and the Enterprise was booming equally with all else. It was undoubtedly at the time the most flourishing newspaper on the Pacific Coast. A tidal wave of gold rolled in upon its proprietors. The paper seemed to run itself—and in doing so ran all connected with it. It seemed to take the lead and go right along without thought or care on the part of anyone. All there was to do was to pile into the paper all the news it would hold. The money to pay for everything seemed to besiege the office.
“Money poured into its safe,” according to Arthur McEwen, who joined the staff in the early 1870s. Goodman and McCarthy “carried their profits home in buckets,” according to rumor. The paper earned an estimated one hundred dollars a day, or by some estimates upwards of five thousand dollars a month. Goodman and McCarthy paid their printers $1.25 per thousand ems, some five times what Sam had earned in St. Louis and New York a decade earlier.9
During flush times, the Enterprise easily fended off its rivals. James Laird and the other new owners of the Carson City Silver Age moved their paper to Virginia City in November 1862, two months after Sam’s arrival, and renamed it the Daily Union. With a press run of about seven hundred, the Union was a formidable competitor by the spring of 1863. The territory was “booming, and the Union is pulling up on us like the deuce,” Goodman alerted Dan De Quille. “The best paper is going to win; and, candidly, I think the Union the better paper at present. We shall enlarge considerably when we get our new press; and I propose to put four men on the editorial staff—one on the editorial, one on the news department, one in local items, and one on mining intelligence.”10 The moves paid off: the Union failed in February 1867. The Virginia Evening Bulletin survived only ten months, from the summer of 1863 until the spring of 1864. The Washoe Evening Herald barely lasted a month in the summer of 1864. The Virginia City Standard, the only pro-Confederacy paper among them, was printed for a few weeks early in 1864, then was reincarnated as the Daily Piute, which was issued from the spring of 1864 until it collapsed in January 1865. An ephemeral German-language weekly, the Nevada Pioneer, was published in Virginia City in the spring of 1864. The Enterprise survived them all.
Sam always claimed that he walked the 130 miles from Aurora to Virginia City in September 1861 because he had no money for stage fare. More likely he traveled on horseback at least as far as Carson City, then caught a stagecoach that carried him the final 14 miles. Rollin Daggett of the Enterprise staff remembered that when Sam arrived at the newspaper offices he was gaunt and disheveled: “He had been living on alkali water and wrang leather, and only a sufficient supply of the former for drinking purposes, for several months, and you may imagine his appearance when I first saw him.” McEwen, later the editor of the San Francisco Examiner, thought that no two men “could be more unlike” in physical appearance than Joe Goodman and Sam. “The first was handsome, gallant, self-reliant, but not self-conscious, vehement of speech and swift in action,” whereas “Clemens was sloth-like in movement, had an intolerable drawl, and punished those who offended him by long-drawn sneering speech. But the two were alike at bottom in one thing—both were genuine, and had the quality of brain that enables one man to understand another of opposite temperament and manner. They soon became friends.” Still, according to Bailey Millard, later a distinguished San Francisco journalist, “Goodman repented of his bargain” to hire Sam the first time he saw “the lanky awkward young man.” Sam had long since adopted the protective coloration of informal Western apparel: “I had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed into boot-tops, and gloried in the absence of coat, vest and braces.” Fortunately, if he had a horse, he disposed of it. It would have cost about five dollars a day, more than he earned as a reporter, to board one at a local livery stable. Hay sold for eighty to a hundred dollars per ton in Virginia City when it sold for as little as twelve dollars per ton 160 miles away in Stockton, California.11
William Wright (aka Dan De Quille or “dandy quill”) immediately took Sam under wing. De Quille had been a reporter in Iowa at eighteen and a miner in California and Nevada since the age of twenty-eight, and he was ideally suited to mentor Sam. He was “one of the noblest men in the world” and “born a newspaper man,” as Sam put it in 1895. Under De Quille’s tutelage, Goodman remembered a half century later, “we put [Sam] to work reporting local affairs.” While his official title was city editor, Sam recalled, “the name was merely for style. In reality the City Editor should have been called the local reporter.” His first day of work may have been Sunday, September 14, 1862, when he covered a local murder. He wrote straight news for the paper without a byline and as a result few of the fifteen hundred to three thousand items he published in the Enterprise during these early months of his employment can be attributed to him with absolute certainty. The staff of the paper initially called him Josh, the alias he had adopted in Aurora, and he was expected to contribute a column of six-point type per issue six days a week. But from the beginning, he enjoyed the luxury of utter independence, even from the truth.12
Nothing that Sam or the other reporters contributed to the columns of the Enterprise was liable to compromise its profitability so long as advertising revenue sustained the paper. Put another way, the paper was long on ads and short on real news, though the editors often filled columns with items reprinted from the San Francisco and Sacramento newspaper exchanges. Goodman espoused a peculiar if not unique editorial credo: “Get your facts first, and . . . then you can distort ’em as much as you please.” Sam adhered to the policy conscientiously. “We were expected and supposed to furnish facts pure and simple for the columns of the Enterprise,” he allowed, “but there were not facts enough to fill the required space, and so often the reading material was largely a matter of imagination—sometimes based on fact, but not always.” He learned quickly that sensational news was “what a paper needed. . . . I felt that I could take my pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and the interests of the paper demanded it.” Elsewhere he recalled, “To find a petrified man, or break a stranger’s leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick’s, were feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast.” The Enterprise office “was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation and general destruction in those days.” Or as the editor of the Morning Glory and Johnson County Warwhoop declares in Sam’s sketch “Journalism in Tennessee” (1869), “mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.”13 According to De Quille, Sam
delighted in the horrible and shocking in those days. Not satisfied with the accidents happening in the mines, though many of them were sufficiently terrible, he would invent horrors of various kinds. These stories were generally in the way of finding human remains in out of the way places. He had a crow to pick with the Coroner, and delighted in placing him in ridiculous positions. . . . [H]e told of going on one occasion with the Coroner to prospect for a dead body reported to be lying in an old tunnel. The Coroner entered the tunnel, which proved to be a very long one, while Mark remained outside to await results. Presently the official reappeared with one arm of the unknown dead man. In trying to drag out the decomposed body the limb had become detached. Intent upon business, the Coroner returned and brought out a leg, and so he continued the work until he accumulated at the mouth of the tunnel a pile of “remains” sufficient to justify him in holding an inquest and so earning his fee. Mark made the whole business as shocking and disgusting as possible.14
As a novice reporter, Sam was “earnest and enthusiastic” and “really industrious,” but “when it came to ‘cast-iron’ items, he gave them ‘a lick and a promise,’” De Quille noted. He was allergic to “solid facts, such as were called for in matters pertaining to mines and machinery.” De Quille elsewhere commented that “we went merrily along, joking and laughing, and never feeling the weight of the work we were doing in the whirl and e
xcitement of the times.” “The indifference to ‘news’ was noble,” McEwen contended, “because it was so blissfully unconscious. Either [Sam] or Dan would dismiss a murder with a couple of inches, and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch. They were about equally good in the sort of invention required for such efforts, and Dan very often did the better work. But the one had reach and ambition; the other lived for the moment.” On a slow news day, Sam and Dan “could scare up a ‘story’ that would raise the old Harry, they well knowing that Goodman and McCarthy would back them up.”15
If Sam’s hoaxes and satires endeared him to the readers of the Enterprise, they sometimes alienated him from the territorial elites. William M. Stewart, one of the most prominent attorneys and politicians in Nevada, complained that Sam “went around putting things in the paper about people, and stirring up trouble. He did not care whether the things he wrote were true or not, just so he could write something, and naturally he was not popular. I did not associate with him.” Then again, Stewart was the lawyer for the bonanza king John W. McKay, with whom Sam also rubbed shoulders. McKay was a “great” and “superb man,” Sam told an interviewer in 1895. Or, as he added in his autobiography, he knew “McKay very well . . . in 1862, ’63 and ’64.” McKay “had established a broker’s office on C, in a new frame house, and it was rather sumptuous for that day and place, for it had part of a carpet on the floor and two chairs instead of a candle-box.”16
Twenty years later, Sam subtly commented on this moment in his career in an otherwise inexplicable digression in The Prince and the Pauper (1881). The mock king Tom Canty dreams that one summer day, while playing “in the fair meadow called Goodman’s Fields,” a foot-tall gnome instructs him to dig in the ground, whereupon he discovers in the hole “twelve bright new pennies—wonderful riches! Yet this was not the best of it; for the dwarf said—‘I know thee. Thou art a good lad and a deserving; thy distresses shall end, for the day of thy reward is come. Dig here every seventh day, and thou shalt find always the same treasure, twelve bright new pennies.’” In this brief anecdote, Sam allegorized in Canty’s dream the weekly salary he earned when he worked for Joe Goodman’s newspaper in the mining district, a more regular and secure income than he had realized by mining. According to McEwen, moreover, he sent “a good part” of his salary to his family “back in Missouri, where it was needed.”17
Sam elsewhere bragged about a related job benefit: he was often given shares in mines if he would “get up an excitement” for them in his column. “Reporting was lucrative, and every man in the town was lavish with his money and his ‘feet,’” he noted in Roughing It. This quid pro quo was, of course, a conflict of interest if not a bribe, but it was not illegal. He bragged to his family in July 1863 that he had “raised the price of ‘North Ophir’ from $13 a foot to $45 a foot” by his puffs and as a reward “they gave me five feet” in the mine. During the summer of 1863, he repeatedly touted the prospects of Hale & Norcross, of which he had been given several shares. “From the increasing richness of the developments being made in the Hale & Norcross mine,” he publicly reported in July, “I think you may count on a great advance in the price of that stock within the next few days.” A week later, he descended three hundred feet into the main shaft of the Hale & Norcross mine and “found they had not yet struck the ledge in the lower level, and will not for the next five or six days”—plenty of time to allow for some insider trading. Or, another month later, “The Hale & Norcross continues to supply a number of mills with choice rock; the stock has advanced to $2,600 in this market.” The footage he was given in return for these plugs and others like them was still subject to periodic assessments; that is, like the other stockholders he was levied a fee to keep the mine open if it failed to earn a profit and pay dividends. In a sense, then, the shares were more invoices than gifts. In May 1863 Sam received ten shares in the Fresno Mining Company, and in August he was listed as the owner of five shares in the Sonora Silver Mining Company with a nominal value of five thousand dollars. In December, he was assessed fifty dollars on twenty-five shares of the Nightingale Mining Company that he no doubt had been given for favors in kind.18 This method of developing claims, not by reinvesting profits or dividends but by taxing stockholders, was of course liable to fraud. The directors of the Bullion Mine famously lived on the $3.8 million in assessments they levied on the stockholders, while the mine never produced any paying ore. In 1867, of the four hundred mining companies in Virginia City, only three—the Ophir, the Gould & Curry, and the Savage—paid dividends, while most of the others simply collected assessments. Over the years, in fact, according to Elisha P. Douglass, as many as five thousand claims “were located and traded within thirty miles of Virginia City. Only 300 were ever opened, only 20 became mines, and of these only 8 or 9 paid dividends.” Or as Sam observed in Roughing It, there were “more mines than miners” in Washoe and “not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth hauling to a mill”—his inclination to plug every new excavation in the Enterprise notwithstanding. But the opportunity to puff a stock still proved lucrative. In April 1863 he wrote his family that he had recently been given fifty feet in the East India Gold and Silver Mining Company for which he had been offered nearly five thousand dollars.19
He soon insisted in an editorial that he fully understood his responsibilities as a member of the fourth estate: “Our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights and balls and theatres, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and Bible societies, and hay waggons [sic], and the thousand other things which it is within the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily newspaper.” For the record, Sam was likely the source of the report that a pack train of six Bactrian camels, beasts of burden each carrying upwards of a half ton of freight, arrived in Virginia City from Salt Lake City on October 16. He also published a piece in which he scorned the prospects in Humboldt, declaring them “little better than worthless,” much to the consternation of the miners there. Soon after he went to work for the paper, Sam dutifully described the organization of the Storey County Bible Society, the first such society in Nevada, and the election of the Episcopalian minister Franklin S. Rising as its secretary. A graduate of the Free Academy of the City of New York (later the City College of New York) and the General Theological Seminary, Rising was assigned to Nevada in the spring of 1862 by the American Church Missionary Society in New York and, as Sam avowed, he did “as much as any man among us to redeem this community from its pristine state of semi-barbarism.” They became fast friends. “I used to try to teach him how he ought to preach in order to get at the better natures of the rough population about him,” Sam remembered, “and he used to try hard to learn—for I knew them and he did not; he was refined and sensitive and not intended for such a people as that.” McEwen remembered that “while the clergyman probably did not consider Sam Clemens a devout Christian, at least he regarded him as a promising young man whose leanings were in the right direction.” Rising was the first of Sam’s many ordained friends: in the West, lawyers and ministers were virtually the only formally educated men, and Sam was loath to associate with lawyers. Rising became the prototype of the “fragile, gentle, spiritual new fledgling from an Eastern theological seminary” who conducts the funeral for Buck Fanshawe at the request of the stalwart miner Scotty Briggs in chapter 47 of Roughing It.20
In addition, Sam reported on a dance held at La Plata Hall to raise money on behalf of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a forerunner of the American Red Cross. Sam apparently was introduced there to a young woman named Etta Booth. “I first saw you in Virginia City,” he wrote her in 1877, and it “was at a ball.” Sam joked she was “a child then—8 years of age, I think,” though he revised his estimate of her age upward to thirteen in his autobiographical dictation in 1906, after they met by chance on a New York s
treet. He recalled that the dance was held in “a great ball-room in some ramshackle building in Gold Hill or Virginia City, Nevada. There were two or three hundred stalwart men present and dancing with cordial energy” and “she was the only dancer of her sex on the floor.” Whatever her age, Etta’s mother had escorted her to the party. Little more is known about their friendship, though his friend Tom Fitch remembered later that she once knit a woolen scarf for him.21
In “The Petrified Man,” published less than a month after he joined the staff of the paper, Sam announced the discovery of a fossilized human body cemented to a stump in the Nevada mountains. He was weary, he later wrote, of the recent “mania” about “extraordinary petrifications” found in the region and decided to burlesque them with “a very delicate satire.” Two years earlier, for example, a fossilized human skull had been discovered at the bottom of a well in Calaveras County. It had been authenticated and dated to the Stone Age by Josiah Whitney, the California state geologist after whom Mt. Whitney is named. The relic turned out to be a fraud, however, and Bret Harte ridiculed it in his poem “To the Pliocene Skull” (1866):
Speak, thou awful vestige of the earth’s creation,
Solitary fragment of remains organic!
Tell the wondrous secret of thy past existence,—
Speak! thou oldest primate!
Sam admitted that his own hoax was perhaps “altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all.” The squib was “a string of roaring absurdities” from start to finish, including the “facts” that the fossil had a wooden leg and that a coroner’s jury had tried to give the stone figure a Christian burial. As Sam described him, moreover, he was thumbing his nose.22
The Life of Mark Twain Page 28