All our boys—the editors—were in our office, “helping” me in the dismal business, and telling about duels, and discussing the code with a lot of aged ruffians who had had experience in such things, and altogether there was a loving interest taken in the matter, which made me unspeakably uncomfortable. . . . I sent him another challenge, and another and another; and the more he did not want to fight, the bloodthirstier I became.
According to Graham of the Union, Laird was “anything but a fighter” and “did look like he could shoot anything without shutting his eyes.” Tom Fitch, who had resigned from the Union staff in January, agreed that Laird was “an arrant coward.”68 Laird tried to sell Fitch his one-third interest in the newspaper on credit for half its value if he would take responsibility for the offending article and fight Sam in his stead. Fitch refused, of course. Certainly Laird’s reply two days later reads like a capitulation to a playground bully:
In reply to your lengthy communication, I have only to say that in your note opening this correspondence, you demanded satisfaction for a communication in the Union which branded the writer of an article in the Enterprise as a liar, a poltroon and a puppy. You declare yourself to be the writer of the Enterprise article, and the avowed author of the Union communication stands ready to afford satisfaction. Any attempt to evade a meeting with him and force one upon me will utterly fail, as I have no right under the rulings of the code to meet or hold any communication with you in this connection. The threat of being posted as a coward cannot have the slightest effect upon the position I have assumed in the matter. If you think this correspondence reflects credit upon you, I advise you by all means to publish it; in the meantime you must excuse me from receiving any more long epistles from you.
In fact, Sam responded to this challenge by reprinting the whole of their correspondence in the Enterprise on May 24 as though to prove he was braver or more principled than Laird. He accompanied the exchange with yet another comment on the subject: “I denounce Mr. Laird as an unmitigated liar. . . . I denounce him as an abject coward.”69
The newspapers in the region that deigned to notice the brouhaha considered it a comedy of insults that had deteriorated into farce. Lynch of the Gold Hill News observed the crossfire between his professional colleagues with amusement if not dismay. The dust-up “has at last culminated in a serious row, and the bloody and barbarous code has been appealed to,” Lynch wrote on May 24, the day Sam reprinted the whole of the correspondence in the Enterprise. “This is emphatically a bad egg. In the first place, the cause of [the] quarrel was not calculated to enlist public sympathy; neither did the discussion of the question demand the use of the language which was resorted to. If the matter results in bloodshed, the victim will not be mourned as a martyr in a holy cause, nor the victor crowned with laurel as the champion of right.” Lynch insisted that “this thing . . . be put [to a] stop.” The San Francisco Morning Call opined, “The day has gone when duels can give any man credit for bravery or honor, wisdom or truth.” The Sacramento Union reprinted the whole of the correspondence on May 26 and added that at last report there had been “no fighting.” The Mariposa, California, Gazette joked that “the easiest and most honorable way they can end the trouble is to go to a cheap grocery, take a little ‘tarantula juice,’ and say no more about it. After so much wind they must need ‘some stimulus.’”70
Apparently summoned from San Francisco by Dan De Quille to manage the crisis, Joe Goodman arrived by stage in Virginia City on May 25, the day after Sam published the whole of his correspondence with Laird in the Enterprise. He could not have been pleased—but then he had injured Fitch in a shootout only a few months earlier. Moreover, the pugnacious Steve Gillis had fought three duels; De Quille had faced the desperado “Farmer” Peel at fifteen paces; Sam’s distant cousin ex-senator Sherrard Clemens had been shot in the right testicle in an affair of honor to prove his bona fides as a loyal Son of Old Virginia; and Sam’s distant cousin ex-senator Jeremiah Clemens of Alabama had once clubbed a member of Congress from Mississippi who accused him of abolitionist sympathies. Each had fought a duel, even if none of them had killed a man or “had a man for breakfast.” When Goodman arrived he “found six duels on his hands—my personalities had borne fruit,” Sam quipped in Roughing It. But Goodman’s “return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become a reporter again. I could not do that; I could not serve in the ranks after being General of the army. So I thought I would depart and go abroad into the world somewhere.”71
In retrospect, the tempest in a teapot might be dismissed as little more than a ploy to boost the circulation of both papers, with each side angling for an out. Laird insisted that Wilmington had a prior claim to satisfaction, Wilmington remained silent, and Sam hotfooted it from the scene. But Sam committed two serious and separate offenses: alleging that the employees of the Virginia Daily Union had reneged on their pledges and suggesting that money from the Carson City charity ball had been diverted from its intended purpose. He might have survived one scandal, but not both. His local reputation was so damaged it could not be repaired, at least in the short run. Goodman apparently convinced Sam to resign from the paper and leave Virginia City for his own good. Sam admitted in an interview in 1895 that “I left Virginia City by request,” and it is more likely the request was Goodman’s than Laird’s. Much as he had deserted from the Marion Rangers three years before, Sam chose the better part of valor and skedaddled. “First there had been the war; now there was the duel,” and in both instances, as James M. Cox has concluded, Sam had “failed in courage and honor.” On his part, Laird moved to Virginia City, Montana, within a few months, then to Helena in July 1866, before departing via the overland route in December 1866 for Illinois where, according to Fitch, he was later murdered “by the brother of a young woman with whom he had carried on a liaison.”72
Years later Sam claimed he had frightened Laird into ducking the fight by pretending to be an expert marksman, but there is no independent evidence the two men ever met in the field. There was a long-standing territorial law against dueling and Sam claimed in his autobiography that James Nye had ordered “the arrest of all concerned in the preliminaries” of the gunfight, but no evidence except his own words corroborates this assertion. The proposed 1863 state constitution both prohibited dueling and required public servants to swear under oath they had never participated in a duel, even as a second, but that constitution had not been ratified. That is, there was no recent proscription on dueling before Sam departed Nevada in May 1864 and no solid evidence that he and Gillis were liable to be arrested even if he had fought Laird. Still, he invoked the authority of the failed constitution in his subsequent efforts to justify his decision to flee the territory: “The law was new and they wanted to try it on. Of course, I was the first victim. But I preferred that to the duel.”73
Sam’s long-held sense that he was the victim in this ruckus was nothing new. He wrote Orion and Mollie the day Goodman arrived back in Virginia City a self-pitying letter that makes clear he thought he was the injured party. He was “mighty sick of that [Sanitary] fund—it has caused me all my d——d troubles—& I shall leave the Territory” soon “& leave it for good.” The women of Carson “got out of me what no man would ever have got, & then—well, they are ladies, & I shall not speak harshly of them.” Sam believed he had “triumphed over those ladies at last, & I am quits with them. But when I forgive the injury—or forget it—or fail to set up a score against it, as opportunity offers—may I be able to console myself for it with the consciousness that I have become a marvelously better man. I have no intention of hunting for the puppy, Laird, Mollie, but he had better let me have 24 hours unmolested, to get cool in.”
The next day Sam wrote Orion that he and Steve Gillis had decided to leave for the States not because they feared any action by the grand jury but because “Washoe has long since grown irksome to us, & we want to leave it anyhow.” According to Lynn, “The moment ranks as one of the significant crises o
f his life,” and Sam “met it unflinchingly. Once again, he ran away.” After instructing Dan De Quille to sell his furniture, Sam and Gillis left by stage early in the morning of May 29 or, as the saying went, “between two days.” They traveled north through the Henness Pass and along the Geiger Grade, a seven-mile-long toll road between Virginia and Steamboat Springs, to Sacramento and then to San Francisco, a route that enabled them to avoid Carson City because “we dare not do anything, either to Laird or Carson men without spoiling our chances of getting away.” Sam had considered challenging one of the husbands, presumably Cutler, “& then crossing the line to await the result,” much as Fitch and Goodman had traveled to California to duel, “but Steve says it would not be safe, situated as we are.” Goodman accompanied Sam and Gillis all the way to San Francisco to help protect them.74
Nearly thirty years later, in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Sam remarked on the “infamy” of Tom Driscoll, the presumed scion of one of the First Families of Virginia, who fails to fight a duel. In the novel, Sam obliquely comments on his own cowardice in failing to fight the duel with Laird: The “unwritten laws” of the First Families “were as clearly defined and as strict as any that could be found among the printed statutes of the land.” The “highest duty” of the gentleman “was to watch over that great inheritance and keep it unsmirched. He must keep his honor spotless. Those laws were his chart; his course was marked out on it; if he swerved from it by so much as half a point of the compass, it meant shipwreck to his honor; that is to say, degradation from his rank.”75 In effect, Sam confessed shame for his failure of nerve in Virginia City in May 1864.
The local response to Sam’s retreat was mixed. Lynch of the Gold Hill News proclaimed good riddance. Sam’s beard was “full of dirt,” according to Lynch, “and his face is black before the people of Washoe. Giving way to the idiosyncratic eccentricities of an erratic mind,” he
indulged in the game infernal—in short, “played hell.” . . . The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man, though sheathed with the brass and triple cheek of Mark Twain. . . . Those groans were not for the Enterprise in the abstract, but for the Enterprise as the vehicle of Mark Twain’s abominations. He has vamosed, cut stick, absquatulated; and among the pine forests of the Sierras, or amid the purlieus of the city of earthquakes, he will tarry awhile, and the office of the Enterprise will become purified.
On the other hand, John Lovejoy of the Old Piute lamented Sam’s departure “for bluer skies and more verdant hills.” Every “lunch house in the city, every brewery and every woman (who knew him)—and to know was to love him—will miss him. We can’t dwell on this subject; we can only say—God bless you, Mark; be virtuous and happy.”76 Thus Sam’s twenty-two-month tenure on the staff of the Territorial Enterprise ended not with a bang but a whimper.
CHAPTER 10
San Francisco
I wanted to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted—I did not know what I wanted. I had spring fever and wanted a change.
—Roughing It
SAM CLEMENS INSISTED in later years that he left Virginia City only because he was “tired of staying in one place so long” and that “when the silver collapse came” and the local economy soured he simply “went to San Francisco.” True enough, mineral production on the Comstock began to decline in the spring of 1864 and the mining industry would not recover until the Big Bonanza strike of the mid-1870s. According to a prominent Virginia City attorney in May 1864, the same month Sam fled Nevada, “We are in the midst of unprecedented and unexpected hard times.” In early June 1864, less than two weeks after Sam resigned from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the Nevada City, California, Transcript reported that “thousands of men” in Virginia City were out of work and “every branch of business” was on “the down grade.” The Transcript added two weeks later that the “rush this way from Virginia City is still on the increase, and everyone that we have had any talk with says that employment cannot be had in the Territory.” The average value of mining stocks plummeted by more than half over a few months. By the end of July, as Edgar Marquess Branch has documented, a foot of the Gould & Curry Mine worth $6,000 at its peak in 1863 “sold for $900, and Real del Monte stock worth $510 late in 1863” went “begging at $9.” The depression in the diggings grew more severe during the course of the year. The companies reduced wages by fifty cents a day to $3.50, a measure that sparked the formation of miners’ unions in both Virginia City and Gold Hill. According to the Sacramento Bee, four thousand men in Virginia, nearly 20 percent of the population, were unemployed, and California newspapers gloated over the exodus from Nevada. Whereas the Comstock had been a magnet for Californians in 1862–63, the flow of immigrants was reversed in 1864. “The returning tide of Washoeites continues to come in upon us with increased numbers,” the Transcript reported in mid-August. Men who thought they were wealthy a few weeks earlier “have been ruined by the fall in stocks” and “hundreds of workmen thrown out of employment have been compelled to expend their last dime. This reaction which is now ruining, for the present, the business of Virginia City is the inevitable result of the wild speculations of people in mining stocks.” The market value of the Comstock companies fell from $40 million in 1863 to $12 million in the summer of 1865 to $4 million in December 1865.1
As a wartime measure, the ironclad monitor Camanche had been shipped in pieces around Cape Horn in the hold of the Aquila, which sank on November 16, 1863, in thirty feet of water in San Francisco Harbor before it could be unloaded. The pieces of the Camanche had been recovered and the Aquila raised the second week of June by a salvage team led by Major Edward C. Perry, who was honored at Maguire’s Opera House the afternoon of June 12. Less than two weeks after fleeing Nevada and landing in the city, Sam was the master of ceremonies and presented Perry with an ornamental cane. The Sagebrush Humorist from Silver-Land, as Sam was soon dubbed, reprised a stunt he had pulled at his facetious gubernatorial address in Carson City six months earlier. He unrolled an illuminated parchment seven feet long and three and one-half feet wide, and while he read from it the audience “dissolved in tears,” as the San Francisco Alta California reported. In the speech, he riffed on the Native American name of the ship. He claimed to represent the “red men” and “noble sons of the forest” he had often satirized in print: the “Diggers,” the “Pi-Utes,” the Washoes, the Shoshones, and “the numberless and nameless tribes of aborigines that roam the deserts of the Great Basin to the eastward of the snowy mountains.”2
Sam claimed in Roughing It (1872) that he had planned to live in San Francisco on the sale of his mining stocks, a paper fortune he asserted “would soon be worth $100,000,” and—what is untrue—that his soap-bubble fortune in Nevada silver burst only after he settled in the city. During his first weeks there, he later wrote, he enjoyed a life of “Heaven on the half shell” or a “butterfly idleness” while rooming with Steve Gillis at the Occidental Hotel. “I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schottisched” and “spent money with a free hand,” he remembered in Roughing It. “What a gambling carnival it was! . . . And then—all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! The wreck was complete. The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one.” The “cheerful idiot” who “had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when I gathered together my various debts and paid them. I removed from the hotel to a very private boarding house. I took a reporter’s berth and went to work.”3
A pretty story, but one demonstrably false at least in many of its details. Despite his account in Roughing It of his “butterfly existence” during his first weeks back in San Francisco, Sam was probably broke when he left Virginia City in late May 1864. Certainly he was in debt in July 1864, as he wrote Dan De Quil
le. He recalled later that he owned several shares in the Hale & Norcross Mine worth a thousand dollars apiece and held onto them even after they soared in value. But from all indications he labored to meet the assessments on the stock. In October 1864, for example, he struggled to pay a hundred dollars assessed on four shares of Hale & Norcross purchased in his brother Orion’s name, and in May 1865 he apparently defaulted on the fifty-dollar assessment owed on two other shares worth $460 per share. When the price of the stock began to soar again, Sam joked that it had become “such a valuable property since I got out of it” and “If I were mean enough to bear malice, I would buy in again and kill that mine.” He griped in May 1868 that six feet of Hale & Norcross he had sold four years earlier for three hundred dollars per foot had appreciated in value to two thousand “and was up to seven thousand during the winter.” He was so disgusted with the unpredictable fluctuations in the value of the claims he argued in August 1864 that, in the interest of greater transparency, mining companies whose stock was publicly traded should be regulated like banks and forced to file a monthly statement of their affairs.4
In brief, the account in Roughing It of his life in San Francisco in the spring of 1864 simply cannot be squared with the facts. He likely lived at the Occidental for no more than a few days. He found a job and went to work on June 6, less than a week after his arrival, as the local news hawk for the San Francisco Morning Call at a salary of forty dollars a week (that iconic number again). The Call editor George Barnes remembered “how the slim, awkward, hawk-eyed, tousle-haired Twain appeared one day in his office” on Commercial Street “and asked to be given a trial as a reporter, his first attempt at newspaper work in San Francisco. The refugee from Nevada justice told a hard-luck story about being out of money and out of work in a strange city.” Barnes “lent him five dollars, gave him a few assignments, and after a while installed him as city editor.”5 Gillis, meanwhile, went to work in the Call print shop.
The Life of Mark Twain Page 39