by Ron Powers
He had gone out there with Orion, who had just secured the only prestigious appointment of his life. Orion was to be the secretary of the Nevada Territory, and Sam would serve as his unofficial aide. The post was a reward for Orion’s dogged campaigning for Lincoln in the unfriendly northern Missouri counties. The newly inaugurated president had named Edward Bates attorney general, and in January 1861, Orion had petitioned his old mentor for an appointment of some kind. Bates recommended him to Secretary of State William Seward for a territorial secretaryship, and Seward assigned him to far-off Nevada. Orion would be the second-ranking official under the territorial governor, James W. Nye. Sam saw Orion’s appointment as a timely ticket out of town. Since stealing away from the Rangers, he had lived virtually as a fugitive from justice in the Moffetts’ household. Partisans for both South and North were scouring the city for manpower, and experienced riverboat pilots were in demand. A gun to the head was an effective recruiting tool.
So when the chronically cash-poor Orion visited the Moffett house in St. Louis in July to show off his certificate signed by Abraham Lincoln, Sam made him an offer: in return for a sinecure as an unpaid secretary-to-the-Secretary, he would bankroll the trip to Nevada for the two of them, using twelve hundred dollars he had saved during his piloting career. Mollie Clemens and little Jennie, still back in Keokuk, would join them later. Sam saw his exile as lasting no more than three months, by which time the war would be over and he could get back to piloting steamboats. He certainly never imagined that it would be another six years before he saw the Mississippi again; nor could he have conceived the profoundly altered man who would return east, with a national reputation, an alternate name, and a new career.
Orion took his oath of office before a Supreme Court justice in St. Louis on July 11, 1861, and, a week later, the brothers boarded the packet Sioux City for passage westward on the Missouri River to St. Joseph. From there they booked seats on an overland stagecoach for Carson City, Nevada. They packed light: warm shirts, pipes, blankets. A bag of coins, Sam’s savings. And as hedge against secretarial spelling slips, a six-pound unabridged dictionary.
It was a magnificent ride. They bowled through Kansas at a hundred miles a day. The brothers lounged on the rear passenger seat-board facing stacks of mail bound for people in Brigham and Carson and ’Frisco. They learned to sleep atop the mailbags, although Orion’s dictionary kept sliding down and smacking one of them. In Nebraska Territory, they saw their first specimen of the famous “jackass rabbit” and then their first sagebrush, for both of which Mark Twain would fashion great descriptions in Roughing It—the preposterous-eared jackass rabbit sitting quietly, thinking about his sins; the sagebrush like a miniature live-oak tree, the author gazing into their foliage like Gulliver.1 Nights, they donned their heavy woolens and smoked and lay down on mail sacks. It was complete and satisfying happiness. “There was a freshness and breeziness…and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities…”2
Tall tales and wild characters were part of the West’s atmosphere. Sam heard about a buffalo bull that chased a man up a tree. A little later, myth came alive: their stagecoach was overtaken by a rider for the legendary Pony Express that rushed mail from St. Joseph to Sacramento, and Sam drank him in—“The rider’s dress was thin, and fitted close; he wore a ‘round-about,’ and a skull-cap, and tucked his pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider…nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear—another instant a whoop and a hurrah…and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!”3 One night, in hostile Indian territory, they awoke to a man’s screams for help, then pistol shots, and then the jolt of the coach jerked into motion down a mountain grade. In the morning they picked up hints from the new man at the reins that their former driver had been murdered while off-shift at a way station. Tales of violence filled the air. Slade, the scourge of the Rockies, dominated all. “There was such magic in that name, SLADE!” Mark Twain wrote. “I stood always ready…to listen to something new about Slade and his ghastly exploits.”4 He devoted eighteen pages of Roughing It to reviewing them. Joseph Alfred Slade was a Mexican War veteran and stagecoach driver-turned-desperado who shot men with sadistic avidity. Mark Twain’s unmistakably enchanted précis of Slade’s gunslinging (and hanging and stabbing and beating) adventures—the body count reached 26—informed the emerging myth of the Western Bad Guy in dime novels and later in the movies. Sam and Orion ran into the villain at a stopover in southwestern Wyoming. “He was so friendly and so gentle-spoken that I warmed to him in spite of his awful history,” Mark Twain writes.5 In fact, the Clemens brothers never heard of Slade’s reputation until after the stage-stop encounter.
Their journey then took them across the Rockies and down into Salt Lake City, where Orion had been instructed to interview Mormon leaders about their allegiances to the Union in light of the South’s secession. The Secretary was taken aback to find that the self-exiled churchmen, wary over the hostility shown their sect inside the United States, half-believed that Lincoln would have attacked them but for his distraction vis-à-vis the South. They fantasized that the Civil War would destroy the Union, after which the Mormons would arise to rule the country.
While these weighty matters were being discussed, Sam was trying to get his mind around all those wives. He found that, aside from hearing stories from the Mormons about their persecution,
the next most interesting thing is to sit and listen to these Gentiles talk about polygamy; and how some portly old frog of an elder, or bishop, marries a girl—likes her, marries her sister—likes her, marries another sister—likes her, takes another—likes her, marries her mother—likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and then comes back hungry and asks for more.6
On the twentieth day of their journey, August 14, 1861, Sam and Orion reached Carson City, having clattered nearly two thousand miles from St. Louis. The area was called Washoe, after a regional Indian tribe. “The idea of coming to a stand-still…was not agreeable, but on the contrary depressing,”7 wrote the man who would roam over land and water for most of his life. They found themselves in a burg of two thousand people, surrounded by the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Deep beneath the mountains’ surface stretched a newfound labyrinth of unimaginable riches.
Carson City was founded in 1858 by rich lawyers connected to the cattle-ranching trade; they named the town after U.S. Army scout Kit Carson. A year later, a couple of prospectors named Pat McLaughlin and Peter O’Reilly were working the dregs of the California Gold Rush about twenty miles northeast of Carson. Needing a hole in the ground to store water, they scraped out a cavity on a steep ravine on the eastern slope of the mountain, unearthing some gold nuggets. The two miners scrabbled further, and found lots more. Others from the camp below rushed to join them, including a dishonest man named Henry Comstock, who convinced McLaughlin and O’Reilly that the land was his. The prospectors found deposits of strange-looking bluish mud beneath the nuggets, and followed the goo to the greatest single cache of precious minerals in human experience. The mud contained silver, and went on for miles, stretching deep underground. Henry Comstock’s name entered history.
The Gold Rush to the West that had flared in 1849 reignited. By the time the Clemens brothers arrived in the area, a slapdash, wood-frame metropolis called Virginia City, eighteen miles north of Carson, was erupting up and down the slope of Mount Davidson. Swarms of humanity poured in: prospectors, speculators, merchants, preachers, menials, con artists, saloonkeepers, builders, engineers, killers, prostitutes, even lawyers: seven thousand of them in three years converged from across the plains and from California. That figure would rise to twenty-five thousand within a decade. Comstock mining produced more than $300 million worth of gold and silver in its first twenty years.
Walking toward the governor’s “state palace” (actually a one-story white-frame pillbox), Sam and Orion witnessed
their first Western gunfight. A notorious stagecoach robber known as Jack Harris had fired from horseback at some antagonist, missed, and took bullets in the chest and leg for his trouble. As Mark Twain improved on the prosaic facts of the incident, Harris passed the brothers on his horse, began a friendly chat with them, only to abruptly excuse himself and cross the street, where he traded the hot lead. After it was over, he chucked his horse past them, nodding politely, and headed on home, perforated in the lung and hip. “I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it recalled to mind that first day in Carson,” was Mark Twain’s “snapper.”8
They found sleeping space in a slapped-together shanty that passed for a boardinghouse on the town plaza, its inner walls made from stitched-together flour sacks. Its beds were occupied mostly by young New York–Irish party pols who had accompanied the new governor. (James Nye had been New York City’s police commissioner and William Seward’s presidential campaign manager before his appointment.) Orion plunged into the duties of his new post. He was responsible for supervising the procedural arrangements for the first territorial legislature, scheduled for early October. In addition to setting the territorial budget, he had to find a suitable hall for the meeting, and stock it with chairs, desks, and the other necessary accoutrements. In his spare time, he needed to design an official seal.
Orion also discovered the dark side of territorial politics. Nye, a product of the Tammany Hall political machine, was not interested in proper bookkeeping or playing by the rules. To him, money was used to buy access and people.
PROXIMITY TO the Comstock put Sam within reach of a possibility beyond imagining in his threadbare Hannibal days, when he watched the sinking Marshall Clemens dream vainly of cashing in the Tennessee land. Here was a chance to get rich.
He bought himself some cowboy clothes—big slouch hat, flannel shirt, thick pants stuffed into leather boots. He struck up friendships with the young Nye pols in the boardinghouse, disarming them with his Pike County drawl, and listening to their plans to cash in on the mining bonanza. Since no one really knew where luck would strike next, the trick, he learned, was to buy up shares—called “feet”—for legal ownership of physical space in the various mining claims believed to hold silver or gold, which anyone with or without cash could do, since barter was commonplace.
The West was a dream world, fast, wild, dangerous. Sam’s first few letters home reveal both his exuberant embrace of this new landscape and his instinctual habit of couching his observations in comic-epic imagery. The writer in him was setting up shop, even though Sam may not have been fully aware of it yet.
The country, he told Jane,
is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris, (gypsum,) thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, cuyotès (pronounced ki-yo-ties,) poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits…. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them.9
He liked the sound of that passage, and repeated it virtually word for word in another letter to Jane the next day—this one prepared with an eye toward publication in the Keokuk Gate City. It created a stir when it appeared in print and Sam published two more. Annie Moffett always believed that its reception back east was not lost on Sam. “It…may be said to have been the real beginning of his literary work.”10
Meanwhile, Sam was hatching a new idea. The Comstock had created its own satellite economy, with money constantly changing hands. A smart fellow could get rich just by catering to the needs of the miners, without getting his own hands dirty in the pickax wars. Sam decided to go into the timber business. Virginia and Carson cities were devouring lumber as their boundaries expanded. He would hike into the Rockies and select a mountainsideful of thick, hundred-foot yellow pine trees for his inventory. In early September, Sam, accompanied by a young Cincinnatian named John D. Kinney, headed into the mountains.
The plan probably would have worked, if they hadn’t set the mountain on fire. They spent two or three days cavorting in the wilderness, swimming and fishing in Lake Bigler, cooking trout dinners over campfires and smoking their pipes under the stars. Eventually they cut down the obligatory two or three trees to mark their claim. Sam lit a fire by the lakeshore and walked off to fetch a frying pan. When he came back, flames were racing up the mountainside, from tree to tree.
Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! It went surging up adjacent ridges…burst into view upon higher and farther ridges, presently—shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again…threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges, till…the lofty mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava streams….
Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake!11
The Clemenses never had been too successful getting money out of pine-covered land. Sam shifted to speculation in mining “feet.” He caught gold and silver fever. Rumors of sudden wealth abounded: widows without the means to buy a crepe bonnet selling ten “feet” for $18,000; common loafers waking up from the gutter to $100,000 fortunes. The nearby Gold Hill, where it had all started, was now the hottest mining spot in the territory.
In October, Sam’s letters home were full of wheeling-and-dealing reports: he had laid a timber claim for William Moffett, situated on “Sam Clemens’ Bay.”12 He had amassed 1,650 feet of mining ground, and Moffett’s name would go on that, too. He had trekked a hundred miles south to the Black Warrior Gold and Silver Mining Company in the Esmeralda district, where he had “been given” (actually was sold, most likely on credit) fifty feet at ten dollars a foot. He waited eagerly for the men there to “strike it rich.” Sam also lent a hand to his brother, who had finally organized the legislature’s first meeting. Sam was present when, at noon on October 1, 1861, Orion called the two-week session to order and ran the show until the permanent officers were elected.
For once, Sam felt sympathy for Orion, whose official status he seems to have admired. In Roughing It, he parodies the legislators’ pettiness and rails against the tight restrictions that the U.S. comptroller levied against the Secretary’s expense vouchers. “The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy,” Mark Twain fumed, “and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.”13
INSTEAD, HE turned to mining, and got his own pockets picked.
By the end of autumn, Sam was bored with Carson City, and the brothers’ cash was running low. He’d grown a faceful of whiskers and mustaches; he looked the part; so why wasn’t he mining? In December, he rounded up three companions—a friend from Keokuk, Billy Clagett; an old blacksmith named Combury Tillou and his mean little dog; and a young lawyer from Maine named Gus Oliver (Tillou is “Ballou” in Roughing It, and Oliver is “Oliphant”). The four struck out on the 175-mile journey north to the rich mineral region of Humboldt County. Fifteen days later, they reached Unionville.
They built a cabin, staked a claim around some good-looking rock, and tried to sink a shaft with their store-bought picks and dynamite. They gave up after twelve feet and turned to speculating with the other dreamers and dilettantes around them. Before long the Carson City quartet had amassed more than thirty thousand feet apiece in “mines” that essentially did not exist. A collective denial of reality had set in. Sam and Tillou headed back to Carson City, determined to get rich by wheeling and dealing their “feet.”
Back in Carson City, Sam wrote letters to his mother and to Orion’s wife Mollie that cast his misadventures as amusing tall tales—Roughing It rough drafts, in a way. Certain passages in each letter revealed how quickly the West was turning Sam from a modest boy into a man. The letters also showed that he still hadn’t tamed the silver-dreaming beast within. He mentioned a keg of beer
to Jane, the first hint that he no longer felt bound to any pledges of temperance to her. To Mollie, pining for summer to arrive so that she and her daughter could join Orion in Carson City, Sam was confessional to an extent he never would have dared with his female relatives or an unmarried woman.
Well, Mollie, I think July will be soon enough, because I think that by that time some of our claims will be paying handsomely, and you can come in “high-tone” style…And we could have a house fit to live in—servants to do your work…I am not married yet, and I never will marry until I can afford to have servants [for his wife]…I don’t want to sleep with a three-fold Being who is cook, chambermaid and washerwoman all in one. I don’t mind sleeping with female servants as long as I am a bachelor—by no means—but after I marry, that sort of thing will be “played out,” you know. (But Lord bless you, Mollie, don’t hint this depravity to the girls.)14
He also wrote letters, now and throughout his time in the West, to his beautiful eidolon of regret and yearning, Laura Wright.
Sam fidgeted around Carson City for most of February. He tried to get the territorial Secretary to upgrade his lodgings to quarters worthy of his status, but Orion wouldn’t budge from his cramped fifty-dollar-a-month office, rented with his own money. As usual, Orion’s naïve frugality on behalf of the territory cut no ice with his political associates. They saw him as a prissy chucklehead—mostly getting in the way of things. Governor Nye lolled around in far fancier digs on Carson’s main street, stroked his white goatee, and plotted his ascension to the U.S. Senate. When Nye urged Orion to improve the legislature’s financial image by cooking a few “special bills and accounts,” Orion insisted that he would do no such thing. Soon the Missouri rustic and the wised-up New Yorker were eyeball-to-eyeball, with Orion’s future in the balance. When Sam heard about the impasse, he acted with the same outrage that he had shown the pilot Brown in defense of Henry: he called on the governor and gave him about forty kinds of Mississippi-riverboat-pilot hell. Astonishingly, the governor backed down, and even developed a liking for Sam, a liking that would pay off in a few years.