The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  The truth seems to be much more prosaic. Sam wrote Orion on June 2 that he had acquired a specimen of ore from the lead. Small samples seem to have been readily available in the mining camp. “It was not hard rock,” he reported, “but black, decomposed stuff which could be crumbled in the hand like a baked potato, and when spread out on a paper exhibited a thick sprinkling of gold and particles of ‘native’ silver.” In mid-June, Clayton’s mill began to crush the ore from the lead and by early July, Edgar Marquess Branch notes, it was well known that the ore was part of a cross ledge, a “single underground vein that cut across both the Pride of Utah and the Wide West ledges,” that had been christened Johnson’s Ledge after Peter Johnson, a principal owner of the Pride of Utah. A pound and a half of the rock “yielded about an ounce of gold,” the Esmeralda correspondent of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise reported on July 13. But this correspondent, almost certainly Sam in one of his first contributions to the paper, allowed that the ostensible “blind lead” was not located on unclaimed land but was simply

  a cross ledge running through the Pride of Utah and the Wide West. . . . During the week the Wide West Company have sprung an injunction upon the Pride of Utah, and stopped that company from working—which was the severest blow the prosperity of the district has yet received—for, otherwise, by this time, fifty men and a dozen teams would be constantly at work for the Pride of Utah. But on the 8th, the Pride of Utah boys returned the injunction compliment upon the Wide West in a rather novel manner. The excavations of the two companies have run together and early on the morning of the 8th, some disinterested members of the Pride of Utah Company built a fire of such aromatic fuel as old boots, rags, etc., in the bottom of their shaft, and closed up the top, thus converting the Wide West shaft into a chimney. As there was scarcely room enough for the smoke, of course there was no room at all for workmen—and labor was suspended in both ledges, for that day at least. . . . After the Wide West had served the injunction, they proceeded, of course, to seize upon all Pride of Utah bullion, amalgam and quartz lying at that time in the mills. Pine, the officer who attached that portion of the property which was at Clayton’s mill, informed me that he took charge of one hundred and twenty-one pounds of good solid bullion (more than half gold), the yield of twenty-nine tons of Pride of Utah rock.

  Sam no doubt nursed John Nye during his illness, but he also returned to Esmeralda no later than July 9, not that his absence was even slightly relevant to the question of the mining title. They simply had no claim to the ledge. Ownership might have been disputed in court, and Sam and his partners might have filed for a limited injunction to prevent the Pride of Utah and Wide West owners from developing the vein but, as Branch observes, there is no evidence they ever “acquired title to any portion” of it. They “might have made a small fortune by selling out” their interest “at the proper time,”39 but such a stroke of good fortune was extremely implausible.

  Despite their initial promise, moreover, the Esmeralda mines literally did not pan out. Only about $8 million in bullion was shipped from Aurora in 1864, at the height of the boom (such as it was), and the mines were exhausted after only three years. Some of the miners blamed the inefficiency of the quartz mills for failing to remove all the gold and silver in the ore. In fact, only one local mill extracted silver from the crushed rock in a process of chemical amalgamation requiring mercury, or quicksilver—ironically, the same element that had been used to treat venereal disease and had been placed in loaves of bread floated on the Mississippi to locate dead bodies during Sam’s boyhood in Hannibal. Six hundred thousand pounds of quicksilver were consumed annually in the mills on the Comstock. But it cost a minimum of sixty cents per pound and it so sharply increased expenses that milling for silver was not necessarily cost-effective. The tailings at the other mills were simply dumped on the ground and much of the potentially valuable rock washed away in storms. As former Nevada governor Roswell K. Colcord put it, “Big fortunes went down the cañon into Walker River.” Most of the ore extracted in Esmeralda was worthless unless it contained at least thirty dollars of gold per ton, the cost of mining and milling it. In mid-June, an estimated half million tons of quartz were aboveground or in exposed outcroppings in the region “awaiting a successful silver process.” Sam and his partners “took up various claims, and commenced shafts and tunnels on them, but never finished any of them,” he wrote in Roughing It, because the rock simply did not pay. “I purchased largely in the ‘Wide West,’ the ‘Winnemucca,’ & other fine claims, & was very wealthy,” he explained later. “I fared sumptuously on bread when flour was $200 a barrel”—it’s unlikely it ever cost so much—“& had beans every Sunday when none but bloated aristocrats could afford such grandeur.”40

  By late July he was dead broke. The Nevada outback was, he wrote Orion, “the d——dest country for disappointments the world ever saw.” He had squandered the grub stake he had saved from his piloting career and carried to Nevada, all the money Orion had sent him, as well as the $480 he had earned as clerk during the legislative session. His debts were “greater than I thought,” he complained. “If I can’t move the bowels of those hills this fall,” he assured his brother, “I will come up and clerk for you. . . . I owe about 45 or $50, and have got about $45 in my pocket. But how in the h——” was he “to live on something over $100 until October or November,” when he planned to return to work for $8 a day during the second territorial legislative session? “The fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too,” he wrote Orion. “At last, when flour reached a dollar a pound,” he claimed in Roughing It, “I abandoned mining and went to milling. That is to say, I went to work as a common laborer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board.” He was hired by J. E. Clayton, owner of the only local mill that worked rock for both gold and silver. Operating around the clock on Martinez Hill, it processed seven to eight tons of ore per day, or about ten pounds per minute. (By comparison, the Gould & Curry mill in Virginia City, one of the largest quartz mills in the world, reduced a hundred tons of ore per day.) Sam soon discovered

  that the burrowing was only half the work; and that to get the silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of it. . . . There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling. There never was any idle time in that mill. . . . When there was nothing else to do, one could always “screen tailings.” That is to say, he could shovel up the dried sand that had washed down to the ravine through the troughs and dash it against an upright wire screen to free it from pebbles and prepare it for working over. . . . Of all recreations in the world, screening tailings on a hot day, with a long-handled shovel, is the most undesirable.

  Sam bragged in later years that he had no particular aversion to dirt because he had “seen so much of it in mining camps,” but he drew the line at shoveling tailings: it was the “most detestable work I ever engaged in.” He quit or was fired after only a week, though he recounted his “dreary and laborious” experience in the quartz mill and its “exceeding hardness” in Roughing It.41

  All of this should provide context to his decision to contribute some columns to Nevada newspapers in the spring of 1862: he desperately needed the money. The record of his writings between April and August 1862, however, is shrouded in mystery and speculation. As early as April, soon after his arrival in Aurora, he began to send some articles to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, though he probably was not paid for them. Under the pseudonym Carsonite he collaborated with Phillips on a piece for the Carson City Silver Age in late April that reported on military operations against local Indians and touted the prospects of the Esmeralda mines. They probably were paid two or three dollars for this item, which was subsequently reprinted in the San Francisco Bulletin.42 He petitioned in April, too, for a commission as an Esmeralda County deputy sheriff, though his petition was inexplicably ignored in Carson City.43 He may have contributed to the ephemeral Esmeralda Star, launched in mid-May, though its circulation was small and fe
w copies of the paper survive. If so, his articles may have been signed “Josh,” the pseudonym he adopted in his famously lost humor writings of this period.44 But Sam may have sent the Josh letters instead to another, ephemeral newspaper, perhaps the Carson City Silver Age if not the Esmeralda Star. That is, Sam may have been contributing to as many as four different papers in early 1862—the Keokuk, Iowa, Gate City; the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (in April, without signature); the Esmeralda Star (in mid-May under the pseudonym Josh); and the Carson City Silver Age (briefly, in late July). In any event, none of the Josh letters from this period is extant, at least in part because the copies Sam asked Orion to preserve in scrapbooks are lost.

  While these letters are apparently irrecoverable in their entirety, parts of the correspondence Sam sent the Territorial Enterprise in 1862 survive as reprints in other regional papers. In particular, two comic articles reprinted from the Territorial Enterprise in the San Francisco Bulletin in May and July 1862 bear the earmarks of his early humor. Satirical advice columns for greenhorns on how to survive in the mining districts, steeped in irony and couched in the imperative mood, they anticipate some of his other apprenticeship pieces, such as “How to Cure a Cold” (1863). Each of them also exhibits a familiarity with terms and techniques that Sam would have learned during the months he worked in the mines and mills of Nevada. The first of these items, titled “How to Prospect a Mine,” appeared in the Territorial Enterprise a day after he instructed Orion to put his “Enterprise letters in the scrap book.” In it, he proposed several rules to govern “the operations of miners in Washoe.” To wit: “First, find a lead; no matter what it looks like, or how much bed-rock is mixed with it, so you have something that seems to be running somewhere.” Then, “go off about 2,000 feet and start a tunnel towards it.” Next, organize your company by writing bylaws and appointing officers, especially a treasurer. “You may never have any use for a Treasurer,” he added, “but it looks well, and men from the Bay will expect it; therefore, it is best to have one.” Finally, call meetings “every two or three days—nothing like meetings. . . . You cannot have too many meetings.”45 Two months later, the Bulletin reprinted from the Territorial Enterprise a similar piece with a headnote to the effect that the Virginia City paper “has been indulging in a satiric vein of late”:

  HOW TO SEE WASHOE—ADVICE GRATIS TO VISITORS.

  The stage will land you in Virginia City. Once you are here, all necessity for personal exertion is at an end. You need not fret your gizzard about where you will go or what you will do. A deputation of well-dressed, gentlemanly appearing citizens will receive you. You know little or nothing of ores; it’s of no consequence—your self-constituted body-guard will tell you what to admire.

  Devote the first day of your stay to drinking with all who inform you that they are happy to meet you. . . . Spend your second day in dining and supping with those who have appointed themselves a special committee to protect you from imposition. The third day you will doubtless be invited to dine, or sup, or lunch somewhere. Go, by all means. You will be surprised at the amount of information the gentlemen you meet with can give you in regard to the richness of the claims in which they own. . . . The fourth day of your stay, get yourself invited to a public dinner, if possible; that is if there is no danger of your coming in contact with a different class from those you have been associating. Your bodyguard, however, will be likely to attend to this, and see that you meet with none but persons whom it is proper for you to know. This time spent in dining is not lost. Every day you will gain a great deal of astonishing information in relation to the mines owned by your friends—while at the same time you are enjoying yourself finely. This you will find a delightful combination of pleasure and profit. There is not the least necessity of your going outside of town to look at anything. . . . The fifth day, take dinner with your friends; go with them to such places as they regard worthy of being visited. . . . You are by this time well posted up in regard to the mineral wealth of Washoe, and if you have concluded not to invent in mining stock, get aboard the stage and go back to California. . . .

  HOW TO GET A BIG THING IN WASHOE—ADVICE GRATIS TO THOSE WISHING TO INVEST.

  Strangers will be pleased to know that on landing in any of the principal cities of Washoe, they will find any number of men ready, should they desire to invest in mining stock, to lend them their advice and assistance. Cultivate the acquaintance of these gentlemen. It will be a good plan to let them know as soon as possible about what kind of speculation would suit you, and the exact amount of money you desire to invest. It will expedite your business wonderfully, and you will soon find yourself “into something.”

  You will not be long in discovering that the self-appointed special committee having you in their charge own in all the best claims. . . . Be very careful not to let anybody but the well-dressed, genteel fellows who constitute your body-guard know that you have money to invest in mines. . . . Listen and give heed only to the words of kid-gloved, gentlemanly dealers in mines. They, of course, are incapable of uttering a single word not strictly true in regard to the mines. . . .

  HOW TO MANAGE A MINE.

  First, incorporate. Immediately after your incorporation, lay your plans to get rid of all the poor men in your company. They may be honest men; they may be industrious, enterprising, intelligent and good men, but they are poor. What right has labor to clog capital? . . .

  It is of the first importance that you require all assessments paid promptly in cash. Allow no poor man to hold an office in your company. . . . You may now hoist out your richest ore and start your mill. It is safe to allow the mine to pay now. If you should ever happen to meet with any of the poor devils whom you froze out, speak to them pleasantly; let them see that you are a true gentleman and cherish no animosity. Inquire when they last heard from their families and when they expect to see them. You might ask them to drink with you occasionally—nothing like a well-timed display of little kindnesses. In this case it will show that you are of a very forgiving disposition.46

  By mid-May, Sam and Raish Phillips were frantic. They were strapped for cash without “three days’ rations in the house. Raish is looking anxiously for money and so am I.” Their predicament had not materially improved twelve days later. If, as the robber baron Jay Gould once suggested, it is a blessing to owe what cannot be paid, then Sam and Raish were thrice blessed. Back in Missouri, Jane Clemens wrote Orion that she would be happier if Sam was “writing for a paper and giving general satisfaction” than working in the mines. She disapproved of both his wildcatting and tomcatting. On July 23 Sam begged Orion to “write to the Sacramento Union folks” and “tell them I’ll write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a week—my board must be paid. . . . If they want letters from here, who’ll run from morning till night collecting materials cheaper[?]”47

  Down-and-out in Aurora, Sam certainly had no plans to contribute exclusively to only one paper. He had been promised a position on the staff of a Carson City newspaper that his friend William Gillespie, who had accompanied James Nye to Nevada and clerked for the legislature in 1861, planned to launch. The paper was stillborn and the job never materialized. In late July he agreed to “write a short letter twice a week for the present for the [Carson City Silver] ‘Age,’ for $5 per week. Now it has been a long time since I couldn’t make my own living, and it shall be a long time before I loaf another year.” Two days later he sent a piece to the Silver Age that was subsequently reprinted on the front page of the San Francisco Alta California. “The town is fast improving,” he reported, and “there are now over six hundred dwelling houses here, and a good many more are being erected. There are near two thousand inhabitants in this place—about sixty families and over one hundred ladies.” As usual, he also touted the prospects of the region if only because he had invested so much of his own money there. “The mines here are turning out very rich, some of them fabulously so,” he insisted, before offering the orthodox explanation for their fail
ure to yield more bullion: “Only a portion of the mills are in operation; some of them are putting in silver processes, without which they are not of much account, as there is so much silver in most of the rock it does not pay well to work for gold alone.”48

  According to the mythology that has accreted around this period of his life, Sam’s break into full-time journalism occurred after he ostensibly wrote a bogus version of the Fourth of July address delivered in Aurora in 1862 by George Turner, chief justice of the Nevada territorial courts, for the Territorial Enterprise. Sam admitted he did not hear the speech, but he claimed that Turner’s oratorical style was so distinctive that his parody “was easily recognizable by the whole Territory as being a smart imitation” of it.49 In this version of events, Sam opened his parody with the phrase “I was sired by the great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam.”50 The talk by Turner that Sam ostensibly lampooned was so pretentious and self-referential that the printers for the Enterprise exhausted their supply of capital I’s while typesetting it, prompting Sam to refer scornfully to Turner as Professor Personal Pronoun. His satirical attack on the judge’s “vanity, egotism, and emptiness” was “regarded with such favor by Joseph Goodman,” the co-owner and editor of the Enterprise, that he offered Sam a job. That is, as Sam put it, the parody appeared “just in the nick of time to save me.”51

  There are a number of reasons to doubt the veracity of this account. Nothing even remotely similar to this burlesque speech was reprinted from the Territorial Enterprise in the surviving newspapers of Nevada, California, and Utah for July 1862. Moreover, Turner delivered the Fourth of July address that year in Placerville, California; the Independence Day speaker in Aurora was the Nevada lawmaker L. O. Stearns. George Turner in fact spoke in Aurora on July 4, 1864, two years later, and he was a notoriously poor orator, but Sam had long since left the region. That is, Turner may not have been the butt of Sam’s humor at all. Instead, Governor James Nye, infamous for his breast-beating histrionics on Independence Day, may have been the target. As the New York World remarked in the winter of 1865, Nye’s “well-belched eloquence here years ago was wont to overpower and put [the winds of Manhattan] to flight.” He repeated “his oration . . . on numberless Fourths of July,” excreting “his bunkum and his bile.” Sam was certainly familiar with Nye’s pompous and ponderous speaking style and ridiculed it a few years later in an unpublished essay, “On Gov. —— Who Loves to Talk Nonsense.” Nye had in fact visited Aurora between June 27 and 30, 1862, but delivered no address. In addition, at Sam’s death nearly a half century later, some papers reported that his satirical Fourth of July address in 1862 had originally been published in the Esmeralda Star. In short, in his own accounts of this episode Sam may have misremembered or deliberately misrepresented the circumstances, or he may have contributed a satirical piece to the ephemeral Star under the Josh pseudonym that has since been lost, or nothing like it may have appeared at all. And even if Sam wrote a humorous article attacking Stearns, Turner, or Nye, it may have had nothing at all to do with his job offer from the Enterprise.52