He spent a couple of days after the Carson lecture with McCarthy “rusticating” at Lake Tahoe rather than compete with the excitement of state and federal elections on November 6, when Blasdel was reelected governor. They arrived in Washoe City in time for Sam’s lecture on the evening of November 7, and he was impressed by the “lively business” there. Tom Fitch had booked the Washoe County Courthouse for Sam’s talk and Fitch both collected admission at the door and introduced the speaker. Though an audience of about two hundred enjoyed the lecture, Fitch remembered, Sam was “not quite satisfied with the result.” He asked Fitch whether “as a lecturer I am a fraud,” and Fitch replied in the affirmative. “I suspected as much,” Sam confessed, before adding, on a more hopeful note, that “there are over 500 towns in the United States of more than 5000 inhabitants, and I can play them all once.” As if to prove the point, Sam lectured the next two nights in Dayton and Silver City. He planned to close his tour in Gold Hill the night of November 10, then return to San Francisco and depart for New York on November 19. Sam’s “fame travels before him,” the Territorial Enterprise reported, praising “his humorous yet interesting, instructive and beautiful description of his sojourn” to Hawaii. McCarthy collected about a hundred dollars in admission fees at the door in Gold Hill, but Sam was upstaged after the lecture by several friends, including George Birdsall, Steve Gillis, Jack Perry, and one or two other members of the Virginia police force, who played a practical joke on him. At about midnight, as they were crossing the Divide between Gold Hill and Virginia City—the site of many a theft in the past—Sam and McCarthy, who was in on the joke, were ambushed by highwaymen in masks and robbed of the box office receipts that McCarthy was carrying, plus twenty or twenty-five dollars in Sam’s pocket, two jackknives, three pencils, and the gold watch presented to him by Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters in January 1864. Sam reacted impulsively because, as the Gold Hill News observed the next day, “when a fellow has a pistol stuck in his ear it is rather hard for him to make sage calculations whether it is a practical joke or not.”24
Reports of the holdup preempted all mention of his lecture in the papers. Neither Sam nor Dan De Quille treated the event with levity in the Territorial Enterprise the next morning. Sam reported that one of the road agents had “thrust a horrible six-shooter in my face” and demanded that he empty his pockets. The thieves addressed each other with the names of Confederate generals—for example, P. G. T. Beauregard and Stonewall Jackson—which should have suggested to Sam, whose Union allegiances had crystallized by the end of the war, that the “robbery” was a hoax perpetrated by people familiar with his politics.25 He publicly pleaded the next day for the return of his watch because he valued it “above anything else I own. If you will send that to me (to the Enterprise office, or to any prominent man in San Francisco) you may keep the money and welcome.” Dan was less accommodating: “This is no joke, but is downright sober earnest. There should be a little hanging done among these rascals. This is the boldest robbery yet.”26
Sam did not discover that the theft had been perpetrated by his friends until noon the next day, when he boarded the Pioneer stage and was handed a package containing everything that was stolen from him and the masks worn by the bandits. He was not appeased; he “failed to see where the point of the joke came in,” as Doten put it, and he cursed them until the stage left. Sam left the mining district on a sour note a second time, and the Transcript speculated that he “will have a duel on his hands if he comes into this region again.” McCarthy accompanied him back to San Francisco, but when Sam learned that his agent was complicit in the “joke” he fired him. The Meadow Lake Sun was similarly aghast: the joke was “a very silly one, we think, and one which should subject its perpetrators to a wholesome confinement in the lock-up.” Less than a month later, McCarthy was involved in a fracas with his brother in Sacramento. He was shot in the head but survived.27
On his part, Sam soon expressed forgiveness because his friends returned the stolen loot, but he continued to hold a grudge. “I never saw such hangdog countenances in my life as the gang wore that captured me,” he charged. “And besides, they transacted the business with a degree of artistic excellence that could only have been attained by long experience.” He crowed a week later that the “brigands” nearly froze “while they were waiting two hours for me to come along the night of the robbery.” He assured them that “I bear you no malice. And I sincerely pray that when your cheerful career is closing, and you appear finally before a delighted and appreciative audience to be hanged, that you will be prepared to go, and that it will be as a ray of sunshine amid the gathering blackness of your damning recollections, to call to mind that you never got a cent out of me.” He claimed in Roughing It that his own “chilly exposure” on the Divide while he was in a sweat “gave me a cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor’s bills. Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my temper when one is played upon me.” Again he fudged the facts. There is no evidence either in his private letters or journals that he required medical attention or that he was idle. But news of the sham robbery was printed in papers across the country, including the Albany Argus, Brooklyn Eagle, Boston Herald, Boston Transcript, Cincinnati Gazette, and Philadelphia Telegraph. A columnist for the Golden Era alleged that the holdup was nothing more than a publicity stunt. However embarrassing the story may have been, at least the name Mark Twain was spelled correctly.28
Three nights after the pretend robbery on the Divide and two nights after Sam had again fled Virginia City, a miner was mugged by a band of copycat thieves at the same spot. Dan De Quille claimed vindication in his condemnation of the “practical joke played on Mark Twain.” It inspired some “real professors at the business, and this is the practical effect of it. The rascals are getting bold.”29
Sam earned by his own estimate between twelve and fifteen hundred dollars during his speaking tour through northern California and Nevada but, after paying off McCarthy, his profit was modest. His lectures in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Virginia City had been lucrative, but in Carson City, Gold Hill, Grass Valley, Marysville, Nevada City, Red Dog, and You Bet he seems to have lost money. Still, he held an ace in the hole: he decided to deliver a “re-hash” or variation on his Sandwich Islands lecture at Platt’s Hall in San Francisco on Friday, November 16, before leaving for New York the following Monday. He hoped to exploit his recent notoriety by promising in his advertising to recount “the only true and reliable history of the late revolting highway robbery, perpetrated on the lecturer at the dead of night between the cities of Gold Hill and Virginia,” fueling the speculation that he had staged the event for publicity purposes. But his scheme, like the best-laid plans of mice and men, went awry. Despite a dearth of advertising and muddy streets, the theater was packed with an audience of about fourteen hundred, but the lecture was both a critical and commercial flop. The Owyhee Avalanche struck one of the few positive notes, but even its praise was qualified: the talk had been “well received and worth more than the money,” despite Sam’s “gawky appearance and affectation” while speaking. Most of the other reviews of the performance were at best lukewarm. The San Francisco Bulletin averred that it was “not equal” to his October 2 speech, “having less coherence and finish,” and complained of “irrelevancies pardonable only to a popular humorist talking among his neighbors.” But Sam also exhibited in it some of his “best traits—audacious humor, sometimes verging on coarseness, alternating with sound practical suggestions and fine description.” The Morning Call attributed Sam’s disappointing performance to his “native bashfulness or the effect exercised upon his nerves” by the robbery. In any case, “the lecture became, somehow, inextricably confused,” with “facts and facetiae being strongly intermixed. We must remonstrate with ‘Mark’ regarding his carelessness—not to use a graver word.” The Dramatic Chronicle concurred:
&nbs
p; Mark was not as happy in this new lecture as he was in his old one. He was not in very good condition, having of course got alkalized while in the savage wilds of Washoe, and at the same time we fear that he had become a little demoralized. He was a little too familiar with his audience. . . . Some of “Mark’s” jokes were very much strained, and others were so nearly improper—not to say coarse—that they could not be heartily laughed at by ladies.
The San Francisco Times delivered the coup de grâce: Sam “fulfilled his promise of perpetrating a robbery.”30
Nor did Sam profit from the lecture, despite the full house. The box office receipts were seized, probably at the behest of former police chief Burke or police court officials loyal to him, to satisfy the balance of the bond he had signed for Steve Gillis the year before. Sam was compelled to admit in court the next day that, despite his recent successes on the boards, he was unable to pay the bond. Evans chortled in the Gold Hill News that Sam had suffered a “severe attack of impecuniosity owing to another meeting with fellows ‘not on the divide,’” though most of Sam’s friends understood that he was the victim of his political enemies: “If the person who let loose the dogs of law” upon Sam “can gain any comfort from his action,” the Morning Call editorialized on November 18, “he is welcome to it. We feel satisfied” that Sam “will not lose the respect of any one by being forced to acknowledge that he is short of funds.” The Washoe Evening Slope struck a similar note: “In future it will be well for Mark to hypothecate his evenings in advance . . . to protect himself from his natural enemies the police.”31 But Sam was again required to postpone his return to the East to lecture four more times in the Bay Area to earn some additional cash before his departure.
On November 20 Sam entrained to San Jose, which he described in his next letter to the Bulletin as “a handsome city of 6,000 inhabitants.” The editor of the San Jose Evening Patriot spent a half hour with him that evening “until by some unknown force he was drawn into the Ranch,” apparently a local brothel. He was scheduled to speak in Armory Hall the next evening, though he was prevented either by weather or a hangover from arriving on time and so appeared before three hundred “grumpy and frigid” listeners. “I hurried to my place on the platform, weak and quaking with trepidation,” he recalled in his autobiography.
An audience had been sitting there an hour and a quarter, waiting for me. There was a scowl upon their faces that stretched from the stage to the doors, and darkened the place like a thundercloud. For the first time in my brief oratorical career, I was received in silence; there was not a hand-clap, there was not a movement, there was not a gesture. I was sick, sick clear to the heart. I began—timidly of course—and of course that made matters worse, for timidity gains no friends in most company, especially among human beings who are ready to eat a person. Uttering jokes timidly is not a good way; there are no laughs, there are only sneers, and you can read the sneers as plainly as if they were written on those faces in large print.
Faced with a hostile crowd, Sam improvised a stunt that soon became a standard part of the lecture: he offered “to demonstrate cannibalism as practiced in the Sandwich Islands if a mother in the audience would bring her child to the platform.” The joke apparently won over the audience. The next morning, the San Jose Mercury commended Sam’s “beautiful” set piece about Kilauea, though the reporter also recommended that he prune the lecture “and lop off, not a branch of humor or a twig of wit, but all of the buffoonery and not a little of the vulgarity.”32
While in the neighborhood Sam also spent two hours interviewing the French-born botanist Louis Prevost, who pioneered California sericulture at his plantation in Santa Clara County. He had met Prevost in the fall of 1864 while covering the Mechanics’ Fair in San Francisco as the local reporter for the Morning Call, where he had lauded the potential for the industry in the San Jose Valley: the “dry, sunny, mild and balmy atmosphere” of the valley was “unsurpassed in all the world in its peculiar adaptation to the production of raw silk,” and finished silk could be “manufactured in San Jose, with Chinese labor, cheaper than it can be imported.”33 Prevost’s scheme to get rich by growing mulberry trees for feeding silkworms may well have been Sam’s source for the name of the would-be baron of business Mulberry Sellers in Colonel Sellers (1874), the stage adaptation of The Gilded Age (1874), and the novel The American Claimant (1892).
His other encores in the region were little more rewarding than his San Jose appearance. Sam appeared onstage five nights later (November 26) in Petaluma, north of the Bay, where the reviewer for the Journal and Argus panned his performance: “As a newspaper correspondent Mark Twain is a racy and humorous writer, but as a lecturer he falls below mediocrity.” On November 27, three days before his thirty-first birthday, he spoke at College Hall in Oakland, where he met the travel writer J. Ross Browne. Though the local city council postponed its meeting expressly so that its members could attend the event, he appeared before only about two hundred people. At least his lecture there was not a critical disaster. The Oakland News avowed that Sam “succeeded perfectly in entertaining his audience. In fact, we think that some of them felt a rather strong inclination to visit the Sandwich Islands and see for themselves the funny things which he described.”34
Much as Sam had finagled an invitation to speak in Carson City, he next arranged to be invited to deliver a third and final lecture in San Francisco. Twenty prominent citizens—including Governors F. F. Low of California and Henry G. Blasdel of Nevada; the Reverends Charles Wadsworth, A. L. Stone, and Horatio Stebbins; Robert B. Swain, superintendent of the Branch Mint; and Frank Soulé—published an open letter on December 8 asking him to repeat his first Sandwich Islands address. (Bret Harte’s name was conspicuous in its absence.) Sam replied the same day that he would repeat the talk at Congress Hall on Bush Street on December 10 and he hoped on that occasion to “merit the high favor you have shown me.” As a publicity stunt, he published that morning a letter to the editor of the Alta California in which he burlesqued the Byzantine politics of the Franco-Mexican War as it was ending. The letter opens with his admission he was confused about recent armistice negotiations—and with an incidental plug of his talk: “I wish, now, I hadn’t advertised to lecture to-night on the ‘Sandwich Islands,’ because everything seems conspiring to discompose my mind.”35
The ploy worked. Once again, the hall was packed with some seven or eight hundred people who, according to the Call, appeared to enjoy Sam’s lecture “vastly.” His entertainment was “a success [in] every way,” according to the Bulletin, and “one of the best of the season.” The reviewer predicted Sam would “find room for an honorable career in the field to which he is going.” With it he earned “the entire good will of the San Francisco press and public. . . . [T]here lives not a man so mean that would not wish him God speed on his voyage to the cities of the East.” The lecture contained “a mingling of fact, fun and fancy, which was as delightful as it was instructive,” the San Francisco Times declared, and “probably never before was so much factual information imparted in such an agreeable manner.” Sam had “struck a new lead in . . . literary research.” He closed the lecture with this coda, delivered in a prophetic voice:
This straggling town shall be a vast metropolis; this sparsely populated land shall become a crowded hive of busy men; your waste places shall blossom like the rose and your deserted hills and valleys shall yield bread and wine for unnumbered thousands; railroads shall be spread hither and thither and carry the invigorating blood of commerce to regions that are languishing now.
The Alta California noted that Sam took his leave “in dignified and touching terms” and “thanked the public for the kindness they had shown him” before walking into the wings.36
During his final days in the city he bid his friends farewell and contracted with John McComb to send weekly letters to the Alta for twenty dollars apiece along the lines of his Sandwich Islands correspondence with the Sacramento Union. McComb bragged about the new
contributor to the paper and his open-ended assignment:
“Mark Twain” goes off on his journey over the world as the Travelling Correspondent of the Alta California, not stinted as to time, place or direction—writing his weekly letters on such subjects and from such places as will best suit him. . . . That his letters will be read with interest needs no assurance from us—his reputation has been made here in California, and his great ability is well known; but he has been known principally as a humorist, while he really has no superior as a descriptive writer—a keen observer of men and their surroundings—and we feel confident his letters to the Alta, from his new field of observation, will give him a world-wide reputation.
As Sam bragged to his mother and sister, he left “more friends behind me than any newspaper man that ever sailed out of the Golden Gate.” He had decided to return east in the fastest, most convenient, and most expensive way—by steamer to Panama, by stage across the isthmus, then by steamer up the Atlantic coast to New York. He laid in a stock of wine and books for the voyage.37
At noon on December 15, a pleasant sunny day with the hills surrounding San Francisco Bay “brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery,” as he noted in his journal, Sam and four hundred other passengers departed aboard the Opposition Line steamer America. They “bade good-bye to the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent,” as he remarked in Roughing It, and headed south. Sam carried with him “more worldly gear than I was accustomed to,” including several scrapbooks filled with clippings of his western writings and letters of introduction to a number of prominent easterners, among them the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in America. Sam’s letter of introduction to the so-called Great Divine was probably written by his friend and Beecher’s fellow Congregationalist minister Charles Wadsworth. He joked in his journal at the time that he had signed the ship’s register as “Mark Twain—Barkeeper” from Terra del Fuego, California. He invented an even better story in his autobiography two generations later: that when he sailed from San Francisco in 1866 he was merely a beneficiary of serendipity, that he “had failed in all my other undertakings and had stumbled into literature without intending it.”38
The Life of Mark Twain Page 54