Sam predicted that “the only way to gouge Union Square” out of the “glory-loving Supervisors” was “to promise them that they shall be published and praised and flattered all over the world. . . . Let us commence idolizing them at once, else we may not get the new Mint in ten years” to replace “the present little Mint.”66
Another San Francisco item in the Enterprise in mid-November 1865, almost certainly by Sam, betrays his lifelong fascination with gadgets. The correspondent reports on several “new inventions, of incalculable value to the human race,” that had been introduced in the Bay Area “within the last two or three months,” including one “to preserve large brick buildings from destruction by earthquakes,” another “to furnish a simple, powerful, fuel-economizing and speed increasing wheel for steamboats,” still another “to work rebellious ores cheaply and well,” and a fourth “to save life, and harness, horses and vehicles by instantly separating runaway animals and runaway wagons from each other.” Finally “comes Brown—Samuel Brown—old Sam Brown—son of old Brown” with a contrivance “for instantly detaching boats from a ship’s tackle” called “the ‘Lightning Disengaging Hook.’”67 Sam’s fascination with such gadgetry foreshadows his own invention of a self-pasting scrapbook and investments in a steam pulley and the Paige typesetter.
At 12:48 p.m. on Sunday, October 8, 1865, Sam experienced his first earthquake, one of the strongest temblors recorded in San Francisco prior to the devastating quake of April 1906. He was walking along Third Street and had just reached the corner of Mission when suddenly “there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that here was an item!—no doubt a fight in that house. Before I could turn and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing together.” As he “reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing, I saw a sight!” The entire front of L. Popper’s four-story brick building, under construction on the southeast corner of the intersection, collapsed and splattered into the street, “raising a dust like a great volume of smoke!” Sam leaped against a wall for protection from the falling debris. “No one else saw it but me,” he remembered, and “I never told anyone about it.”68 He detailed these incidents in his next letter to the Enterprise, though he mostly ignored the deaths and property damage to crack wise. At the moment of the tremor, according to Sam, Horatio Stebbins left the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church “and embraced a woman. Some say it was his wife.” Pete Hopkins, the old adversary he murdered in the “bloody massacre” hoax, “narrowly escaped injury” when he fell “from the summit of Telegraph Hill” onto “a three-story brick house ten feet below.” In another account of the events, Sam reported that a brick warehouse near the docks had been “mashed in as if some foreigner from Brobdignag had sat down on it.”69 His piece in the Enterprise was accompanied by several scare headlines, such as “San Francisco Half in Ruins” and “Loss of Life and Numerous Instances of Injury,” that the San Francisco press reproved.
The reason? The city fathers were frantic to suppress the news of natural disaster lest it hurt business. As Harte reminisced after another earthquake almost exactly three years later, the chamber of commerce types worried that “one of the cheap photographs of the ruins in San Francisco” might circulate in the East and discourage both emigration and investment. Some of the local newspapers, he mused, had “suggested that, with a little more care and preparation on our part, the earthquake would have been very badly damaged in the encounter.” In short, according to Harte, “local news was under an implied censorship which suppressed anything that might tend to discourage timid or cautious capital.” The same may be said of news coverage after the 1865 earthquake. The San Francisco dailies “affect[ed] to consider the late earthquakes no great shakes,” the Virginia Daily Union reported four days later. C. H. Webb, who was walking along Montgomery between California and Sacramento Streets when the quake struck, recalled that immediately afterward “the daily papers went earnestly to work to convince people that earthquakes are the most innocent things in the world, that they are to be looked upon as the divertissements of life rather than otherwise, that no lives have been lost by them, and never can be, and that San Francisco has nothing to fear from them in any event.”70
One other upshot: the San Francisco artist Edward Jump based one of his most famous illustrations, Earthquakey Times, on news accounts of the tremor, including Sam’s letters to the Enterprise.
The Virginia Daily Union, for example, had reported (erroneously) that Sam “at the time of the shock had on no clothing but his shirt” and rushed “into the street in this costume.” In the lower left corner of Jump’s caricature, Sam “is en route for Washoe or some other country, forgetting when he left his room [to] take anything except an old boot, which he holds in his left hand, and the bed sheet, with which he endeavors to cover his nakedness.” Among the other prominent San Franciscans depicted in the sketch, Pete Hopkins is falling “from a three story house and is about to alight on one of the street cars” and Martin Burke, the chief of police, “is represented as clasping in his arms an unfortunate female, who has swooned away.”71
Over the summer Ward had again invited Sam to send him a comic piece for publication in his next book. Though he had recently announced to Orion that he had received a “call” to write literature “of a low order,” Sam dawdled for weeks, at a loss to know what to write—but determined to submit something. As Paul C. Rodgers Jr. notes, “[Sam] was in debt at the time, his investments in certain mining properties were proving worthless,” and “his dreams of gaining wealth and prominence in the West” had been disappointed. Sam worked initially on a story based on an anecdote he had heard James Townsend, the original of Harte’s “Truthful James,” tell in the Lundie Diggings
about a tame fox who used to sweep his master’s cabin and dust off the furniture with his unusually bushy tail—but for some reason or other I simply couldn’t get the thing just to my liking. Each time I rewrote it, it seemed less humorous than when originally told by the inimitable Townsend.
Then one dismal afternoon as I lay on my hotel bed, completely nonplussed and about determined to inform Artemus that I had nothing appropriate for his collection, a small voice began to make itself heard.
It was the poor little jumping frog . . . that old Ben Coon had described! Because of the insistence of its pleading and for want of a better subject, I immediately got up and wrote out the tale.
He drafted two versions of the anecdote he had heard the previous winter, “The Only Reliable Account of the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “Angel’s Camp Constable.” But both of them were false starts and, according to his friend Joe Twichell, Sam pigeonholed them “in contempt.”72 He had not yet figured out how to integrate the frame story about Simon Wheeler, modeled on Ben Coon, with the inside narrative told by Wheeler about Jim Smiley and the stranger who bilks him. The version he eventually polished and published under the title “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” is written in the form of a letter from Mark Twain to Ward and is organized around a series of the tricks or practical jokes characteristic of Southwestern humor. Narrator Twain has been directed by Ward to call on Simon Wheeler, whose name is redolent of “side-wheeler” and who reels off the story of Smiley, a miner who wagers on, among other contests, the fighting skills of his “bull-pup” Andrew Jackson and a mare nicknamed “the fifteen-minute nag” even though she was “slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind.” But Smiley “used to win money on that horse” because
at the fag-end of the race she’d get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust, and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose and always fetch
up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down.73
Even in his most famous comic sketch, that is, Sam turned his enthusiasm for horse racing and his experience as a reporter of horse races to account.
The piece focuses, however, on the jumping abilities of Smiley’s flip-flopping frog Dan’l Webster, so named for the disgraced U.S. senator, an apostate to the antislavery movement who supported the Compromise of 1850 in a vain effort to advance his political career. Smiley’s frog loses a contest with a rival fresh from the swamp after a stranger loads him with quail shot. Though usually read simply as a humorous anecdote, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” also satirizes both the Whig Webster and the Democrat Andrew Jackson. In Simon Wheeler’s insistent narration to a trapped auditor—and in Sam’s analogous publication of it in an eastern paper—the sketch also reenacts the triumph of the westerner in “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter” (1852).
Sam completed this version of the story in mid-October and mailed the manuscript to G. W. Carleton, the publisher of Artemus Ward: His Travels. But Ward’s book had been issued in late September,74 so Carleton forwarded Sam’s story to Henry Clapp, editor of the New York Saturday Press. Clapp included the sketch in the November 18 number and paid nothing for it. Though Sam claimed later that the jumping frog story “killed” the paper because it appeared in its “very last issue,” in fact the Saturday Press staggered along for another year before it collapsed. Meanwhile, Sam sent another copy of the sketch to Bret Harte for publication in the Californian, where it appeared in the December 16 issue under the title “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” But the two versions were not identical: Sam had christened the owner of the frog in both manuscripts Jim Greeley, but the typographers for the Saturday Press changed the name to “Jim Smiley” simply because, as Sam explained in 1895, they “had not enough [capital] ‘G’s’” in their cases, whereas the compositors for the Californian retained the name “Greeley.”75 That is, the Saturday Press version was not reprinted in the Californian, as Sam’s biographers sometimes assert. Sam preserved the Press variants in subsequent reprintings of the sketch.
According to conventional wisdom, Sam’s rise to national fame began with the publication of this signature story. It was immediately hailed as a work of comic genius, or so the story goes, and catapulted the author literally overnight to the front rank of American humorists. “No reputation was ever more rapidly won,” Edward House later claimed. Sam also helped to foster this legend, but it is a myth. When the jumping frog sketch appeared in the Saturday Press, editor Clapp prefaced it with this note: “Mark Twain . . . has long been a favorite contributor to the San Francisco press, from which his articles have been so extensively copied as to make him nearly as well known as Artemus Ward.” As if to prove the point, the sketch was reprinted over the next few months in papers across the country, from the New Haven Palladium (December 4), Albany Argus (December 23), Cleveland Leader (January 6, 1866), and Milwaukee Sentinel (January 6, 1866), to the San Francisco Examiner (January 12, 1866), Columbus Statesman (January 17, 1866), Baton Rouge Advocate (March 19, 1866), Chicago Tribune (April 1–2, 1866), and Memphis Avalanche (April 11, 1866). It was pirated in the spring of 1866 by Beadle & Adams in the Beadle Dime Book of Fun No. 3. Richard L. Ogden, the New York correspondent for the Alta California, reported that Sam’s tale “has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. It is voted the best thing of the day.” Sam bragged that the story “became widely known in America, India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars.” Ironically, Dan De Quille admitted that he “never could see much in the ‘Jumping Frog’” and, on his part, Sam was initially discouraged that he had made a hit with a mere “squib.” He regretted “that after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!” Three years later, however, he had revised his opinion. He privately conceded to his future wife that, in his view, it was “the best humorous sketch America has produced yet.”76 He also found a way to profit by its popularity. Much as Poe sold “The Raven” for next to nothing but exploited its success in “The Philosophy of Composition,” a genetic history about how he wrote it, Sam received nothing for the first publication of the jumping frog story and its many reprints but exploited its success in his essay “The Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story.”
In the hustle to pay his bills, Sam became an occasional contributor to the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle in the fall of 1865. Founded by the teenage brothers Charles and Michael H. de Young the previous January, the Dramatic Chronicle, the forerunner of the modern San Francisco Chronicle, was a four-page tabloid that boasted a daily circulation of about six thousand free copies and depended entirely upon advertising for revenue. It was widely regarded as an outlaw sheet, especially after the brothers were indicted in March “for conspiracy to cheat and defraud in issuing a bogus extra.” After the torment he suffered while working for the Call, Sam relished the “more agreeable & less laborious” reporting for the Dramatic Chronicle. As he bragged to his mother and sister about this time, he was “the Genius of Indolence.” Michael de Young remembered that Sam was one of “those Bohemians” who “hung around” the Chronicle offices and contributed to the paper occasionally “though [they were] paid no regular salaries.” While Sam had “desk room with us . . . and made his headquarters in our office,” he was paid by the piece and earned upwards of ten dollars a week for six weeks to write squibs and “dramatic criticisms,” such as a review of a burlesque Mazeppa that debuted at the Olympic Theater the evening of October 30. He considered Addie Florence’s performance in the title role “strikingly original and terrifically grand.” Given the simulated nudity in the play, Sam asserted that “an actress’ form is as open to criticism as her acting, or a little more so; we may therefore observe that Miss Florence’s figure is nearly perfect.” His only complaint was that her feet were “rather too large.”77
To save money, the same reason he had spent the winter in the goldfields of northern California, Sam began to frequent the working-class saloons of San Francisco, where he could buy a drink and enjoy a “free” lunch for a mere twelve and a half cents. “There is now, and has been for a long time past, camping about through town, a melancholy-looking Arab, known as Marque Twein,” his former employer, the Morning Call, reported in late October. “His favorite measure is a pint measure. He is said to be a person of prodigious capacity, and addicted to a great flow of spirits. He moves often” and “these periods occur at the end of his credit.” Meanwhile, his old adversaries at the Virginia Daily Union perpetrated a small hoax of their own by claiming he had tried to market directions to all of the free meal counters in the city in one of the San Francisco dailies: “For Sale—A Free Lunch Route—The Best of Soups, Roasts, Stews, etc., set forth daily. The Route embraces twenty-three Saloons. For particulars inquire of MARK TWAIN. At his office, the Lamppost, on Bummer’s Corner; or at his residence No. 115, fourth story, Rue de Pacific.”78 Albert Evans of the Gold Hill News, who bluntly announced in his San Francisco correspondence in late 1864 that “I detest . . . Mark Twain,” averred that Sam had preempted a book planned by Adair Wilson, formerly of the Virginia Daily Union, titled The Free Lunch Table, by consuming “all the available material for the work to be found in San Francisco.” Wilson’s only consolation was “that he was not the first man ruined by the wagging of Mark’s paw; several second class saloons which were wont to furnish a passable drink and a tolerably square meal for a man of moderate appetite and ordinary stowage capacity . . . have closed business since he broke out here as an epidemic.” According to Evans, Wilson struggled against “the ravages of this modern vandal with the unconquerable appetite,” had tried to organize a “Lunch-eaters Protectiv
e Union,” and even tried to kill Sam “with overdoses of very salt corned beef.” On a related matter: in early November 1865, Sam reported to the readers of the Territorial Enterprise that he had traveled to Lake Tahoe to recuperate from an unnamed gastric disorder. His column echoes in some details the pieces he had written over two years earlier that recount a similar trip to the lake to recover from a “cold.” Sam wrote that he had carried to Tahoe “a broken spirit, blighted hopes and a bursted constitution. Also, some gin. I shall return again, after many days, restored to vigorous health; restored to original purity, free from sin, and prepared to accept any lucrative office the people can be induced to force upon me. If elected, I shall donate my salary to charitable institutions.” Evans was neither appeased nor bemused. Before the end of 1865 he blasted Sam for his “lamentable failures” as a writer.79
In the afternoon of December 10, 1865, five Virginia City and Gold Hill journalists—Dan De Quille and Alf Doten of the Territorial Enterprise, Bob Lowery of the Union, Charley Parker of the News, and William Gillespie—sat for a photograph in the studio of James Sutterley in a display of professional camaraderie. As Parker put it, “we had our ‘phiz’ taken.”
The Life of Mark Twain Page 45