The Bohemians

by Ben Tarnoff

  Later, George would “In California there . . .”: ibid., p. 305.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The connection couldn’t The telegram announcing the delay arrived on the afternoon of May 7, 1869; see Daily Alta California, May 8, 1869, and San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 7, 1869. Reasons for delay: David Haward Bain, Empire Express, pp. 648–652.

  At sunrise, cannon Celebration on May 8: San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 8, 1869, and Daily Alta California, May 9, 1869.

  By the time Celebration on May 10: Daily Alta California, May 11, 1869, and San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 10, 1869. One of the illuminated signs held during that evening’s festivities read “The Pacific Railroad, Uncle Sam’s Waistband—He would burst without it.” See also SFLF, pp. 3–5. National celebration: David Haward Bain, Empire Express, pp. 666–667. Stagecoach from St. Louis to SF: Philip L. Fradkin, Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster Source, 2002), p. 31. Traveling from NY to SF by steamer required taking a ship to Aspinwall, Panama, then a railroad across the isthmus, and finally another ship from Panama City to SF. The journey could last as few as 21 days, but more often it took about a month; see ET&S, vol. 2, p. 169, and MTL, vol. 6, p. 41. Transcontinental railroad travel time: ibid. “a victory over space”: San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 8, 1869.

  The railroad didn’t “The Overland for June crosses the continent on the completed Pacific Railroad,” Harte wrote in the June 1869 issue of the Overland Monthly. It had his poem “What the Engines Said,” a whimsical take on the transcontinental link. It also included another one of his gold rush stories, “Miggles.” The eastern papers that reprinted Harte’s fiction included the Springfield Republican, New York Evening Post, and the Hartford Courant; see BHGS, p. 47. James T. Fields’s offer: ibid., pp. 48–49.

  Dime novels were Dime novels and explosion of popular literature: John Tebbel, Between Covers, pp. 73–75; Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America, pp. 194–196; and Gary Scharnhorst, “‘All Hat and No Cattle’: Romance, Realism, and Late Nineteenth-Century Western American Fiction,” in Nicolas S. Witschi, ed., A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West (New York: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 282–284. Formation of “Wild West”: ibid., pp. 282–285.

  This set the scene “the trammels of English . . .”: Bret Harte, “The Rise of the ‘Short Story,’” p. 251. “inchoate poetry”: ibid., p. 257.

  He did so subtly Harte’s technique: William F. Conner, “The Euchring of Tennessee: A Reexamination of Bret Harte’s ‘Tennessee’s Partner,’” Studies in Short Fiction 80.17 (Spring 1980), pp. 113–120. A man stranded in the wilderness: Bret Harte, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, ed. Gary Scharnhorst, pp. 27–37. A father reunites with his estranged son: Bret Harte, “Mr. Thompson’s Prodigal,” The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, ed. Gary Scharnhorst, pp. 79–86. “snapper”: Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” p. 8.

  The Overland stories “the Western predilection . . .”: Bret Harte, “Mr. Thompson’s Prodigal,” The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, ed. Gary Scharnhorst, p. 79. Harte’s wryness: ICHC and ECW. “You could never . . .”: William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” p. 156.

  Ever since the “He was an exacting . . .”: Charles Warren Stoddard, “In Old Bohemia II: The ‘Overland’ and the Overlanders,” p. 265.

  But sharp editing “Why do you waste . . .”: quoted ibid., p. 266. Stoddard’s departure for Hawaii: CSCWS, pp. 118–120, and GP, pp. 39–41.

  His friends hated All quotes: IC to CWS, January 9, 1869, HUNT.

  Harte, she discovered “a born actor . . .”: ICHC.

  One day Coolbrith Harte’s religious critics: BHGS, p. 50. All quotes from the scene: ECW.

  They took care “Harte was good . . .”: ibid. Harte helping Coolbrith with household tasks and trying to find her paying work: ibid. Society of California Pioneers gig: BH to IC, August 17, 1868, BANC, and George Wharton James, “Ina Donna Coolbrith: An Historical Sketch and Appreciation,” p. 320.

  Most important, he “I was quite . . .”: BH to IC, January 28, 1869, BANC. “Is it because . . .”: BH to IC, undated, BANC. Ringing on Saturday afternoon: BH to IC, May 3, year unknown, BANC. “I must have . . .”: ibid. Sending messenger: two undated letters from BH to IC, BANC.

  He was equally New title and extra syllable: BH to IC, undated, BANC. “What do I . . .”: Ina Coolbrith, “The Years,” Overland Monthly 4.2 (Feb. 1870), p. 161.

  Harte always wanted All quotes: ECW.

  Yet the one Anna Griswold Harte: Josephine Clifford McCrackin, “A Letter from a Friend,” pp. 222–224. “How my heart . . .”: quoted ibid., p. 223.

  In June 1869 Roman’s sale of the Overland: BHGS, pp. 50–51. Harte announced his demands in a letter to John H. Carmany, June 7, 1869, BANC. “Of my ability . . .” and “If I do not . . .”: BH to John H. Carmany, June 8, 1869, BANC.

  Carmany surrendered Harte quit his job at the US Mint in August 1869. John H. Carmany would later recall that “the importance of [Harte’s] remaining with the magazine was a constant subject of anxious thought on my part”; quoted in BHGS, p. 51.

  In 1869, as “The Eastern press . . .”: quoted in MTL, vol. 3, p. 321.

  It had been Arrival in NY and trip to Hartford to see Bliss: MTAL, pp. 240–241. Book delays: Elisha Bliss Jr. to SLC, February 10, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, pp. 98–100; SLC to Elisha Bliss Jr., February 14, 1869, ibid., p. 98; and Elisha Bliss Jr. to SLC, April 14, 1869, ibid., pp. 193–194. See also MCMT, pp. 102–104. Battle with board of directors: MTL, vol. 3, pp. 170–171, and TAMT, pp. 207–208. Publication would be postponed again: Elisha Bliss Jr. to SLC, July 12, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, p. 286. “After it is done . . .”: SLC to Elisha Bliss Jr., July 22, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, p. 285.

  Bliss got the Bliss’s replies to Twain’s angry letter: Elisha Bliss Jr. to SLC, July 30[?], 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, p. 287, and Elisha Bliss Jr. to SLC, August 4, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, pp. 292–294. Bliss registered the copyright for The Innocents Abroad on July 28, 1869. Book’s appearance: Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1869), and MTAL, p. 275. “trimmed & trained . . .”: SLC to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, January 27, 1871, in MTL, vol. 4, p. 316.

  In a typically Twainian Meeting Livy and proposal: MTAL, pp. 229–230, 241–245; MCMT, pp. 65–66, 76–83.

  Predictably, her answer Twain’s first courtship letter to Livy was SLC to Olivia L. Langdon, September 7 and 8, 1868, in MTL, vol. 2, pp. 247–249. 184 letters: MTAL, p. 245; Victor Fischer and Michael B. Frank, introduction to MTL, vol. 3, pp. xxv–xxvi; and Mark Twain, The Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949). Nearly half of Twain’s courtship letters have been lost. The last of them was written on January 20, 1870, shortly before his marriage to Livy in February. On the envelope of this letter, Livy wrote, “184th—Last letter of a 17-months’ correspondence”; see Resa Willis, Mark and Livy: The Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1992]), p. 51. For a calendar of the courtship letters, see MTL, vol. 3, pp. 473–480. “Don’t read a word . . .”: SLC to Olivia L. Langdon, December 31, 1868, in MTL, vol. 2, pp. 369–370.

  Fortunately, it never Livy’s assent, and her parents’ conditional approval: SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, November 26 and 27, 1868, ibid., pp. 283–288. “I am so happy . . .”: SLC to Joseph H. Twitchell, November 28, 1868, ibid., p. 294. Livy’s editorial input: MTL, vol. 3, p. 179; SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, March 24, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, p. 176; SLC to Olivia L. Langdon, May 13, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, pp. 225; and MTAL, p. 271. “scratch out . . .”: SLC to Susan L. Crane, March 9 and 31, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, p. 181.

  It worked Copies sold and royalties: MTL, vol. 4, p. 280, and MTAL, p. 277. Reviews: Louis Budd, ed., Mark Twa
in: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 34–89. “There is an amount . . .”: William Dean Howells, “Reviews and Literary Notices,” Atlantic Monthly 24.146 (Dec. 1869), pp. 765–766.

  The Atlantic’s support Subscription publishing: John Tebbel, Between Covers, pp. 166–169. Twain’s use of the model: Bruce Michelson, Printer’s Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 17–18, 82–88, and MTAL, pp. 176, 234–235.

  Upscale Americans had The years after the Civil War saw a surge of Americans traveling to Europe, as the rising American middle class took advantage of improved transatlantic routes. “Everybody was going to Europe,” as Twain recalled in The Innocents Abroad. See Jeffrey Steinbrink, “Why the Innocents Went Abroad: Mark Twain and American Tourism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 16.2 (Autumn 1983), pp. 278–286. “old connoisseurs . . .”: Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, p. 263. Relic hunter crawling up the Sphinx: ibid., pp. 473–474. “The gentle reader . . .”: ibid., p. 164.

  The familiar spectacle “mournful wreck”: ibid., p. 132.

  This declaration of independence Harte, in his review of Innocents for the Overland Monthly, detected in Twain’s book “that ungathered humor and extravagance which belong to pioneer communities”; see Bret Harte, “Current Literature,” Overland Monthly 4.1 (Jan. 1870), p. 101. “continuous incoherence”: William Dean Howells, “Reviews and Literary Notices,” Atlantic Monthly 24.146 (Dec. 1869), p. 766.

  It made for Twain’s lecture tour began on November 1, 1869, in Pittsburgh; his last performance was on January 21, 1870, in Jamestown, NY. The tour took him through towns in New York, Pennsylvania, and New England, as well as to Washington, DC. See Fred W. Lorch, The Trouble Begins at Eight, pp. 105–110. More than fifty towns: MTAL, p. 277. For an example of Twain’s personal appeals to newspaper editors, see SLC to Whitelaw Reid, August 15, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, p. 303. As many as two thousand advance copies: Elisha Bliss Jr. to SLC, August 4, 1869, in MTL, vol. 3, p. 293.

  One would of course “He praised the book . . .”: SLC to Charles Henry Webb, November 26, 1870, in MTL, vol. 4, p. 248. Problem with distributor: ibid. “wrote me the . . .”: ibid., p. 249. Harte’s letter is no longer extant.

  Yet Harte still “six hundred and fifty . . .”: Bret Harte, “Current Literature,” Overland Monthly 4.1 (Jan. 1870), p. 100. Favorable notice of The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches in “New Books,” Buffalo Express, April 30, 1870; see MTL, vol. 4, p. 250.

  Sometime in the early Twain’s margin notes in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches: Bradford A. Booth, “Mark Twain’s Comments on Bret Harte’s Stories,” American Literature 25.4 (Jan. 1954), pp. 492–495. “nearly blemishless”: ibid., p. 493. “Dickens . . .”: ibid., p. 494. “showy, meretricious . . .”: TAMT, p. 163. “artificial reproduction”: ibid., p. 397. “a dialect which . . .”: ibid., pp. 162–163. “truthful pictures . . .”: “New Publications,” New York Times, April 30, 1870. Contract for Roughing It, prepared on July 15, 1870: MTL, vol. 4, pp. 565–566.

  Sometimes this bothered Persuading Livy’s parents: MTAL, pp. 260–262, 266–267; MCMT, pp. 88–92; and TAMT, pp. 247–248. “six prominent men”: ibid., p. 247. “The friends I had . . .” and “did not . . .”: SLC to CWS, August 25, 1869 [2010 edition], accessed online via Mark Twain Project Online, University of California, Berkeley.

  On February 2, 1870 Wedding: MTL, vol. 4, pp. 42–49; MTAL, pp. 280–281; and MCMT, pp. 112–113. Wedding cards: MTL, vol. 4, p. 57. “Tell me . . .”: SLC to CWS, February 6[?], 1870, in MTL, vol. 4, p. 62.

  Stoddard would stay “did more for me . . .”: interview in the Santa Barbara Morning Press, October 31, 1908, included in the Stoddard clippings at BANC.

  In the summer Stoddard’s Hawaii trip in 1868–1869: CSCWS, pp. 120–126, and GP, pp. 41–44. He returned to SF in July 1869. “You will easily . . .”: SLC to Walt Whitman, March 2, 1869, quoted in GP, p. 43. No response from Whitman to Stoddard’s Poems: ibid., p. 35. “Now my voice . . .”: SLC to Walt Whitman, March 2, 1869, quoted ibid., p. 42. “Those tender . . .”: Walt Whitman to SLC, June 12, 1869, quoted ibid., p. 43.

  “A South-Sea Idyl” Charles Warren Stoddard, “A South-Sea Idyl,” Overland Monthly 3.3 (Sept. 1869), pp. 257–264. “petted in . . .”: ibid., p. 260. “hating civilization”: ibid., p. 259.

  Harte loved the “Now you have . . .”: quoted in CRP, chap. 6, p. 7. “mustang humor”: William Dean Howells, “Introductory Letter,” in Charles Warren Stoddard, South-Sea Idyls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907 [1873]), p. vi. “If you want . . .”: Charles Warren Stoddard, “A South-Sea Idyl,” p. 258. “who dared . . .”: quoted in GP, p. 44. Stoddard sent the piece to Whitman on April 2, 1870. “beautiful & soothing”: Walt Whitman to CWS, April 23, 1870, in Walt Whitman, Selected Letters of Walt Whitman, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 149.

  Harte wanted the Charles Warren Stoddard, “Barbarian Days,” Overland Monthly 4.4 (April 1870), pp. 327–335. Charles Warren Stoddard, “How I Converted My Cannibal,” Overland Monthly 3.5 (Nov. 1869), pp. 455–460. For other of Stoddard’s South Sea sketches, see CSCWS, p. 129. “It’s time . . .”: BH to CWS, April 24, 1870, quoted ibid., p. 129.

  Of course, the Stoddard’s plans to return to the Pacific: GP, pp. 45–48, and Charles Warren Stoddard, The Island of Tranquil Delights, pp. 13–14.

  He anchored himself Bierce arrived in SF in late 1866 or early 1867. His former commander, Major General William B. Hazen, had promised him a captain’s commission, but when he arrived at the Presidio, he discovered a letter with a commission for only second lieutenant. Angrily, Bierce resigned. See Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1996]), pp. 101–115. Stoddard would use the nickname Biercy in their letters; see M. E. Grenander, “Ambrose Bierce and Charles Warren Stoddard: Some Unpublished Correspondence,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 23.3 (May 1960), pp. 261–292. Bierce’s appearance: Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce, p. 124, and Richard O’Connor, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 75. Bierce and Coolbrith: ICLL, p. 97. Bierce and Harte: BHAN, p. 94, and BHGS, pp. 36, 52. Bierce and Stoddard: GP, pp. 38–39.

  In print he Bierce also published poems and prose pieces during the final years of the Californian; see Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce, pp. 115–116. But Bierce’s local literary career really began when he became the “Town Crier” of the San Francisco News Letter in December 1868. His columns: ibid., pp. 118–127; SFLF, pp. 250–255; and Ambrose Bierce, A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), pp. 87–105.

  This ruthlessness reflected Bierce was struck by a bullet from a Confederate sharpshooter on June 23, 1864, during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain; see Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce, pp. 88–89. His war experience: ibid., pp. 21–89; Richard O’Connor, Ambrose Bierce, pp. 22–45; and Carey McWilliams, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography (Boston: Albert & Charles Boni, 1929), pp. 28–64. “To the amiable . . .”: Ambrose Bierce (as Ursus), “Grizzly Papers, No. 1,” Overland Monthly 6.1 (Jan. 1871), p. 94. Bierce wrote five essays for the Overland, which he called the “Grizzly Papers,” and signed under the pseudonym Ursus; see Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce, pp. 127–128. The Overland would also publish Bierce’s first short story, “The Haunted Valley,” in July 1871.

  The gold rush had Industrialization of gold mining: Martin Ridge, “Why They Went West: Economic Opportunity on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier,” American West 1.3 (May 1964), pp. 48–50, and Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope, pp. 45–47. Corporate agriculture and land monopoly: Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream, pp. 131–132, 164–165.

  No single event Suez Canal: SFLF, p. 351.

  There were bigger California’s challenges after 1
869: Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974 [1935]), pp. 60–65; Robert Knight, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 12–14; Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, pp. 130–134; SFLF, pp. 296–297; William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 34–40. Seven thousand San Franciscans out of work: ibid., p. 36.

  The heads of Nob Hill palaces: Richard Rayner, The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 118–119.

  Meanwhile, the slow “social wrecks”: Walter Mulrea Fisher, The Californians (London: Macmillan, 1876), p. 72. Hoodlums: Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, p. 133. Rising anti-Chinese racism: ibid., p. 132; Neil Larry Shumsky, “Dissatisfaction, Mobility, and Expectation: San Francisco Workingmen in the 1870s,” Pacific Historian 30.2 (March 1986), pp. 21–27; and Robert Knight, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, pp. 14–17. “The cause of her death . . .”: San Francisco News Letter, October 8, 1870, quoted in Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce, pp. 119–120.

  The rising tide Bierce’s version of events: Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce, p. 127. Conversely, Twain later claimed that Harte wrote the poem “for his own amusement” and “threw it aside, but being one day suddenly called upon for copy he sent that very piece in”; see BHGS, p. 52. Bret Harte, “Plain Language from Truthful James,” Overland Monthly 5.3 (Sept. 1870), pp. 287–288.

  “Plain Language from” “We are ruined . . .”: Bret Harte, “Plain Language from Truthful James,” Overland Monthly 5.3 (Sept. 1870), p. 288. “did as the . . .”: Henry J. W. Dam, “A Morning With Bret Harte,” p. 43. “The Heathen Chinee” as satire: Margaret Duckett, “Plain Language from Bret Harte,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 11.4 (March 1957), pp. 241–260.