Besides mining news, murders, Indian trouble, and saloon brawls, there was little else to report in Virginia City. Of course, the legislature was a news item when in session, and one of its biggest debates was over the growing presence of toll roads in Nevada. Often these writers, many of whom had an eye toward a national market, would write stories that turned out to be hoaxes, hoping they would be circulated around the country. This kind of newspaper literature apparently matched the Wild West mood of Virginia City, where there was heavy drinking and the back-slapping camaraderie that calls for endless jokes and guffaws. It was generally a man’s town, with the requisite vulgarity. Virginia City’s population of two thousand was more than 90 percent male. According to an 1860 census, around one hundred of the women were accompanying husbands. 4 Most of the rest—those with whom a single man like Sam would come in contact—were either prostitutes or saloon ladies who sold dances. In a way, this segment of the town’s female society mirrored the floating palaces Clemens had experienced as a steamboat pilot.
As we shall see, Mark Twain actually started out writing rather vulgar material, but even here we can detect emerging genius. There are examples, of course, of the low state of his humor that make us wonder how he ever managed to succeed in the general marketplace. Not until the publication of The Innocents Abroad, almost ten years later, did he fully cleanse himself of the backroom humor of both the river and the West. By that time, he had become a writer whose humor was always appropriate for the “evening lamp” of the family circle. His obituaries would attest to that, and the literary world would have to wait another decade for Van Wyck Brooks to suggest, sometimes in exaggerated or distorted terms, the other personality, the one partly shaped by the steamboats and mining camps that always lurked below the surface in his plots and themes. 5
Unlike Walt Whitman and Theodore Dreiser, two other major American writers whose democratic themes challenged the order of Victorian standards of morality in literature, Mark Twain ultimately entered the forum as a “safe” (if also subversive) writer, one who would eventually be embraced and championed by Howells, the “dean” and arbiter of American literature in his day.
There is no complete file of the Territorial Enterprise, but perhaps 20 percent of Sam’s pieces survived in his brother’s scrapbooks or were reprinted in newspapers whose files were not destroyed. One of the first hoaxes he wrote for the paper was entitled “Petrified Man.” Widely reprinted in other papers, it first appeared in the Enterprise on October 4, 1862, when he had been on the job for only a couple of weeks. Usually, one of the unwritten rules of any hoax was that it had to contain enough erroneous information to alert local readers and ensure that its story didn’t cause civil alarm. In the case of “Petrified Man,” the geography was the main giveaway, along with the mention of a justice of the peace by the name of “Sewell or Sowell.” This was Judge G. T. Sewall of Humboldt County, the target of this hoax and satire. We do not know why Clemens, as he told his brother Orion, “got it up to worry Sewall.” 6 The judge had been active in mining around Aurora, and he and Sam may have disagreed over a claim.
But the true reason for the hoax was probably not so much to bother Judge Sewell, though Twain claimed to have sent him “exchanges” reprinting the squib for another year. He was trying to shine on the Enterprise and probably emulating Dan De Quille, who was also known for scientific tall tales. In “Petrified Man,” Clemens described a recently discovered “mummy” in hilarious detail, all the way down to the fact that it was thumbing its nose. Every “limb and feature,” he said, was perfect, including a petrified wooden leg. The body was found in the nearby mountains “in a sitting posture . . . the attitude was pensive, the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the fore-finger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.” We learn that Judge Sewell “at once proceeded to the spot and held an inquest on the body” of a man described earlier as “defunct” for almost a century. 7
Clemens, after all, never forgot that officially he was simply filling in for De Quille, and no doubt thought he had to try to match him in such matters. And that meant he was hired more for satire than straight reporting. In fact, De Quille was still in Virginia City when “Petrified Man” appeared, and wouldn’t leave for the Midwest until December 27. The pressure was on from the outset for this substitute reporter to measure up. No doubt Sam became an apprentice to Dan during the first two months of writing for the Enterprise. “Old Dan is gone,” Sam was finally able to say in the newspaper one day in December; “that good old soul, we ne’er shall see him more—for some time.” 8 But it would be time enough for Clemens to establish his own identity as a humorist and win the lifelong friendship of Enterprise owner and editor Joe Goodman.
Goodman and Clemens, especially after De Quille’s departure, frequently dined together in a local French restaurant and drank at a nearby saloon. 9 Looking for material to keep alive his job on the Enterprise, he asked Goodman to send him to Carson City to cover the second meeting of the territorial legislature, which was being managed by his brother Orion. He went there in late November and stayed with Orion and Mollie through the middle of January. It was from Carson City on February 3, 1863, during a return visit, that he may have used for the first time in print the nom de guerre “Mark Twain.” The letter in all probability was sent from Carson City on January 31. Although its content suggests to some that Twain had used the name in an earlier Enterprise article (now lost), it would be nice to imagine that we of posterity have caught the great man in the very act of donning his public name for the first time. Indeed, Henry Nash Smith, possibly the most insightful critic of Mark Twain, in an obvious attempt to celebrate that point, even printed in 1957 a misleading illustration of the letter: a facsimile of the actual newspaper clipping from the Enterprise, but reproducing only the beginning and ending of the letter, including “Yours, dreamily, Mark Twain,” without the intervening text. 10
When exactly was Mark Twain first born? The answer is probably not February 3, 1863, of course, but that is a very close estimate of the day on which the humorist Mark Twain was born. That other, deeper, much greater writer was born later, and he probably outlived the humorist in his grim readings of the human condition following the publications of A Connecticut Yankee and Pudd’nhead Wilson. The humorist was born—and not prematurely this time, as Sam Clemens had been in 1835—in the literary wilderness of Nevada Territory.
By February 1863 his salary had been raised to almost forty dollars a week. With his room, board, and laundry costing him only seventy-five a month, he had plenty of drinking and dining money. 11 He continued to purchase shares in silver mines as well. This would be the beginning of his lifelong losing streak as an investor, culminating in the Paige typesetting machine in the 1890s. Along the way, he would decline to invest in Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. But his reputation as a local reporter in the West and on the Pacific Coast was taking off. In May and June he took another working leave, accompanied by Clement Rice, to San Francisco, where he was fast becoming known as the “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope.” The two writers ate and drank their way through the city for weeks, making important literary connections along the way. “I suppose I know at least a thousand people here,” he told his mother and sister in June. “We dine out, & we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were. After breakfast, I don’t often see the hotel again until midnight—or after.” 12
He was back in San Francisco for another visit in September, this time by himself. Now he was writing for both the San Francisco Call and the Golden Era in addition to his regular duties on the Enterprise. Dan De Quille returned to Virginia City that month. Evidently, his renewed presence stirred up Clemens’s sense of competition, for on October 28, 1863, he published an upsetting hoax entitled “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” in which a forty-two-year-old man named Hopkins wa
s reported to have scalped his wife and killed all of his nine children as well as himself because he had invested and lost “an immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company of San Francisco.” Sam included the usual clues to warn local readers, but the story was so despicably bloody that it shocked the Enterprise readership in general and threatened the newspaper’s reputation for veracity, even in a market in which hoaxes were not uncommon. Clemens published a retraction the very next day, but “I Take It All Back” failed to satisfy or quiet his critics, who maintained a negative if low-key drumbeat for almost another year.
He claimed that the purpose of the hoax was “to get the fact into the San Francisco papers[, which immediately picked up the story] that the Spring Valley Water company was ‘cooking’ dividends by borrowing money to declare them on for its stockholders.” But one has to agree with Ivan Benson that the piece is simply hard to explain. Even Effie Mona Mack’s discovery that it was also a ploy to embarrass a local official named Pete Hopkins, or politicians who met regularly at Hopkins’s Magnolia Saloon in Carson City, where the killer allegedly dies of self-inflicted wounds, does not lessen the horror of Sam’s hoax. Although later he would also regret (for a time at least) a hoax he delivered at the seventieth-birthday dinner of John Greenleaf Whittier, here he was truly guilty of a bizarre act. 13
He offered his resignation to Goodman, but Joe stood by him and tried—unlike a later editor friend at the Whittier speech—to persuade him that he had done little or no harm to either his reputation or that of the newspaper he worked for. 14 Mark Twain, as he was now known in the West, survived the scandal and continued to grow in reputation as the “Washoe Giant.” He would soon have the firm and enthusiastic support of Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne), though this influential humorist would not live long enough to savor the fame of his Nevada apprentice.
12 Governor of the Third House
By the end of October 1863, Sam was back in Carson City to report on the territory’s constitutional convention, in which statehood was rejected because the vote called for a property tax on mines, not simply on their output. The negative vote delayed statehood for another nine months, and western secessionist presses hailed it as a victory for anti-Union sentiment in the territories.1 Clemens either remained through the New Year or returned there from Virginia City, to cover the third territorial legislature, which eventually redesigned the state constitution to limit the tax on mines. In spite of the recent setback to his reputation as a journalist as a result of “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” he had developed into a credible political reporter who had inside influence through such well-placed friends as Jack Simmons, speaker of the house of representatives, and Billy Clagett, who was also a delegate to the legislature. With James Nye, the governor, out of town most of the time lobbying for Nevada (and for himself as one of its first two senators upon statehood), Orion was frequently the chief politico in the Territory.
Indeed, Sam Clemens was so popular with the political press that he was named “Governor of the Third House,” perhaps to complement Orion’s de facto status. While Orion conducted the business of the third legislature, his younger brother addressed a mock legislature of reporters in Carson City on January 27, 1864. The text of his speech is not extant. It is thought that the target of this humorous address was the elusive Governor Nye, with whom he would have a future not entirely congenial. Orion ultimately botched his chances of becoming part of the territory’s political hierarchy when Nevada became the nation’s thirty-sixth state on October 31, 1864. In fact, his fortunes began to slide shortly before that. The death of Jennie, his only child, on February 1 of that year may have permanently dampened the spirits of the often moody Orion. Although he was respected for his honesty as a politician, he lost his bid to become the first secretary of state of Nevada essentially because of his anti-whiskey stand. Twain later called it a “spasm of virtue,” but we should remember that Orion had been a confirmed teetotaler since his days as a printer’s apprentice in St. Louis. The territorial secretary would ultimately find himself out of work in the new state and forced to sell his house in Carson City at a financial loss. He and Mollie eventually moved back to her beloved Keokuk, where he began the second and final act of a life of persistent failure, his career as a statesman in Nevada its intermission and only bright spot.
As Orion’s future pointed downward, his brother’s began what became a rather swift ascent to a long series of literary successes and, for the most part, financial stability. He was already a celebrity in Virginia City when the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken came to town on February 24 to perform for four nights at Maguire’s Opera House. Among her acts was what became her “Lady Godiva” performance, in which she appeared in the title role of Mazeppa, based on one of Byron’s poems. Her entire costume consisted of tights that simulated nudity. The “great unadorned” or “bare” caught the attention of all the journalists, including Twain, who was described by the Golden Era as having fallen “under [Menken’s] spell.” This report may have been exaggerated. In fact, the rising humorist might have been more interested in meeting her current husband, whom Menken was rumored to have abandoned for another man but who had nevertheless traveled with her to Virginia City. This was Robert Henry Newell, poet and author of the ongoing Orpheus C. Kerr Papers (1862–68).2
Indeed, his head may still have been spinning from the visit to Virginia City in December and January by the more famous humorist Artemus Ward. For three weeks Ward drank the bars dry with Joe Goodman, Dan De Quille, and Mark Twain (as he was now definitely becoming known not only in Nevada but also in California). A favorite on President Lincoln’s list of humorists, Ward had come to lecture, but stayed to play. He was at the pinnacle of a career that would be cut short by death in 1867. In the words of Bernard De Voto, this literary comedian “made men glow.”3 Nights of oyster dinners and roof walking in this hilly city were the routine. During those weeks of comradeship and high spirits, Sam came to know Ward, who advised him on his career. It was at Ward’s encouragement that Sam set his sights higher than that of western journalist (the career that Dan De Quille would have to settle for). Ward promised to tell the editors of the New York Sunday Mercury about Sam’s work. He even suggested that Sam eventually relocate to New York, where he himself was headed.4
This was a period of hard drinking for a man who during most of his life abused tobacco but not liquor. Had Twain been a twentieth-century American writer like such alcoholics as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or Hemingway, he would have extended his binges well beyond the nightspots of Virginia City and San Francisco. But he resembled most writers of that era in that he adhered to the national image of the “gentleman,” who did not go to bed every night drunk or indeed very high on alcohol. Bret Harte was the kind of self-destructive drunk that Sam Clemens, whose standard of morality made him eligible for a cameo role in a Howells novel, certainly strove to avoid. But he was in fact high on more than life on the evening of May 16, 1864, when he playfully wrote a report intimating that funds raised for the United States Sanitary Commission by the ladies of Carson City were to be donated to “a Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East.”5
The Sanitary Commission was a government bureaucracy that eventually became the Red Cross. Rather than a hands-on medical agency like the Christian Commission, which Walt Whitman much preferred during his years as “Wound Dresser” in Washington’s wartime hospitals, the Sanitary Commission too often made enemies of common soldiers, who rarely saw the real fruits of its efforts, which were organizational and financial rather than directly humanitarian. Furthermore, the former Confederate soldier may have looked askance on any organization that favored Union soldiers over those from the South. In any event, as Clemens confessed to Mollie Clemens, one of the Carson City ladies who had organized the fund-raising campaign, he had written the piece involving a miscegenation society one night after having drunk too much with Dan De Quille. Definitely a Union supporter, De Quille had told Sam that evening in no uncert
ain terms that he would be offended if such a joke were ever published. Sam, whose mind must have been somewhat muddled with liquor, hastily assured his senior associate at the Enterprise that he hadn’t meant it, but tossed the manuscript by mistake on the editing table. The printing foreman, Sam told his sister-in-law, “prospecting for copy [the next morning], found it, & seeing that it was in my handwriting, thought it was to be published, & carried it off.”6 At least this is the account he later gave.
The Carson City sponsors of the Sanitary Commission fund-raiser sent a letter of protest to the Enterprise, which refused to print it. The Union, always eager to do battle with its local competition, published the letter as a public notice, three days running, under the headline of “The ‘Enterprise’ Libel of the Ladies of Carson.” Even though Sam’s authorship was generally assumed, the letter demanded the name of the author of such a lie, published at a time when so many were dying for the Union. Naturally, the subjects of race or slavery never entered the discussion. The matter was further complicated by an editorial that appeared in the Union before the letter from the ladies of Carson City was published; it assailed the Enterprise for insinuating that the printers for the Union as well as others on the staff did not pay the money they had publicly pledged to the Sanitary Fund campaign. That insinuation had been made in Sam’s “How Is It?” published on May 18, the day after his “libel” of the ladies of Carson City. He answered the editorial with one of his own, and it was in turn replied to with a letter signed “Printer” and another editorial escalating the war of words.7
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