Then every sufferer stood amazed
That pilot man before;
A moment stood. Then wondering turned,
And speechless walked ashore.
The poem obviously mocks the tradition of the brave sailor who sacrifices life and limb to save others. In chapter 49 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), Sam mentions two examples of pilots he had known on the river who “perished at the wheel” or “died a very honorable death” when fires consume their boats. In addition, his friend Bart Bowen, while piloting the Garden City in 1855, had famously run the burning steamboat aground so that his passengers could escape the flames.51 Both the German poet Theodor Fontane and the American temperance lecturer John Gough recounted in their writings the legend of John Maynard, who allegedly dies from burns after piloting his Lake Erie boat to safety. Later, both John Hay in his ballad of Jim Bludso and Horatio Alger in another John Maynard poem tapped into this tradition. But Sam’s satirical target seems more pointed than this literary convention writ large. He specifically parodied Felicia Hemans’s chestnut “Casabianca” (aka “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck”), the declamation piece he had despised since he was a student at Samuel Cross’s school in Hannibal.
The competition among Nevada newspapers for territorial printing contracts became increasingly more intense if not cutthroat. While Orion awarded most of the jobs to the Territorial Enterprise, he occasionally tossed a bone to some other shops. In the winter of 1863–64 he offered Lynch of the Gold Hill News “the privilege of doing certain kinds of printing at certain prices,” though Lynch declined because “the prices did not suit us” and “our bills would be compelled to take a voyage of circumnavigation of the globe” before they were paid by the Treasury Department in Washington. Still, the News received some patronage—specifically, a contract to print sundry proclamations featuring the signatures of Governor Nye, Orion, and other dignitaries. Unfortunately, when Lynch submitted an invoice for this printing to Acting Governor Clemens or, as he put it, “the circumlocution office at Carson,” he was frustrated by the runaround he received. As Lynch later griped, “We made out in due time our bill and sent it to the Secretary of State,” who “occupied several months in finding out that we ought to have sent it to the Executive Department”—that is, directly to the governor. It apparently “would have been contrary to the forms of high official etiquette and against the peace and dignity of the Territorial Government for Clemens to have handed it across the table to Nye.” Lynch then forwarded a power of attorney, hoping it would expedite the receipt of “our money, warrants, script, or whatever was coming to us,” only for it to be returned to him by Orion by the next mail with a letter specifying “divers objections.” The form had not been notarized, the territorial auditor would not pay for printing “the military proclamation at all,” he would “not pay for the others till you make out a bill, certified by Governor Nye to be correct,” and so “you will have to wait till Governor Nye returns” from a political trip to the States to reapply for payment. Orion and the other petty functionaries in the state government could “go to the devil,” Lynch fumed, “and as for our little bill they can shove it—into the fire.”52
In his autobiographical dictation forty-two years later, Sam reminisced about another editorial that he wrote for the Enterprise during Goodman’s absence. In his telling, Goodman “went off to San Francisco for a week’s holiday” and left Sam in charge. “I had supposed that that was an easy berth, there being nothing to do but write one editorial per day,” but “I couldn’t find anything to write an article about, the first day.” In fact, Goodman had already been gone about a month. But in Sam’s fanciful version of events, the pressure to produce an editorial “weighed with more and more solidity.”
Then it occurred to me that inasmuch as it was the 22d of April, 1864, the next morning would be the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakspeare’s birthday—and what better theme could I want than that? I got the [New American] Cyclopedia and examined it, and found out who Shakspeare was and what he had done, and I borrowed all that and laid it before a community that couldn’t have been better prepared for instruction about Shakspeare than if they had been prepared by art. There wasn’t enough of what Shakspeare had done to make an editorial of the necessary length, but I filled it out with what he hadn’t done—which in many respects was more important and striking and readable than the handsomest things he had really accomplished.
In fact, April 23, 1864, was not only the 300th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth but the 248th anniversary of his death, a detail Sam incorporated into the prosaic piece he actually wrote, which in no sense relies upon the ten-thousand-word entry about the bard in the Cyclopedia:
This day, three hundred years ago, the greatest of modern poets, William Sha[k]speare, commenced; this day, two hundred and forty-eight years ago, the same quit again. But while we mourn his untimely end, it is satisfaction and consolation to us to know that he is not forgotten, and that the homage due to his genius will be offered at Maguire’s Opera House, this evening, when his disembodied spirit will have an opportunity of seeing one of his tragedies which he went most on, performed in a manner calculated to exceed the most extravagant expectations of the deceased. The tragedy is “Othello,” and it will be powerfully cast and well played. The whole strength of the Opera House company will be brought to bear upon it. The management, in thus doing honor to the memory of a man so well and favorably known as Shakespeare, are doing themselves and the community honor, and we hope these facts will be duly recognized by a large and appreciate audience to-night.53
But this much Sam got right: Othello was performed that evening at Maguire’s Opera House.
“An institution that was very popular for a time in 1863–64 among Comstock young men of leisure,” Dan De Quille recalled in 1893, was the gymnasium opened by O. V. Chauvel, the French restaurateur, on North C Street near the Enterprise building. An accomplished fencer, Chauvel offered lessons in the foil and broadsword and kept a few pairs of boxing gloves handy for men who wanted to spar. Sam’s interest in the manly arts was no doubt whetted during these months and anticipate his disquisition on the code duello in the fencing chapters set in Heidelberg in A Tramp Abroad (1880), his treatment of the jousting scene in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and the sword fighting in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896). Sam, Dan De Quille, and Joe Goodman “cared little for anything but fencing,” De Quille remembered, “and upon entering the gymnasium went at once for the foils.” Sam “became quite an expert” and in attack “he was fiery and particularly dangerous for the reason that one could not watch his eyes, which he habitually wears about half closed. In defense he was not so good and would nearly always give ground when hotly pressed.” In the summer of 1863 Sam was so enthusiastic about sparring that he proposed in his Enterprise column the establishment of a city gymnasium, though predictably some rival reporters scorned the idea. Before a gym “is completed,” the Bulletin warned Sam, “we will put you through some evolutions that will make you think a bath house is a very healthy institution.” Philip Lynch of the Gold Hill News reported in mid-April 1864 that Sam and Dan apparently had “little faith in the old saying that the pen is mightier than the sword, as they are taking lessons daily in the latter weapon. It is said to be highly amusing to witness these two ‘roosters,’ they sometimes get so terribly in earnest. Then do their blades describe wicked circles, and their nostrils breathe forth wrath. We understand that Dan came out of one of these conflicts minus several buttons and one shirtsleeve” and Sam “was in an almost equally dilapidated state.”54
However proficient he became with a foil, Sam was inept and inexperienced in the sweet science. One day in late April 1864, as Dan recalled, “some imp” persuaded his roommate to don “a pair of boxing gloves, and with them all the airs of a knight of the prize ring. . . . No sooner had he the gloves on than he began capering about the hall.” George Dawson, a young Englishman on th
e editorial staff of the Enterprise whose hobby was boxing, was at the gym, challenged him to a game of fisticuffs, and promptly popped him on the snout. “The force of the blow fairly lifted” Sam from his feet, according to Dan, and “with two bountiful streams of ‘claret’ spouting from his nostrils” his nose “was smashed out till it covered nearly the whole of his face.” It resembled “a large piece of tripe,” “swollen to the size of several junk bottles,” so bulbous “that to fall on his breast” would have been “an utter impossibility.” It “was finally scraped into some resemblance of a nose” and Sam trailed blood back to the apartment he shared with Dan, where he “procured a lot of sugar of lead and other cooling lotions and spent the balance of the day in applying them with towels and sponges.” After dark “he ventured forth” with his “vast, inflamed and pulpy old snoot” to “get advice about having it amputated.” He spent the next several days closeted in his room, “contemplating his ponderous vermillion smeller in a two-bit mirror, which he bought for that purpose. We cannot comfort him, for we know his nose will never be a nose again. It always was somewhat lopsided; now it is a perfect lump of blubber. Since the above was in type, the doctors have decided to amputate poor Mark Twain’s smeller. A new one is to be made for him of a quarter of veal.”55
To “get his nose out of town” Sam accepted an assignment to write up the mines in Alpine County, California, like the one that had taken him to Como, Nevada, several weeks earlier. No sooner had he left than Dan wrote a piece for the Enterprise about Sam’s arrival in which he imagined Californians’ horror at the sight of his freakish proboscis. “This was a mild and innocent squib for a Comstock newspaper in those days,” Dan added, but a few days after his return Sam “got even with me.” Dan fell from his horse and sprained a knee, and in revenge Sam “got up a terrific story about my accident.” In Sam’s account of the minor mishap, entitled “Frightful Accident to Dan de Quille,” Dan was split open
from the chin to the pit of the stomach. His head was also caved in out of sight, and his hat was afterwards extracted in a bloody and damaged condition from between his lungs; he must have bounced end-for-end after he struck first, because it is evident he received a concussion from the rear that broke his heart; one of his legs was jammed up in his body nearly to his throat, and the other so torn and mutilated that it pulled out when they attempted to lift him into the hearse which we had sent to the scene of the disaster, under the general impression that he might need it; both arms were indiscriminately broken up until they were jointed like a bamboo; the back was considerably fractured and bent into the shape of a rail fence. Aside from these injuries, however, he sustained no other damage.
“When they gathered him up he was just a bag of scraps,” Sam remembered writing, “but they put him together.” In Dan’s retelling of events, Sam visited the probate court the next day “and getting down on his knees commenced praying . . . for letters of administration” on his estate. Unfortunately, the Territorial Enterprise was routinely sent to the De Quille family in Iowa and, as Dan remembered, the “moment that my wife saw” Sam’s headline about the “frightful accident” she “dropped the paper and raised the death-howl. Some others of the womenfolk began to read the terrible story, but sickened and threw the paper aside when they came to where my hat was pulled out of the wreck of my liver. Not until the last line of the item was it shown that the story of the accident was a fake.”56
During Goodman’s holiday from the paper in the spring of 1864, Sam’s sister Pamela persuaded him to publicize the campaign for the St. Louis Sanitary Fund in the Territorial Enterprise. Technically, the fund only raised money to assist Union soldiers and their families, so it was a partisan cause, but even some copperheads were enthusiastic in its support. The loyalties of Pamela and her husband Will were highly suspect in the family early in the Civil War. Mollie Clemens wrote Orion in November 1861 that she “would be glad indeed to think” her in-laws “were Unionist—but if W[ill] is, it is because he thinks it will be the strongest party—one thing alone I judge from is this, they both appear to be gratified at any defeat we have, and do not at all appear gratified at any or very few federal movements or victories.” In fact, Will Moffett’s commission business was ruined by the war and he died three months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox; and in early 1864 Pamela served on a committee that planned to raise a half million dollars for the fund. She sent Sam a circular about the upcoming Western Sanitary Commission Fair in St. Louis in mid-May. When he received it he contacted Almarin B. Paul, the president of the Storey County Sanitary Commission and a former St. Louisan. Paul “went to work sending calls to the several counties to contribute”; and Sam, though he “had never taken much interest in sanitary matters before,” as he said, went “to scribbling editorials” on behalf of the charity, which he described as the “Army of the Lord,” including one in the Enterprise for March 14:
There are two classes in Nevada who should come forward—who will come forward. . . . We refer, first, to those to whom “home” and “St. Louis” are synonymous terms, and who feels a pride in the success of anything the old city may make up her mind to do; and, secondly, to all who have an interest in drawing capital and immigration hither from the Western States, by exhibiting in a clear and practical light the resources of the Territory, and the inducements she has to offer in the matter of profitable investments of labor and capital.
Let our citizens consider if it would not be well to aid St. Louis, the sick and wounded soldiers, and the Territory by gathering together a few cases of rich silver ode, and adding thereto a corpulent silver brick, which shall concentrate the attention of the thousands who will visit that Fair by its rare and curious aspect, and forward them to the officers of the great Mississippi Valley Sanitary Fair at once.
By late March, Sam reported, the citizens of Storey County had donated the equivalent of two hundred pounds of silver bullion to the St. Louis Sanitary Fund. Charity balls on behalf of the fund were hosted across the territory, including one in Gold Hill on April 20 and another in Carson City on May 5 that garnered over $1,800. After some additional fund-raising, the women of Carson City sent the Unitarian minister Henry W. Bellows, the president of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a check for an even $2,000. In the end, the residents of Nevada contributed a total of $163,581, or over $5 per capita, to the Sanitary Commission, by far the highest rate of donation in the country. In addition, Sam’s ministerial friend Franklin Rising raised thousands of dollars to support the work of the U.S. Christian Commission for sailors in the navy.57
Sam also chronicled a unique form of fund-raising on behalf of the Sanitary Fund. He had last seen his Hannibal friend and classmate Reuel Gridley, seven years his elder, in 1846 or 1847, when Gridley joined a company of soldiers to fight in Mexico. He subsequently served as the assistant sergeant-at-arms of the California Legislature, and in the spring of 1864 he ran the general store in Austin, Nevada. Gridley was, Sam wrote his family at the time, “Union to the backbone, but a Copperhead in sympathies.” He and the county assessor placed a wager on the outcome of the local mayoral election on April 19: If the Democratic candidate was elected, the assessor would carry a fifty-pound sack of flour from Gridley’s store to upper Austin, a distance of slightly more than a mile, marching to the tune of “Dixie.” If the Union candidate was elected, Gridley would carry the sack of flour from north Austin down Main Street to south Austin, about the same distance, to the tune of “Old John Brown.” Gridley lost the bet and the next day, led by the Austin Brass Band, he hauled the flour sack “trimmed with ribbons and mounted with a number of small [U.S.] flags” across town to Grimes & Gibson’s saloon. “Nothing could exceed the good feeling with which the Democratic party surrendered their emblems,” the Reese River Reveille announced. At the saloon the sack of flour was repeatedly sold at auction, the proceeds totaling over four thousand dollars to be donated to the sanitary fair in St. Louis. The news quickly spread across the region, and Gridley t
raveled to several Nevada towns to raise money for the fund by reselling the flour. As Sam wrote later, “in every town [he] was received with bands of music and by the citizens in mass.” Bellows wrote Gridley in the spring of 1864 that the “history of your Sanitary Sack of Flour is undoubtedly more interesting and peculiar than that of any sack recorded, short of the sack of Troy—and it would take another Homer to write it.” In his history of the Sanitary Commission, Charles J. Stillé averred that the repeated auctioning of the flour sack was perhaps “the wildest and most successful extravagance ever practiced” in the interests of the fund, and it began “in the wildest part of the desert.” During May, the sack was sold for over $20,000 in gold in Virginia City and the nearby towns of Dayton, Gold Hill, and Silver City. At the auction in Virginia City on May 16, the employees of the Union pledged $100 and the employees of the Enterprise $150, and Sam was appointed to a committee with Sandy Baldwin and John K. Lovejoy, editor of the Virginia City Old Piute, charged with soliciting contributions from local lawyers. The Gold Hill News reported that when the auction moved across the ravine from Virginia City, “Gov. Twain and his staff of bibulous reporters . . . came down in a free carriage, ostensibly for the purpose of taking notes, but in reality in pursuit of free whiskey.”58
Gridley eventually auctioned the sack in Sacramento and San Francisco, then carried it to St. Louis to sell at the Sanitary Fair. Sam claimed that it was finally used to bake cupcakes “sold at extravagant prices,” though there was also a report as late as 1887 that Gridley’s heirs in Modesto, California, still owned the flour sack. In any case, Sam estimated in chapter 45 of Roughing It “that when the flour sack’s mission was ended it had been sold for a grand total of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in greenbacks!” It was, he guessed, “probably the only instance on record where common family flour brought three thousand dollars a pound in the public market.” Gridley traveled upwards of fifteen thousand miles at his own expense and devoted “not less than three months of his life” to the “long and tedious expedition.” It was, according to Sam, “the best exemplar of the generous nature of the man, and also of his great energy.” Despite his devotion to this project, ironically, Gridley came under fire for his copperhead sympathies and was compelled to send a letter to the editor of the Reese River Reveille after his return from St. Louis to affirm his allegiance to the Union, though he also denied “the right of wholesale abolition” of Southern slavery.59
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