He was not even hired by Goodman but by William Barstow, the business manager of the paper. Certainly Sam was still in financial distress on July 23, almost three weeks after he allegedly wrote the article that attracted Goodman’s attention. Given that Barstow tendered the offer of employment, it may have been less a journalistic or editorial decision than a strategic one. As one biographer wonders, “Why would a business manager urge an owner-editor to hire a letter writer from Aurora . . . ? The answer: When the legislature convened in November 1862 there would be governmental printing to be done.” Orion still managed the printing contracts for the territory and the owners of the Enterprise, Goodman and Denis McCarthy, apparently decided to curry favor with the secretary by hiring his brother in hopes of receiving a larger slice of the appropriations pie. Barstow was the perfect intermediary. He had been the assistant secretary of the Council during the first territorial legislature. Plus there was a vacancy on the newspaper staff. Star reporter Dan De Quille planned to take a months-long leave of absence from the paper to visit his family in Iowa and the paper needed to hire a temporary substitute. Orion evidently showed Barstow some of Sam’s letters to the Gate City that convinced him that the secretary’s younger brother would be a satisfactory replacement during De Quille’s sabbatical. Goodman not only needed to replace De Quille but planned to upgrade the printing plant with steam presses and increase the size of the paper, so he also needed to augment his news corps. And, of course, hiring Sam would give the Enterprise some leverage with Orion when he awarded the territorial printing contracts. “I want a finger in that printing, with Barstow,” Sam wrote Orion in late July. Moreover, “the Enterprise is making ready, with new type, &c.,” to perform it. Then, on July 30, he assured his brother, “Barstow has written me offering pay,” twenty-five dollars a week or a hundred dollars a month to be local reporter of the Enterprise, comparable to the wages earned by manual laborers in Silverado. A week later, Sam elaborated: “Barstow wrote that if I wanted the place I could have it. I wrote him that I guessed I would take it, and asked him how long before I must come up there. I have not heard from him since.”53 He had never before been a full-time reporter but, he admitted in 1871, “if I had been offered the job of translating Josephus from the original Hebrew I should have taken it. If I had translated Josephus I would have thrown in as many jokes as I could for the money, and made him readable.”54 He became a professional journalist by sheer serendipity. He “stumbled” into the profession, he told an interviewer in 1896,
as a man falls over a precipice that he is not looking for. I wasn’t, as far as I could see, intended for a journalist, but out in Nevada in those early silver days it was a struggle—a scramble from pillar to post—and one had to get a living as best he could. I was invited to take a place on the staff of a daily newspaper there—the Territorial Enterprise—and I took it. I should have taken command of a ship if it had been offered, for I wasn’t particular in those days.55
He sold all the feet that he and Orion owned in fifteen mines for a thousand dollars on August 7, about 20 percent of their nominal value, and late in the month he finally left Aurora. It is a ghost town today, with few remaining ruins, the bricks of its buildings scavenged over the years.
But Sam did not hurry to his new job. Instead, he took one final fling at prospecting. He likely met the son of Colonel Gid Whiteman at this time—he referred later to his “accidental glimpse of Mr. W[hiteman] in ’62”—and decided to join an expedition to the region around Mono Lake and the Yosemite Valley to locate the Whiteman cement mine, an episode he recounted in chapter 37 of Roughing It. “For more than two weeks I have been slashing around in the White Mountain District, partly for pleasure and partly for business,” he wrote Orion in early September. The water in the lake, he remembered, was “so strongly alkaline in content that it was undrinkable; indeed, it was almost bleach,” suitable for washing but little else. “If you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment” into the lake “once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwoman’s hands.” Another writer at the time similarly remarked that “it cleanses linen perfectly without the use of soap.”56 Finally, frustrated in his ambition to become a mining magnate, he bent his steps toward Virginia City and destiny.
CHAPTER 8
Virginia City
Reporting is the best school in the world to get a knowledge of human beings, human nature, and human ways. . . . Just think of the wide range of [the reporter’s] acquaintance, his experience of life and society. No other occupation brings a man into such familiar sociable relations with all grades and classes of people.
—“Roughing It,” January 5, 1872
IN THE EARLY 1860s Virginia City, Nevada Territory, was the epitome of a boomtown and the epicenter of “flush times.” In July 1859, three years prior to Sam Clemens’s arrival there, it “consisted of a single tent and a brushwood saloon,” according to the historian H. H. Bancroft, while Gold Hill, a mile south across a ravine, “contained one log-house and two miners’ cabins.” In 1860, the year after the discovery of the Comstock Lode, the population of Storey County swelled to 2,857, only 159 of whom were women, with bullion production of about $1 million. Both the number of residents and the yield from the mines increased exponentially over the next couple of years, from five to seven thousand people and $6 million, respectively, in 1862, the year Sam settled in Virginia City, to twenty-five thousand and $12 million in 1863, and to $16 million in 1864, the year he left.
James L. Laird, the Virginia City correspondent of the Sacramento Bee, reported on October 18, 1862, a month after Sam’s arrival, that from sunrise to sundown every day “one continued line of teams, heavily freighted with every variety of merchandise,” entered the town “to supply the wants of our rapidly increasing population.” On the main commercial street “the pedestrian nearly finds it impossible to wend his way through the throng of miners, speculators, lawyers, horses, oxen, wags, building materials, etc., that crowd our Broadway. Provisions and articles of general use” cost “three and four times as much as in your city.” Joe Goodman wrote in May 1863 that the migration to Virginia City from California was “immense,” averaging “from 50 to 100” people a day. The pioneering Nevada journalist Alf Doten noted in his journal the first time he visited in July 1863 that it was a “big, bustling noisy city—all in process of creation—streets full of wagons, horses, omnibuses, crowd—sidewalk crowded with rushing crowd—500 houses now being built.”1
The miners might literally have lit their pipes and cigars with greenbacks. “Money was wonderfully plenty,” Sam remembered. “The trouble was not how to get it,—but how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it.” The fifty- to eighty-foot-thick vein of gold and silver ore that stretched from Virginia City and Gold Hill to Silver City, a distance of about six miles, contained most of the wealth in Nevada, and these three towns contained most of the people in the territory. At least a third of the Comstock population worked in the tunnels at any given time. “The underground city had some thirty miles of streets,” Sam noted. The Gould & Curry, one of the richest mines in the world, employed a total of two thousand men on a payroll sufficient to support a population of six thousand. As early as February 1863 a total of ninety quartz mills with a total of over a thousand stamps were located in and around Virginia City. Even before the “big bonanza” of the 1870s it was the largest city in the United States between Chicago and San Francisco, or as Sam remarked it was “the second city on the pacific coast” with a population “nearly double that of Sacramento” and “double that of Portland, Oregon.” The market value of a single share or “foot” in the Gould & Curry Mine rose from $500 in March 1862 to $6,300 in June 1863, and Sam predicted it would “advance to the neighborhood of a thousand dollars an inch within the next twelve months.”2
It was also a surprisingly cultured community. In 1867, for example, over three hundred copies of Harper’s Monthly and over
a hundred copies of the Atlantic Monthly were sold in Virginia City and Gold Hill, and nearly two hundred volumes of Charles Dickens’s works and nearly fifty volumes of William Shakespeare were sold in Virginia City during that summer alone. Every theatrical troupe that traveled west in the 1860s and 1870s scheduled a week of performances in one of its four theaters or six music halls. The editor and jurist C. C. Goodwin recalled in his autobiography that “at that time there were more brilliant men in Virginia City than were ever seen in a town of that size before,” among them “the brightest lawyers, doctors, and the shrewdest men of affairs in the world.” Sam asserted in Roughing It (1872) that it was
the “livest” town, for its age and population that America had ever produced. . . . There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, “hurdy-gurdy houses,” wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill every fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor, a City Engineer, a Chief of the Fire Department, with First, Second and Third Assistants, a Chief of Police, City Marshal and a large police force, two Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church.3
It was no country for old men, however. William Gillespie, Steve Gillis (the foreman of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise print shop), and Joe Goodman were only twenty-four in 1862; Denis McCarthy and Adair Wilson of the Virginia City Daily Union twenty-one; Sam twenty-six; Alf Doten thirty-three; and Dan De Quille thirty-four. The jurist and future U.S. district judge Alexander W. (Sandy) Baldwin, son of the author of The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, was only twenty-two.
Hannibal, Missouri, and Virginia City also shared a particular topological feature that Sam could not have overlooked: the terraced streets of both towns sloped to the east—in the first case to the Mississippi River, the main artery of commerce in the nation, and in the latter to what was the richest vein of precious metal on the continent. Perched on Mt. Davidson about 6,150 feet above sea level, Virginia City was one of the most outré outposts in the world. Its parallel streets, as Sam described them in Roughing It, “ran fifty feet above each other, with houses facing into the mountain, so that their fronts “were level with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were propped on lofty stilts.” The streets were literally paved with gold and silver in the form of low-grade ore.4
But it was hardly paradise. Almarin B. Paul, a wealthy mill owner, disparaged Washoe (albeit in a San Francisco newspaper under a pseudonym) as “the fag end” of creation. The journalist and poet Frank Soulé averred that he had never “found so inhospitable, miserable, God-forsaken a spot” as Virginia City. After the Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King spoke there in June 1863, he called it a “city of Ophir holes, gopher holes, and loafer holes.” The journalist A. D. Richardson, who passed through Virginia City in 1865, described the “scores of huge quartz mills” that “pound unceasingly” and emitted smoke that “darkens the heavens.” The travel writer J. Ross Browne regarded the town as little more than “a mud-hole; climate, hurricanes and snow; water, a dilution of arsenic, plumbago, and copperas; wood, none at all except sagebrush; no title to property, and no property worth having,” with nothing to quaff “except old-fashioned tarantula juice” or hundred-proof mash whiskey, also known as “forty-rod” because it was “warranted to kill at forty paces.” He concluded that a “more barren-looking and forbidding spot could scarcely be found elsewhere on the face of the earth.” It was a strange city of “sagebrushes, mud hovels, coyote-holes, gunny-bags, flour-sacks, and tattered blankets.” According to Browne, the streets were paved not with gold and silver but “with a conglomerate of dust, mud, splintered planks, old boots, clippings of tinware, and playing-cards. It is especially prolific in the matter of cards.” Single men paid forty to sixty dollars a month, about half the average income, for room and board.5
While no longer a primitive mining camp, Virginia City was still a rough-and-tumble frontier town, with social demarcations as rigidly prescribed as the circles of Dante’s hell. The upper-crust whites lived up the mountain, much as the aristocratic Melicent Holliday had resided in Hannibal atop the hill named for her husband. The working-class Cornish, German, and Irish neighborhoods were clustered below C Street, and Chinatown, with a population of about a thousand, on E Street below them. Paiute and Washoe Indians were banished to the gulch at the bottom of the mountain or to the outskirts of the city. Artemus Ward claimed after his visit in December 1863 that Virginia City was “very wild” because “a mining city must go through with a certain amount of unadulterated cussedness” before it could become civilized and respectable. Jared Graham of the Daily Union claimed that over half of the population of the town “was made up of disreputables, including hundreds of desperadoes” from “played-out gold camps of California.” To avoid court costs, “the authorities allowed them to shoot without let or hindrance, so long as they did not molest or injure reputable citizens.” Orion admitted, albeit pseudonymously, that Nevada Territory was “infested by a set of godless scamps, gamblers, and villains of every description who, not to exaggerate too much, have consumed liquor enough to run all the quartz mills in the Territory.” Sam wrote at the time that if the devil were to visit Nevada, he would grow “homesick and go back to hell again.” According to Bancroft, in the city might be found “every form of vice, and all kinds of degrading amusements. On Saturday nights the underground population emerged from their tunnels; and while business houses were closed on Sunday, saloons, casinos, theatres, and bagnios were chockablock with customers.” On his part, Sam was thoroughly familiar with the seamy side of life in the territory. As he observed in Roughing It, “Vice flourished luxuriantly during the heyday of our ‘flush times.’ The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails—unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region. . . . A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.”6
Prostitution was legal in Virginia City, then as now; the first ordinances to regulate it by location were not adopted until 1865. It flourished on the Barbary Coast on South C Street near Silver, with a popular pickup spot being the corner of C and Union. Brothels, joy palaces, dance halls, fleshpots, and hurdy-gurdy houses, employing as many as two hundred women by the mid-1860s, were clustered in Chinatown in the northeast corner of the town, down the mountain, and on D Street between Sutton and Union. The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise reported in 1863, in an unsigned news article likely written by Sam, that the streets were routinely infested with “a horde of ruffians” or rowdies and “a lady is hardly safe from insult in Virginia unless she goes armed, or has a male protector constantly at her elbow.” As late as 1875 at least one of every twelve women who resided there worked in the sex trade. Opium was readily available in Chinatown until 1877, and the first age-of-consent laws were not passed in the state until 1893.7
Virginia City was also a refuge for deserters from both Civil War armies. The Gold Rush became a bums’ rush. A San Francisco paper estimated that in 1862, the first full year of the war, nearly one hundred thousand people migrated west to escape the conflict. According to Sam, “most of the desperadoes & the deadliest of them” in town “were not from the South but from the North.”8
Launched in Genoa, Nevada, in December 1858, the Territorial Enterprise relocated to Carson City in November 1859, to Virginia City a year later, and was bought by Joe Goodman and Denis McCarthy in March 1861. Goodman was editor in chief and McCarthy, a printer by training, managed production. Though its press run rarely exceeded 1,500 copies, half of them sold to subscribers for two dollars a month, and it was fantastically profitable because it was the newspaper of record on the Comstock. It would have been profitable had it contained nothing except mining news, legal notices of new claims, and classified ads. Investing in a do
uble-cylinder steam press, Goodman enlarged the Enterprise into an eight-page daily on August 1, 1861, little more than a month before Sam arrived in Virginia City. The owners earned a fortune in ad sales, even though they omitted a dozen or more columns of classified ads every day for months at a time. Or as Artemus Ward’s manager Edward P. Hingston noted, it was “fortunate in its advertisements.” In Roughing It, Sam allowed that its “rates were exorbitant” but its “columns crowded” despite the price. By April 1863 the paper was so prosperous that it issued a twice-weekly supplement, mostly additional ads. “The whole country was booming,” Dan De Quille remembered,
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