Sam reveled in San Francisco and indulged his taste for luxury for two months. “After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me,” he wrote in Roughing It. He “infested the opera” and “learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it.” He had “longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo. . . . I spent money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye and looked to see what might happen in Nevada.” He and Rice roomed first at the Occidental Hotel on Bush and Montgomery Streets and later at the Lick House on Sutter and Montgomery, the two toniest hotels in the city. Fitz Hugh Ludlow considered the comfort of the Occidental “like that of a royal home.” Not even in New York had Ludlow ever seen its equal “for elegance of appointment, attentiveness of servants, or excellence of cuisine.” Sam once facetiously called it the “Incidental Hotel.” He and Rice “fag ourselves completely out every day, and go to sleep without rocking, every night,” Sam wrote his family in St. Louis. “We dine out, & we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were. After breakfast, I don’t often see the hotel again until midnight—or after.” They took day trips to Alameda, Benicia, Oakland, and San Leandro and frequented “the dingy horrors of San Francisco’s pleasure grove, ‘the Willows,’” modeled on the Jardin Mabille in Paris. They attended an eclectic mix of high- and low-brow entertainments, both musicales at Maguire’s Opera House and a variety show at the Bella Union Melodeon on Washington Street, where the “lovely and blooming damsels” were dressed “like so many parasols,” he reported. When he was in San Francisco in 1865, Samuel Bowles marveled at the fashionable dress of San Francisco women “when they go out to the opera, or to party, or ball. Their point lace is deeper, their moiré antique stiffer, their skirts a trifle longer, their corsage an inch lower, their diamonds more brilliant.” In one of the letters Sam sent the Enterprise from the Bay Area during these months he satirized the haute couture of the trophy wives (e.g., “Mrs. J. B. W. wore a heavy rat-colored brocade silk, and trimmed with organdy, and studded with large silver stars”).
Soon enough Sam declared his intention to return to Nevada, however. He was, after all, able to ride the wave of prosperity with less effort there than in San Francisco, whatever attractions the city held for him, and besides he had agreed to become the Virginia City correspondent of the San Francisco Morning Call. He may also have been lured back by a raise in his Enterprise salary to forty dollars a week. Virginia City was booming like never before, but he dreaded the day: “it seems like going back to prison to go back to the snows & the deserts of Washoe, after living in this Paradise,” he admitted to his mother. During these two months of prodigality and trading in mining stocks, by his own estimate he had spent eight hundred dollars and sent his mother two hundred more. He still left San Francisco with twelve hundred dollars, or so he claimed, though it is impossible now to know if he based his net worth on the real value, appraised or assessed value, or speculative value of his stocks. At the very least he owned a couple of shares in the Gould & Curry Mine. He returned to Virginia City on July 1, 1863.50
Sam apparently arrived just in time to meet Thomas Starr King, a celebrated orator, founder of the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco, and the man generally credited with “saving California for the Union.” Statues of King today grace both Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C. He was recruiting in Nevada and had lectured in Virginia City, Dayton, Washoe City, and Carson City, where he had been entertained by Orion. King wrote a week or so later to thank him:
I remember my visit to your Territory with great delight & gratitude. And very prominent among the pleasing recollections is the visit to your pleasant home. Wherever I went in the Territory I heard your name uttered in connection with cordial confidence & the most complimentary respect; & I assure you that I count it a privilege to have made the acquaintance of so efficient an officer & so true a patriot.
In Virginia City, King and his wife Julia were hosted by Charles Strong,51 superintendent of the Gould & Curry Mine, at whose lavish home Sam was likely introduced to them. He was impressed by King, at any rate, and after King’s untimely death in San Francisco less than a year later Sam eulogized him as “the great and good man who is gone from our midst.” He referred to the “renowned” preacher and “my friend, Thomas Starr King” in interviews as late as 1895.52
The next few months were among the busiest of Sam’s life. On July 8, a week after his return, he was a featured orator at the grand opening of the Collins House, the newest hotel in town. As the Virginia Evening Bulletin reported, his address was perhaps “the speech of the evening. . . . Those not familiar with this young man do not know the depths of grave tenderness in his nature. He almost brought the house to tears by his touching simple pathos.” On July 14 he descended into the Ophir, named for one of King Solomon’s legendary mines and one of the richest in the region, and lauded it in his column the next day:
We entered the “north mine” through a tunnel in the vicinity of the Ophir office, and traversed it through endless drifts and shafts, and climbing down from level to level, on dizzy and uncertain ladders, which seemed to rest on solid darkness. . . . We went down to the fifth level, and passed under the Spanish mine, reached the main Ophir south of it. Here, vast quantities of first, second and third class rock are being excavated, day and night. . . . A weary descent of an apparently bottomless staircase, brought us to the lowest gallery . . . 313 feet below the surface. . . . The Ophir mine is in superb condition, and under the watchful care of its officers, all its concerns proceed with the smoothness and regularity of a faultless machine.
Ironically, he narrowly escaped a cave-in during his tour. The following day, the same day this column appeared in the Enterprise, some planking in the mine failed and two hundred feet of rock crashed into the underground tunnels, collapsing an acre of ground on the surface. Sam not only averted disaster by just a few hours but was rewarded for his plug in the paper with three shares in the Ophir—though he was assessed nine dollars on the stock at the close of the fiscal quarter. His financial interest in the Ophir was minuscule, however, compared with the ownership interest of his friend George Hearst, father of the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst and a future U.S. senator from California, who was, Sam remembered, “a long, lean, practical, common-sense, uneducated man of fifty.”53
The same week Sam toured the Ophir he debuted as a theatrical critic in both the Morning Call and the Enterprise. While Sam had been away in San Francisco, the impresario Tom Maguire, a former cab driver and gambler, had built a sixteen-hundred-seat theater on D Street near Union in Virginia City patterned after his opulent opera house in San Francisco, and it was routinely crowded with folks eager to see such popular local favorites as Lotta Crabtree, Julia Dean Hayne, and Frank Mayo. Maguire reserved the front row, the “printers’ pew,” for reporters, and Mayo was so friendly with the staff of the Enterprise that he later claimed he based “all that is quaint and humorous” in his leading role in Frank H. Murdoch’s frontier melodrama Davy Crockett (1873) on Sam and “all that is sweet, wholesome, and lovable” in the role on Joe Goodman. Sam wielded such clout even as a novice critic that the outraged manager of Maguire’s Opera House postponed the opening of Clifton F. Tayleur’s maudlin melodrama East Lynne after Sam warned theatergoers about what to expect from this “sickest of all sentimental” plays. He had seen it staged in San Francisco and he joked how the audiences there would “whine and snuffle and slobber all over themselves.” He expected “to enjoy a season of happiness again” because if “the tears flow as freely here . . . water privileges will be cheap in Virginia next week.” Two weeks later, Sam committed another faux pas when he revealed in one of his columns that some citizens were planning to
surprise Hayne with a silver brick at her next benefit performance. As the Virginia Evening Bulletin complained, “‘Mark Twain,’ the incorrigible newsmonger, spoiled the affair by ‘blowing’ about it.” Ironically, the editors of the Virginia City Daily Union protested their unwillingness at about this time to be drawn into the smoldering feud between the Enterprise and the Bulletin by slandering Sam: “At the solicitation of about fifteen hundred of our subscribers [double the number of their actual subscribers], we will refrain from again entering into a controversy with that beef-eating, blear-eyed, hollow-headed, slab-sided ignoramus, that pilfering reporter, Mark Twain.”54
In early July Sam attended an organizational meeting of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Society in Carson City. The board of directors had appointed him recording secretary at an “exorbitant” annual salary of three hundred dollars—“payable quarterly in Territorial scrip, subject to the mild discount of seventy-five percent”—and he soon proved that he was as adept as George F. Babbitt at writing chamber of commerce promotional prose. The first order of business was to appoint “committees to solicit memberships to the Society,” he announced. Nevadans “are liberal, and thousands should and will” join it, he predicted, and pay their dues of a mere five dollars a year. The society planned to host its first annual fair in October:
Our Territory may not be able to give an Agricultural Exhibition this fall that will be a curiosity, though in agriculture great progress has been made within the past two years. But the mineral department of our exhibition will be a feature, as it is our great resource. And we must make a beginning. If we commence small, our future progress can be the better marked. Fairs and exhibitions stimulate emulation. We shall soon become a State, and all our valleys will blossom with all the beauty of our modern civilization. Let us by all means, then, inaugurate and place upon a firm foundation our Society. “Despise not the day of small things.” Our first annual exhibition, though small, will be a landmark for us in the future. Rapid as has been the growth of our cities, so will our agricultural and mechanical growth be rapid hereafter. By law the first Exhibition and Fair of the Society must be held at Carson City, and two thousand dollars a year for five years has been appropriated. . . . Our people have the means and the liberality to make success perfect.
In Roughing It, Sam wrote more characteristically that “one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars’ worth” of pumpkins. Located on the plaza in Carson, the exhibition was a modest success. Sam was struck by the topographical potential it revealed: “If the Plaza was turned into a park as pleasant and beautiful as it might be made, it would soon become a general place of resort on Saturdays and Sundays for all the young people, and pleasure seekers in general, of all the neighboring towns and cities.” The fair concluded with a ball, and Clement Rice returned the type of compliment Sam often paid the Unreliable in the pages of the Enterprise by describing his costume in the Union: it “consisted of an exquisitely tinted vest of the age of Louis XIV. His hair was entirely without ornament, and his fingernails were clean and well-trimmed.”55
The same day Sam attended the organizational meeting of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Society, a crazed killer named William Cornell or Cornwell, a recent immigrant from Illinois, went on a rampage in the mining town of Austin, Nevada, about 180 miles east of Virginia City. At about 10:00 p.m. on the night of Saturday, July 18, Cornell ran amuck with an ax through the streets of Austin and nearby Clifton. He killed at least four people and injured nearly a dozen. The local newspaper, the Reese River Reveille, issued an extra edition the next day detailing the events. But there was no telegraph there at the time, so the news traveled only by stagecoach. A witness to the massacre arrived in Virginia City early in the morning of Tuesday, July 21, and related the events to Sam, who had returned from Carson City just in time “to get the story and write it up in all its naked horror” for that day’s issue of the Enterprise. As Goodman recalled, “No other paper in Virginia City or any of the towns in the western part of the State got it” because the Reveille extra with the news only arrived several hours later. Sam’s account of the massacre also reached the Pacific coast before the report in the Reveille, so it was the source of the grisly report that appeared on July 24 in the Alta California and the Sacramento Union. Cornell had first assaulted his tentmate, Sam reported, before chasing him into “a crowded saloon” and “bestowing his blows upon any that came in the way. The first cut a man’s arm badly; the second severed another’s hand from the wrist; the third inflicted a wound upon a bystander’s head.” Cornell escaped the melee and ran in the direction of Clifton, where he assaulted at least five others, three of them fatally: “One named Anderson, was reported dead on Sunday morning. . . . Another, called Frenchy, had his head gashed in such a manner that the brain protruded.” He died ten days later. “The third, a German baker—name unknown—it is thought cannot possibly get well.” The next morning Cornell’s body
was found about a half mile beyond the village, with his throat cut from ear to ear—in fact, the head was half severed from the body: the windpipe was cut in two; the back of the head was crushed in, and about the heart were five stabs, either one of which was perhaps sufficient to cause death. The people were undecided as to whether he killed himself or whether someone else killed him; however, that could hardly be, because no man could inflict the stabs or either of the other wounds upon himself.
That is, Sam concluded “that some benefactor of mankind disposed of the desperate lunatic.”
His account of the mayhem in the Enterprise was not exactly a scoop; it did not reach print before the account in the Reveille. But it was based on original reporting and it enjoyed a brief afterlife when it was reprinted in a few provincial newspapers in the East.56
In late July 1863 the offices of the Enterprise moved into a new three-story brick building on South C Street, the main business thoroughfare. In the basement was a saloon and the production room, equipped with the new steam presses, where the paper “employed twenty-five of the best printers on the Coast,” Goodman bragged. The Enterprise compositors spent much of their free time in the saloon, where they enjoyed a ten-gallon keg of beer every night after the paper was put to bed at 2:00 a.m. Sam often joined them and, according to his coworkers, “consumed his portion of the daily allowance with the most astonishing regularity.” He bragged years later that he was “a person of low-down tastes from the start, notwithstanding my high birth, and ever ready to forsake the communion of high souls if I could strike anything nearer my grade.”57 The first and second floors of the new building were occupied by the offices of mining brokers, the telegraph company, lawyers, and a brandy store; and on the third floor were the editorial offices of the newspaper. Hoping to expand his business, Goodman advertised for printing jobs in the pages of his competitors, including the Virginia Evening Bulletin.
Within days of its completion, the brick structure survived a fire that destroyed much of the western part of the town, including the White House, the elegant boardinghouse on B Street where Sam lived with William Gillespie and Clement Rice. At 11:00 a.m. on July 26, as he reported in his next letter to the Morning Call,
I discovered that the room under mine was on fire, gave the alarm, and went down to see how extensive it was likely to be. I thought I had plenty of time, then, and went back and changed my boots. The correctness of my judgment is apparent in this instance; for, so far from having a week to fool around in, I came near not escaping from the house at all. I started to the door with my trunk, but I couldn’t stand the smoke, wherefore I abandoned that valuable piece of furniture in the hall, and returned and jumped out at the window. But I gathered up my San Francisco letter and shoved it into my pocket. Now do you know that trunk was utterly consumed, together with its contents, consisting of a pair of socks, a package of love-letters, and $300,000 worth of “wildcat” stocks? Yes, sir, it was;
and I am a bankrupt community. Plug hat, numerous sets of complete harness—all broadcloth—lost—eternally lost. However, the articles were borrowed, as a general thing. I don’t mind losing them.58
Sam was soon dressing in motley and moved alone to a room in a mansion on A Street. He re-created the fire in chapter 7 of The American Claimant thirty years later.
Sam apparently fell ill after he was dispossessed. “On the day of the fire, my constitution succumbed to a severe cold caused by undue exertion in getting ready to do something,” he reported, and he left Virginia City on August 11 with Adair Wilson of the Union (aka the Unimportant) to recuperate for two weeks in Steamboat Springs, named for the vapor that wafted above the resort near Lake Tahoe. “Those two pilfering reporters,” carped the Virginia Evening Bulletin, “will no doubt bore the sojourners at that retreat with some of their infernally disgusting ‘platitudes.’” Owned and operated by a physician, the “neat, roomy, and well-ventilated” hotel there served fresh vegetables and meat from local farms and ranches and was located a stone’s throw from a hospital.59 Samuel Bowles visited the Springs in 1865 and reported that its medicinal waters “seethe with threatening roar just beneath the surface, and find vent through little cracks in the earth, pouring forth huge volumes of steam and rivulets of boiling water.” In a letter to the Morning Call dated August 20, Sam explained how he “carried over to the lake a heavy cold, and acted so imprudently during a week, that it constantly grew heavier and heavier—until at last it came near outweighing me.” Still suffering from his cold, he returned to Virginia City on August 23. When Dan De Quille returned from the East on September 5 to resume his duties at the Enterprise, Sam was free to return to Steamboat Springs. In his essay “How to Cure a Cold” (1863) he described traveling by stage from Virginia City to recuperate. At the Lake House, an “excellent hotel” at a “beautiful and picturesque point” on the east shore of Tahoe, according to J. Ross Browne, Sam experimented with an allopathic remedy, a homemade tonic called Wake-Up Jake, like those his mother sometimes administered, which consisted of “warm salt-water, solution of molasses, aquafortis, and turpentine, and various other drugs.” The repulsive concoction tasted as “if I had swallowed a slaughter-house” and robbed him “of all moral principle.” He also tried a concoction of gin and onions, which gave him “breath like a buzzard’s.” He finally traveled to San Francisco and registered at the Lick House, where “a lady . . . told me to drink a quart of whisky every twenty-four hours, and a friend at the Occidental recommended precisely the same course. Each advised me to take a quart—that makes half a gallon.”60 “How to Cure a Cold” became one of Sam’s most successful apprenticeship pieces. It was the earliest of his writings to be reprinted in his first collection of humorous articles in 1867, and it was the earliest of his articles to appear in his collection Sketches New and Old (1875).
The Life of Mark Twain Page 31