Sam soon made amends with Pete Hopkins and Abe Curry or, as he put it, “[they] compromised with me, and there is no longer any animosity existing on either side. They were a little worried at first, you recollect, about that thing which appeared recently (I think it was in the Gold Hill News), concerning an occurrence which has happened in the great pine forest down there at Empire.” A few days later, he joked about the episode by publishing a piece in the Enterprise titled “Another Bloody Massacre!” in which he paraphrased the biblical account of Samson’s slaughter of a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass. He beseeched his readers to “keep dark” about the murders, however, because he was “laying” for “the editor of that San Francisco Evening Journal. . . . I expect it will worry him some” to discover that Samson “actually did kill a thousand men with the jaw-bone of one of his ancestors.” The Gold Hill News soon reported that Sam was writing “a bloody tragedy” for Adah Menken that would excel Mazeppa: “It is to be called ‘Pete Hopkins; or, the Gory Scalp.’” The controversy over Sam’s scalp story crested while the bohemian travel writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, the former associate editor of Vanity Fair in New York and another fixture at Pfaff’s saloon, was visiting the West. Ludlow was amused mightily by “that Irresistible Washoe Giant, Mark Twain,” though he seems to have known Sam mainly if not exclusively through his writings. “He makes me laugh more” than any westerner “since poor [George Horatio] Derby died,” he added. “He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself.”15 It was not the last time Sam would be considered sui generis.
Sam was soon charged with a new assignment: to cover with Andrew J. Marsh, Nevada correspondent of the Sacramento Union, the Nevada Constitutional Convention that opened in Carson City on November 2. The Carson government paid the rent so that Territorial Secretary Clemens could install furniture for the delegates. During the thirty-two working days of the convention, Sam and Marsh together cranked out a daily average of over four thousand words. Every weekend he composed a letter for publication in the following Tuesday edition of the Enterprise “in which I made a resumé of the week’s legislative work” and “in order that it might be readable I put no end of seasoning into it.”16 The weekday news reports appeared without signature, and the weekly comic editorials were signed “Mark Twain.”
The proposed state constitution approved by the assembly was fraught with controversy. It included a clause that effectively disenfranchised men who fought duels or were complicit in arranging them. The clause required “everyone on being inducted into office to swear that he had not fought a duel, acted as a second in one, carried or accepted a challenge since the adoption of the Constitution” or “during his term in office.” But the major political flap of the convention again centered on a provision to tax mining interests. Like the incorporation law that had been nullified by Congress, the constitution would have permitted the government of Nevada to regulate mining, in this case by taxing properties whether or not they were developed and producing ore. The opponents of this provision alleged that such taxation would discourage new mineral exploration and depress land values in general. They feared it would choke the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg. But as Orion remarked, it was the only option to finance a government in a state that contained almost no commerce except mining. William Stewart, a delegate to the convention and the mouthpiece of the mining companies, cloaked his opposition to this provision in populist rhetoric; as Sam quoted him in the Enterprise, “when you tax the poor miner’s shafts, and drifts, and bed-rock tunnels, you are not taxing his wealth—no, but you are taxing what may become property someday, or may not.” But the constitution that was offered to voters for ratification the following January included this provision. Orion was subsequently nominated by acclamation at the Union Party convention for election under the new constitution as the first Nevada secretary of state, and the Enterprise endorsed his candidacy: “In addition to all his positive recommendations, he is brother of that ‘moral phenomenon,’ Mark Twain.” Orion was confident the constitution would pass muster. As he wrote Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the Treasury, he expected it to “be approved by the people” despite “vigorous opposition,” and “I suppose Congress will admit us as a State” before the next national election.17
The Constitutional Convention adjourned just before midnight on December 11 and then the so-called Third House, a mock legislature, assembled and unanimously elected Sam its president. As Marsh explained, “this strange institution” was “designed as a burlesque upon the legitimate Legislature.” It met informally in schools, churches, back rooms, even in the formal legislative halls—anywhere, “as Mrs. Malaprop would say, ‘contagious to’ a drinking saloon.” Its members were actual legislators, lobbyists, lawyers, staffers, and brash reporters who “made fun of the governor’s messages, proposed absurd bills, told lies,” and so forth. Sam opened his inaugural address the evening of December 13, his first public appearance in Nevada—this according to his own purported transcription of it—by declaring that the occasion was “the proudest moment of my life. I shall always think so. I think so still. I shall ponder over it with unspeakable emotion down to the latest syllable of recorded time.” He added that the Third House proceedings were “exactly similar to those of the Convention which preceded you. You have considered a subject which you knew nothing about; spoken on every subject but the one before the House, and voted, without knowing what you were voting for, or having any idea what would be the general result of your action.” He later joked that as governor of the Third House “I had a salary of $60,000 a year when I could collect it.” He burlesqued the antidueling clause of the proposed state constitution. In his government, he announced, officers would take an oath “that we have never seen a duel, never been connected with a duel, never heard of a duel, never sent or received a challenge, never fought a duel, and don’t want to.”18
He also lampooned Stewart’s single-minded opposition to the mine taxation clause of the proposed constitution. As chief counsel for the Ophir Company, Stewart had successfully argued in a landmark court case the previous year that all the veins of silver on the Comstock Lode were connected. This “single-ledge” theory, as Sam recognized, was bad geology and worse law. The ruling meant that there were by law no “blind leads” on the Comstock. It allowed any of the giant mining companies to follow leads and extend their claims literally to the ends of the earth. Companies with the cleverest lawyers or the deepest pockets would be able to deflect legal challenges to their rule. In effect, the independent prospector was stripped of all rights to his discoveries unless he had the resources to litigate and still risk losing. “If that decision stands,” Sam wrote Orion, “the Ophir will open its mighty jaws and swallow Mount Davidson.” In Roughing It (1872), Stewart is pictured as a pirate with an eye-patch; and in his Reminiscences, Stewart referred to Sam as “the most lovable scamp and nuisance who ever blighted Nevada.” But Stewart was well rewarded for his legal services: he lived in one of the most opulent mansions in Virginia City. Married to the daughter of his former law partner, ex-governor Henry Foote of Mississippi, Stewart was less principled as a politician than he was ambitious and expedient, shifting his allegiances over the years from the proslavery wing of the Democratic Party while he lived in California to the antislavery Republicans after he moved to Washoe in 1860. He had been one of the original sponsors of the proposed Nevada Constitution because he hoped its passage would remove some of his political rivals from office, including John W. North, president of the Constitutional Convention and justice of the territorial Supreme Court, who repeatedly ruled that silver veins existed in “separate ledges,” a legal opinion that undermined Stewart’s work on behalf of his powerful clients. Because he was not nominated under its provisions to become one of the original U.S. senators from the state, however, Stewart eventually campaigned against ratification of the proposed state constitution.19
He was, in short, an attractive target for Sam’s brand of personal invective�
��all in good fun, of course. The “disreputable old cottonhead, Bill Stewart,” Sam wrote the day after he was elected president of the Third House, would soon prove that no mines existed in Nevada for purposes of taxation because he would (mis)construe the word mine until it had no meaning. “Bill Stewart is always construing something,” according to Sam, and “eternally distorting facts and principles. He would climb out of his coffin and construe the burial service. He is a long-legged, bull-headed, whopper-jawed, constructionary monomaniac. Give him a chance to construe the sacred law, and there wouldn’t be a damned soul in perdition in a month.” Stewart had already tried to convince the public “that the clause providing for the taxation of the mines meant nothing in particular” because “a mere hole in the ground is not a mine” and so “is not liable to taxation.” On his part, Stewart publicly scolded Sam. Ironically, Sam’s enthusiasm for the proposed constitution dwindled as well. He allowed in early January 1864, two weeks before the ratification vote, that it exhibited “one or two unfortunate defects” that disqualified it from being “an immaculate conception.” On January 19 the constitution was resoundingly rejected at the polls by a margin of over five to one (4,609–907). In Storey County, the locus of the Comstock, it was defeated by an even bigger margin, over six to one (3,745–603).20 As result, Orion’s election as secretary of state under the constitution was also voided, though he continued to hold his appointed office.
The popular repudiation of the first Nevada state constitution exposed fault lines and alliances across the political spectrum. Much as Stewart was a mouthpiece of the mining interests, James W. Nye became a tool for the railroads, and their rivalry eventually ripened into animosity. As early as March 1863 the Territorial Enterprise, aligned with Stewart, intimated that Nye was to be removed from office, appointed superintendent of the proposed Carson City mint, and succeeded as governor by state treasurer J. H. Kinkead. Nye and Stewart publicly settled their differences in December 1863, shortly before the vote on the proposed state constitution, lest either of them jeopardize his political future. Stewart and Billy Clagett, Sam’s former mining partner in Humboldt, were also longtime political allies. Fitch’s old adversary Joe Goodman of the Enterprise and John Church of the Union had been candidates for the office of state printer in the election that was voided. Stewart was opposed politically by a cabal that included Fitch, Rollin Daggett, and John W. North. Fitch resigned from the staff of the Virginia City Daily Union on January 11, barely a week before the vote on the constitution, to run for state attorney general.21 These byzantine allegiances were mirrored, of course, by the political affiliations of the territorial newspapers, though Philip Lynch of the Gold Hill News attempted to bridge the divide by endorsing both Stewart and Nye for the U.S. Senate. When both were elected under the terms of the state constitution that was ratified in September 1864, Stewart to a four-year term and Nye to a two-year term, Orion and John North became casualties of political infighting. Orion failed to be nominated by his party for election as secretary of state under the new constitution, and Stewart publicly accused North of corruption. The judge was exonerated but, pleading ill health, resigned his commission and fled Nevada. Despite his reputation as a tool of special interests, Stewart became a distinguished U.S. senator during Reconstruction. He caucused with the Radical Republicans, voted to impeach President Andrew Johnson, advocated free silver, and authored the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed voting rights to all men regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Soon after Sam joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in the fall of 1862, and even before he adopted his nom de guerre in early 1863, his unsigned contributions to the paper began to attract attention east of the Mississippi. To be sure, these items earned “Mark Twain” no fame—after all, “Mark Twain” did not yet exist—but they did not pass without notice. In addition to his “massacre” reports in July and October 1863, “The Pah-Utes,” first printed in the Nevada paper on December 16, 1862, was excerpted in the Cleveland Leader on February 3, 1863. Certainly in late 1864, when Sam began to write for the upscale Californian—and exchanges began to copy his material from it—his reputation steadily grew in the East. All of which is to say that Mark Twain was not nearly as unknown in the East as conventional wisdom has it when “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was printed in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865. The sketch augmented his national reputation; it did not create it.
The first piece Sam signed with the byline Mark Twain to be reprinted in the East, a “condensed melodrama” of Ingomar the Barbarian, was written in Carson City during the Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1863. He had seen a performance of Friedrich Halm’s play about love triumphant, a standard piece on the American stage in the late nineteenth century, in St. Louis in March 1855. It featured a line soon to become a cliché—“Two souls, with but a single thought / Two hearts, that beat as one”—and became the basis for a short film adaptation by D. W. Griffith in 1908. When the blank-verse piece was performed at Maguire’s Opera House in Virginia City in November 1863, Sam lampooned it in a minimalist style originated by William Makepeace Thackeray in his Mr. Punch’s Prize Novelists series and popularized by Bret Harte in his Condensed Novels. Harte defined the technique as “a humorous condensation of the salient characteristics of certain writers,” and Sam deployed it occasionally in the mid-1860s, as in “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier” (1864) and “Who Was He?” (1867). His parodic précis of Ingomar the Barbarian closes with a “grand tableau” of “Comanches, police, Pi-Utes, and citizens generally” as the Greek ingénue Parthenia and the Comanche chief Ingomar sing about two souls and two hearts that beat as one. Finally united “in a fond embrace, they sweetly smile upon the orchestra” as the curtain falls. The burlesque appeared originally in the Territorial Enterprise on November 17, 1863, and was reprinted in the San Francisco Golden Era on November 29 and the Boston Herald for January 19, 1864. Under the title “Play Acting Over the Mountains: A Wild Criticism,” it appeared in the New York Clipper, a sporting and theatrical paper, on January 30 prior to its republication in the New York magazine Yankee Notions the following April. It antedated the publication of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—long regarded as Sam’s “first appearance before a nationwide audience” or his “first taste of national fame”—by nearly two years.22
After the Constitutional Convention adjourned, Sam lingered in Carson City a day or two, perhaps to spend time with his sweetheart Carrie Pixley. As early as September 5, the Virginia Evening Bulletin had reported that he contemplated “making the fearful leap from bachelorhood to matrimony,” and the Gold Hill News even announced in October that he had proposed marriage but the object of his affection “couldn’t see it”—Ingomar’s initial response to Parthenia’s profession of love in Sam’s parody. Pixley apparently ended their relationship because he had failed to escort her personally to his Third House speech, a recapitulation of the faux pas committed by his mother’s beau Richard Barrett forty years earlier. She “pretended to accept” his apologies, “but from that day nothing could induce her to go out with him” again. He had not been “a Chesterfield in deportment,” Pixley remembered later. Sam complained to Will Bowen in August 1866 that women “appear to like me, but d——n them, they don’t love me.” He scurried from Carson to Lake Tahoe to lick his wounds before returning to Virginia City. Dan De Quille facetiously referred later to “his many narrow escapes [from marriage] in this land of sage,” where “some of the tar-head belles used to cast soft glances upon his manly form as he strode forth, note-book in hand.” He seems to have averted nearly as many marriages in Nevada as drownings as a child in Missouri. Sam finally returned to Virginia City on December 17 and the Bulletin reported tongue in cheek that he “gives a very glowing account of the country through which he passed, and we understand will publish an account of it in the Atlantic Monthly.” He was still suffering from his “cold,” however, an
d planned to spend Christmas at “the celebrated Soda Springs of Napa to recruit his prostrated energies.”23
Sam changed his plans when Artemus Ward, the most famous humorist in America, arrived in Virginia City the next day. A native New Englander only eighteen months older than Sam, Ward had published his first book the year before and was President Lincoln’s favorite comic writer. “He brought letters of introduction from mutual friends in San Francisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with him” and his manager, Edward P. Hingston, Sam remembered. The two writers became fast companions of the jug during the meal when Artemus ordered a round of whiskey cocktails. “I am a match for nearly any beverage you can mention except a whisky-cocktail,” Sam added, “and therefore I said I would rather not drink one. I said it would go right to my head and confuse me so I would be in a hopeless tangle in ten minutes. I did not want to act like a lunatic before strangers.” But Ward “gently insisted” that Sam join him so “I drank the treasonable mixture under protest, and felt all the time that I was doing a thing I might be sorry for.” Ward was the first national celebrity and the first prominent man of letters whom Sam had ever met and he was distinctly impressed. Ward’s “personal appearance was not like that of most Maine men,” Sam recalled. “He looked like a glove-stretcher; his hair, red, and brushed well forward at the sides, reminded one of a divided flame. His nose rambled on aggressively before him with all the strength and determination of a cow-catcher, while his red mustache, to follow out the simile, seemed not unlike the unfortunate cow.” On his part, Hingston found in Sam “the very man I had expected to see—a flower of the wilderness, tinged with the color of the soil, the man of thought and the man of action rolled into one, humorist and hard-worker, Momus in a felt hat and jack-boots. In the reporter of the Territorial Enterprise I became introduced to a Californian celebrity, rich in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy, quaint in remark, whose residence upon the fringe of civilization had allowed his humor to develop without restraint, and his speech to be racily idiomatic.”24
The Life of Mark Twain Page 34