Twain wrote, “was poisoned. . . . We presently began to grow pettish by degrees.” Like Pap Finn, they soon tire of reform. “At last I lit the pipe,” he wrote, “and no human being can feel meaner and baser than I did.” Ollendorff returns to his bottle, and Ballou falls deeply into a game of solitaire. “We shook hands and agreed to say no more about ‘reform’ and ‘examples to the rising generation.’” Twain himself soon went back to his three hundred cigars a month in order to finish his book. 8
Twain probably deserved a good smoke for the work he was doing then, but back in 1862 he was becoming discouraged and swore he would return to Missouri by July. “Don’t you know,” he told his mother and sister, “that I have expended money in this country but have made none myself? Don’t you know that I have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that belonged to me?” By now it was probably only the war that kept him out there. Grant was on the move against the South. “They have taken Fort Henry, and Fort Donelson, and the half of Tennessee,” he told his friend Clagett in February, “and the stars and stripes wave over the Capitol at Nashville.” Back in Carson City, he attended the proceedings of the great landslide case, a hoax that snubbed a “stranger” from the East, Benjamin E. Bunker, who was the new United States attorney for Nevada. 9 In April he returned to Aurora in the Esmeralda district with John Nye, the territorial governor’s entrepreneurial brother.
There the two took up various claims, digging mine shafts and tunnels, but failed to finish any of them. “We were always hunting up new claims and doing a little work on them and then waiting for a buyer—who never came,” he stated in Roughing It. Soon he was reduced to milling, or doing the work of a common laborer. This left him little time for anything else. “It is a pity that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill,” he would quip in his book, “in order to understand the full force of his doom to ‘earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.’”10 This was not the last of Twain’s many Adam jokes. In chapter 53 of The Innocents Abroad, at “the tomb of Adam,” he lamented that the old man had not lived to see his kin. In 1880 he even half seriously proposed the erection of a statue to Adam in Elmira. 11
Esmeralda wasn’t a very healthy place to be, mainly because of a running battle south of Aurora between cattlemen and the so-called Digger Indians. Although he said he remained in the milling business one week, he actually stayed there until July, juggling mining claims and going deeper into debt. “Last summer,” he told Bill Clagett, who had remained in the Humboldt area and settled in Unionville, “Orion paid $50 for 15 feet in a claim here. Yesterday one of the owners came and offered me 25 feet more for $50, with 30 days time on half the amount. He said he hated to part with it, but then he wanted me to have a good ‘stake.’ I told him I appreciated his kindness to me, but that I was ‘on the sell’ myself.” 12 Sam had also begun to submit his “Josh” letters (now lost) to the Enterprise, where they were published probably without any payment. The letters nonetheless became his financial salvation when the newspaper offered him a job as a reporter in July.
While in Esmeralda, he quarreled with John Nye, who was himself laid up with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism. In Roughing It, he next travels with Calvin Higbie across the California border to the area of Lake Mono in search of the mythical Whiteman cement mine. A miner named Gideon F. Whiteman had described the existence of a wonderful vein of gold supposedly as thick as a curbstone, running through cement, somewhere in the vicinity of Mono. It was rumored that every pound of the cement was worth two hundred dollars.
But their visit to the lake in fact happened after the “blind-lead episode” described in chapter 40. 13 According to the account in Roughing It, Clemens and Higbie discovered that the Wild West Mining Company’s claim near Aurora, a rich silver mine, was (unbeknownst to the owners) connected to an equally rich ledge still in the public domain, the so-called blind lead. With a third partner, they made a claim on it that required them to begin excavation within ten days. But Clemens was called away to nurse Nye. He left Higbie a note to start the excavation on his own, but Higbie was already off again to Lake Mono still in search of the cement mine. Their crossed signals resulted in the jumping of their claim and the dedication of Roughing It to Higbie: “In Memory of the Curious Time When We Two Were Millionaires for Ten Days.”
Later, Higbie blamed Twain for the loss of their fortune. Bitter at having endured a life of relative poverty and perhaps angry when his old friend declined to make him a sizable loan and did not encourage his literary endeavors, he testified that Twain was physically lazy. But he had to admit his delight in the humorous stories Twain told. “In that humorous drawl of his, that made him a favorite with practically everyone he met, he would spin yarns by the hour.” 14 It was his genius as a storyteller, of course, that made Mark Twain a millionaire for at least ten years. But as with his prospecting for silver, he was destined to stumble continually over fool’s gold, or Whiteman’s mythical cement, in his pursuit of wealth beyond his writing. He was about to partially realize that talent in literature, though for now it would be confined to journalism.
11 “Mark Twain”
Mark Twain told his authorized biographer that when he gave up mining for journalism, he walked the 125 miles from Esmeralda County to Virginia City. “It was the afternoon of a hot, dusty August day,” Paine dutifully wrote, “when a worn, travel-stained pilgrim drifted laggingly into the office of the Virginia City Enterprise, then in its new building on C Street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets from his shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair.” Actually, it was late September, not August, because Clemens was still in Esmeralda on September 9, 1862, and his earliest known writing for the Enterprise did not appear until October 1. It is also doubtful that Sam made the journey entirely on foot. For one thing, it would have been dangerous in terms not only of the hostile “Digger” Indians in the Aurora area but also of highwaymen who lurked along those desert roads. There was also ample transport
ation between mining towns in those days, and Carson City, the territorial capital, was on the road between Aurora and Virginia City. 1 Later—with Joe Twichell, first in New England and then in Europe—Twain would become notorious for beginning such walking tours and quickly switching to train or stagecoach.
Virginia City was located on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, and C Street ran the gamut of this mountainside town and served as its Main Street on which merchants paid thousands for fifty-foot frontages. 2 This was near ground zero for Gold Hill and the Comstock Lode, and prices ran high in the early 1860s. The Enterprise was the oldest newspaper in the territory, having been founded in 1858, a year before the discovery of silver in Nevada. Its material was regularly copied into other Nevada and California newspapers and occasionally by eastern and even foreign papers. When Clemens arrived on the staff, the paper’s coeditor along with Rollin M. Daggett was Joseph T. Goodman, who was also part owner of the paper with Denis E. McCarthy. Sam was hired at twenty-five dollars a week as a replacement for Dan De Quille, whose real name was William Wright. De Quille later wrote a history of the Comstock Lode and, with Clemens’s help, published it through the same subscription publisher that issued Roughing It.
Wright was taking a nine-month sabbatical to visit his family in Iowa, but before leaving, he showed Clemens the ropes, and upon his return they became roommates and close friends. As a contributor to other newspapers as well, Dan De Quille cast an important early influence upon the work of Mark Twain. His solar-armor story may have planted a very early seed for the image in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court of Hank Morgan’s frustrated confinement in the armor of the knights of Camelot. Dan’s tale concerned an inventor of an India rubber suit equipped with a compressor to keep himself cool in the three-digit heat of Death Valley. Unable to turn off the compressor one day, he turned up dead in the desert by freezing to death. Another friend who would figure more significantly in the development of Twain’s fame was Steve Gillis, a printer on the Enterprise. A southerner (from Mississippi) like Clemens, he was three years younger than the future author of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which might not ever have been written without Gillis and his brothers Jim and Bill. Another close friend wrote for the newspaper’s competition in Virginia City, Clement T. Rice of the Union. Twain dubbed him “the Unreliable” in dueling newspaper accounts the two wrote from Carson City when the territorial legislature was in session. They would become close friends and drinking companions but almost certainly not homosexual lovers, as one biography has suggested. 3
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 11