And then there was, still and again, the nagging problem of the territorial printing. In the fall of 1862, when the second legislature met, there were only four print shops in Nevada, just one more than the year before: the Virginia City Daily Union (the former Carson City Silver Age), Washoe Times, Territorial Enterprise, and Esmeralda Star. Despite an attempt by the joint legislative Committee on Printing to usurp his prerogatives, Orion solicited bids from all four shops and, in the end, awarded the contract to the Enterprise just as Goodman and McCarthy had hoped. Sam’s employment on the paper was no doubt a factor in his decision. But Goodman clearly expected to be paid in specie, not greenbacks or territorial scrip. “Were it not for the depreciation in the value of Legal Tender notes, which we were compelled to accept for your draft on the U.S. Sub-Treasurer at San Francisco, thus leaving obligations incurred by us in the execution of the Legislative work yet unsatisfied, we would ere this time be under way with the Laws,” Goodman advised Orion on January 28, 1863. “The uncertainty as to the nature of our compensation for doing the work will not justify us in commencing to incur more obligations before those already against us are liquidated.” Orion assured Goodman that he had “never sent a just and fair bill” to the Treasury Department in Washington “which failed of being allowed, after proper explanations.” That is, Orion knew how to inflate the requisition to cover the cost of paying printers in specie. He feared a repetition of problems like the ones that had plagued the territorial printing the year before. He urged Goodman on February 5 “to go on with the printing of the laws and journals as rapidly as practicable, not doubting that the Government will do what is right under all the circumstances.” He was less sanguine, however, in a letter he wrote the same day to the comptroller in Washington, D.C.: “If I tell them [the proprietors of the Territorial Enterprise] their bill will be paid in coin, five thousand dollars will probably be sufficient. If I tell them Treasury Notes, not less than from seven thousand to ten thousand dollars, I fear, will be required to pay their bills,” if they “undertake the work at all.” Five months later, he complained to his government overseers that the “public printing this year has been a source of much trouble,” though it was eventually completed by “agreeing to allow the printers to make out their bills at what they thought they ought to have.” Orion agreed to pay upwards of $1.50 per thousand ems to the Nevada shops that performed the state printing. The final volume of the journals of the Second Nevada Territorial Legislature, which had adjourned in December 1862, finally appeared from the press of the Enterprise in October 1863.39
All of Sam’s writings to date had appeared anonymously, or over his initials, or under a nom de plume such as W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Sergeant Fathom, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, or Josh. He asked Joe Goodman “if he might sign a name to some stories apart from the regular reports” he contributed to the paper and Goodman “told him he might.” Sam first signed a piece sent from Carson City to the Enterprise with the nom de plume (or as he called it, the “nom de guerre”) “Mark Twain” on January 31, 1863, and it was printed in the paper on February 3. “Twain” seemed a protean figure from the outset: his opening sentence was “I feel as though I’ve just awakened from a long sleep.” The source of the pen name has been critically debated for over a century and a half. Most obviously, “mark twain” was a leadsman’s call on the river to signal a depth of at least two fathoms or twelve feet, safe water for a steamboat in a channel but dangerous water in shallows. As Sam once explained, “mark two . . . cannot be heard in stormy weather, but ‘mark twain’ has a different sound and catches the ear at once.” He was attracted to the name, he said, “because to nine hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand it had no meaning, and also because it was short.”40
But he also offered a more elaborate explanation for his pseudonym. In November 1868, the same week Olivia Langdon tentatively accepted his proposal of marriage, a report circulated in newspapers across the country—originating no doubt with Sam—that he had appropriated the name from “an old boatman on the Mississippi river.” Or as he argued most forcefully in chapter 50 of Life on the Mississippi, he stole the pen name from his old nemesis Isaiah Sellers, who signed it to his river reports in New Orleans papers in the 1850s, in order to pay tribute to him. Sellers “died in 1863,” Sam asserted, “and as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains.” He “confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded” pseudonym or “robbed his corpse” and did his “best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth.” Unfortunately, there is no record that Sellers ever signed a single one of his river columns “Mark Twain,” and Sellers was still alive in January 1863 when Sam first “borrowed” the name. Sellers did not die until March 1864. That is, this account of the source of his pseudonym seems in retrospect a clever attempt to burnish his public image, especially during his courtship of Livy.41
He apparently wanted to suppress a more plausible explanation. In August 1864, only about a year and a half after Sam began to use the pseudonym, his bête noire Albert S. Evans asserted that his “soubriquet was given him by his friends as indicative of his capacity for doing the drink for two.” Similarly, an early published account of Sam’s adoption of the pen name appeared in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle for February 14, 1866. It was soon widely copied in such papers as the Sacramento Bee, the Nevada City Transcript, and the Mariposa, California, Gazette, and there is no evidence he ever challenged its veracity. In this version of events, Sam routinely bought cocktails on credit at various bars around Virginia City, especially John Piper’s Old Corner Saloon at B Street and Union; Mike McCluskey’s establishment on Main Street in Gold Hill; Tom Peasley’s Sazerac Saloon on South C Street near Union; and Winn and Center’s New Saloon on C Street. Piper, McCluskey, and Peasley were among the most trusted and admired citizens in town—in Nevada at the time, Sam explained, the “cheapest and easiest way to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at large was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell whisky”—so he simply charged his drinks. He asked barkeeps to “mark twain,” a request to score two drinks to his bar tab. Clement Rice once called him “Mark Two,” and Sam recalled as late as 1899 that in the Virginia City taprooms “two marks were used” to record his drinks “instead of two crosses,” comments that only make sense if the barroom version of his nickname is accurate. According to a fellow who claimed to have known Sam as a regular at Piper’s saloon, moreover, “he drank for the pure and unadulterated love of the ardent” and “whenever he did his invariable parting injunction was to ‘mark twain,’ meaning two chalk marks.”42
By the age of twenty-seven Sam obviously no longer kept the promise he had given his mother years earlier to shun intoxicating spirits, though he assured her as late as mid-July 1863 that he never drank “anything stronger than claret or lager beer, which conduct is regarded as miraculously temperate in this country.” On the contrary, he was as well known for his imbibing as for his reporting. Sam’s bottle was “never full,” as when he socialized at Piper’s at midnight on July 10, 1863. According to the Bulletin, he gave away a partly full bottle of gin and went “‘prospecting’ for another,” barely a week before he assured his mother he had been temperate in his drinking. In October 1863 he went on a binge with a few friends and a report about their “debauchery” appeared in the Gold Hill News. Dan De Quille reported, probably in early 1864, that a local judge had Sam arrested on a charge of treason for “guzzling beer in plain sight of the Court, without inviting it over to take a glass.” He was so notorious a drinker that almost two years after he left the West the editor of the Grass Valley, California, National joked that Sam was “writing a drama which will appear soon, entitled ‘One Night in Ten Bar-Rooms,’” a play on the title of T. S. Arthur’s popular temperance novel Ten Nights
in a Bar Room. The Virginia City Trespass remarked at the time that Sam “don’t drink except when his spirits are properly amalgamated with sugar, glass, lime, ice and a teaspoon.” It is no wonder that years later he contrived an alternative and more respectable version of the history of his pseudonym that honored a grandee of the river. By then he was not a little ashamed of his antics in Nevada and California. “I think that much of my conduct on the Pacific Coast was not of a character to recommend me to the respectful regard of a high eastern civilization,” he admitted in 1868 to his future father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, “but it was not considered blameworthy there, perhaps. We go according to our lights.” He hastened to add that “I never did anything mean, false or criminal.” Six weeks later he confessed to his future mother-in-law that he had simply been “a man of convivial ways & not averse to social drinking.”43
After all, the liquor on the Comstock was less toxic than the water. The brackish soup pumped from the mines by the Virginia City and Gold Hill Water Company was safe for milling rock but unsuitable for human consumption. The best that could be said, according to the Sacramento Bee, was that it “looks very inviting and is not half so injurious as represented to be, especially if not mixed with too much bad whisky.” Or as Sam mused in his journal, “Water taken in moderation cannot hurt anybody.” Even in the 1860s proposals were floated to pipe fresh water from Lake Tahoe across the mountain range to Virginia City, and Sam was attuned to the politics of water in the arid West. After striking a stream of water in one of his tunnels in Esmeralda he had explained to his mother and sister that “if you knew anything of the value of water, here, you would perceive at a glance that if the water should amount to 50 or 100 inches, we wouldn’t care whether school kept or not. If the ledge should prove to be worthless, we’d sell the water for money enough to give us quite a lift.”44
Sam was confronted in the spring of 1863 with a pair of cautionary tales, the first in the person of a veritable “allegory of Poverty,” a rolling stone named Moss. His childhood classmate Neil Moss, brother of Mary Moss and son of one of the richest men in Hannibal, arrived in Virginia City “hungry, bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket, roofed with a brimless hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated that he could have ‘taken the shine out of the Prodigal Son himself,’ as he pleasantly remarked.” Evidently Moss had wasted his inheritance in riotous living. Like the false Tom Driscoll in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), he had been sent to Yale University and returned to Missouri “in swell eastern clothes,” but by the age of thirty he had become “a graceless tramp in Nevada” living on borrowed money. As Sam recalls in chapter 55 of Roughing It, Moss “came tramping in on foot from Reese River” and asked “to borrow forty-six dollars—twenty-six to take him to San Francisco, and twenty for something else; to buy some soap with, maybe, for he needed it.”45
Nor was Sam, inured to bloody battles during his boyhood in Hannibal, a stranger to lethal violence when it erupted on the streets of Virginia City. At 3:30 a.m. on April 12, literally as he was writing to his mother and sister, he heard five shots near his boardinghouse. “As such things are in my line,” he noted in a postscript to his letter, “I will go and see about it.” At about 5:00 a.m. he added in a second postscript, “The pistol did its work well.” Two policemen, John Reed and John McMahon, both of them Sam’s friends, had been slain by a young Missourian, John Campbell, alias Palmer, who had arrived in Virginia City from Sonoma County, California, only two days earlier. Campbell had been disturbing the peace by singing Dixie songs in a beer cellar on North C Street when the officers tried to arrest him. After the murders, the killer fled the scene, though he was captured near Dayton shortly after sunrise, returned to Virginia City, and jailed. The local Home Guards were pressed into service to prevent his lynching. The victims were buried on April 15 and, according to a report Sam telegraphed the San Francisco Morning Call, “the whole town attended the funeral.” Unfortunately, a posse chasing Campbell, believing he was holed up in a mining tunnel near Gold Hill, plugged the hole and tried to smoke him out. Instead they suffocated five Indians who had sought shelter there.46 The incident may have influenced Sam’s description of the death of Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer after the mouth of McDougal’s Cave, his hideout, is bolted shut.
By early 1863 Sam had begun to wear out his welcome in Virginia City. He admitted to his mother and sister in mid-February that Goodman had given him leave, “about the first of the month, to stay twenty-four hours in Carson, and I stayed a week.” The editors may not have “much confidence in me now,” he conceded. “If they have, I am proud to say it is misplaced” because, though paid six dollars a day, “I make 50 per cent profit by only doing three dollars’ worth of work.” To be sure, at the time Joe Goodman thought Sam’s colleague De Quille the more promising writer. “If I had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, Dan de Quille or Sam, would become distinguished,” Goodman admitted, “I should have said De Quille. Dan was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. Of course, I recognized the unusualness of Sam’s gifts, but he was eccentric and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that I should have prophesied fame for him then.” Even Sam admitted a dozen years later that the “first big compliment I ever received was that I was ‘almost worthy to write in the same column with Dan de Quille.’” In the spring of 1863, moreover, some of the other locals had already begun to turn their guns on him. On April 2 the Virginia Evening Bulletin upbraided Sam for his “merciless” humor and added that “when acrimony and bitterness is [sic] exhibited, wit is no more genuine than a bar of gilded brass is gold.” He took a leave of absence from the Enterprise on May 2 and left with Clement Rice for San Francisco, his first excursion to the Bay Area. At the time, the cosmopolis had twelve daily newspapers and 231 liquor stores serving a population of 115,000, about one-sixth of them Chinese immigrants.
Goodman conceded that he was surprised by Sam’s sudden departure: “The poor fellow actually thought he possessed some breeding—that Virginia was too narrow a field for his graces and accomplishments.” He then added tongue in cheek that it was “to be regretted that such scrubs are ever permitted to visit the Bay, as the inevitable effect will be to destroy that exalted opinion of the manners and morality of our people which was inspired by the conduct of our senior editor.” Privately, Goodman wrote Dan De Quille in Iowa simply that Sam had gone to San Francisco to “remain for an indefinite time—and it is doubtful whether he will be connected with the paper again or not.” He urged De Quille to return to Washoe “post-haste” and “resume work on the paper.”47
The hoaxes had tarnished Sam’s reputation, and according to a couple of Enterprise employees he was not well liked. One of his coworkers remembered a decade later that he had been “a notoriously lazy grinder” of copy for the paper and “would sit at his editorial table for hours drumming on a cracked guitar.” In addition, he had criticized the “d——d fool printers” who typeset the paper for mangling his manuscripts even while he was in Aurora, and Joe Farnsworth, one of the compositors, remembered that “everyone on the staff hated” him. George Barnes, the editor of the San Francisco Morning Call, concurred a quarter century later: “It cannot be said he made many friends in Nevada. There were some who affected his company on account of his writings, but he had not the faculty of winning friendship.” McEwen reiterated the point as late as 1893: “Not many people liked Mark Twain, if one may judge by the tone of deprecation in which he is spoken of on the Comstock to this day.” Whereas the printers once presented Goodman with a gold-handled cane, they gave Sam an imitation meerschaum (“meer sham”) pipe “with a straight bowl about five inches high and about a yard of blue ribbon floating from the stem” that cost thirty cents. It “split in twain” the first time he smoked it and the episode stuck in his craw: it “was a cruel, cruel trick the boys played on me.” Over the years, his irritation with the practical joke dissipated but never evaporated. One day in 1870 when Goodman w
as at the Clemens home in Buffalo, or so he later remembered, Sam
took out of a cabinet that charred old eggshell pipe and looked at it till I wondered what there could be new about it to so absorb him. “I have kept it all these years, and shall keep it as long as I live,” he said at last, in a voice from which every touch of bitterness had vanished. “It really should remind me only of a poor joke at my expense; but I can never forget the kindly spirit in which I thought it was being given, nor the feeling with which I received it.”
But he never entirely forgave the offense. He confessed to some lingering resentment over the prank as late as 1902: “I wouldn’t have cared if the pipe cost 30 cents or $30, but when they came to me seriously and made the presentation as a costly pipe, when it was a cheap affair, that was another thing.”48
One of his columns in March 1863 also seems to have backfired. He advertised for a cat and as a result dozens (“over a thousand,” in his reporting) of the animals were dropped off at the Enterprise building—so many that “the office was full and overflowing with them. There were cats of all ages, kinds, and descriptions.”49 Sam apparently set them all free.
The Life of Mark Twain Page 30