Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  He played cards, drank a little whiskey—well, a lot of whiskey—and lusted to get back down to Esmeralda, to examine the status of the “feet” he had accumulated earlier from that district.

  His head was spinning with “feet.” He bought and sold “feet” and related interests like latter-day boys would deal in bubblegum baseball cards, and with about as much to show for it. Steeped in mining arcana, he kept careful track of all his transactions and grew conversant in iron pyrites, copper, selenite crystals, mica, water rights, even the effects of underground springs on rheumatism. He also grew familiar with the phrase “played out.”

  Finally, in early April 1862, he returned south to the Esmeralda mines. He would spend five months at this desolate outpost: five miserable months of shabby quarters, leaking roofs, bad food, too much whiskey, hard work, dashed hopes. At Aurora, in the center of the district, Sam fired off desperate letters to Orion: “Send me $50 or $100, all you can spare…we shall need it soon for the tunnel.”15 “Send me $40 or $50—by mail—immediately.”16 “Don’t buy anything while I am here—but save up some money for me. Don’t send any money home. I shall have your next quarter’s salary spent before you get it, I think. I mean to make or break here within the next 2 or 3 months.”17 A week or so later: “No, don’t buy any ground, anywhere. The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now. My back is sore and my hands blistered with handling them to-day. But something must come, you know.”18

  He continued in this vein—as it were—for the next several months, alternately badgering his brother for money and raving of imminent riches. In mid-May he reported an armed confrontation with claim jumpers at the Monitor hole; a friend had been shot dead in a similar incident a few days earlier. By June 2, it was, “Send me all the money you can spare every week or so.”19 By late June, it was, “No—haven’t struck anything in the ‘Annipolitan.”20 A month after that, “My debts are greater than I thought for…I owe about 45 or $50…how in the h—l I am going to live on something over $100 until October or November, is singular.”21 And on, and on, in a descending arc of hope, over the next several months.

  In the summer of 1862, he admitted defeat and gave up mining—or so he thought—and took a job as a common laborer at a quartz mill for ten dollars a week. It was nonstop, backbreaking work, and he stayed at it long enough to collect ten dollars. When he asked for a raise to $400,000 a month, his boss fired him, for some reason. He had one more halfhearted fling with mining that ended in a miasma of bureaucratic misunderstandings. Only then, when all else had failed, did Samuel Clemens submit himself to his true mining career.

  Storytelling had been the vein open to him all along, and he’d been toying at it since childhood, incurious about its depth or worth. His writing had been recreation, venting, showing off. He had dealt the riches mostly for free. But now, exhausted from the recurring saga of “sure” fortunes vaporizing, and in debt to Orion, twenty-six-year-old Samuel Clemens finally began to seriously take stock of his own lode. A hint of his gathering awareness lay in a June 22, 1862, letter to his brother, in which he tersely instructed: “Put all of Josh’s letters in my scrap book. I may have use for them some day.”22

  “Josh’s letters” were brief comic sketches that Sam had been occasionally writing since April, without pay, for a little newspaper in Virginia City called the Territorial Enterprise. (None of these sketches survive.) Now Sam would write for pay. In July he’d leaned on Orion to make a connection for him with the Sacramento Union, 130 miles to the southwest in the capital of California: “As many letters a week as they want, for $10 a week.”23 But Orion had already made the better connection for Sam: within days, a letter from Bill Barstow of the Territorial Enterprise arrived at Aurora with a far better offer: twenty-five dollars a week, as a staff reporter.

  “Eureka!” he slyly recalls shouting in Roughing It. But in fact, he took some time to think it over, during a hiatus at Mono Lake with Calvin Higbie. Then, swallowing his pride and tacitly conceding failure as a miner, he accepted the job. In Washoe, in the autumn of 1862, while ignorant armies clashed back east, Samuel Clemens finally fell into his true calling.

  11

  A Journalistic Counterculture

  (1862–63)

  He walked to work. That is to say, he left Aurora and the Humboldt mines on foot in late September 1862, and hiked the 120 miles north to Virginia City with a bundle of blankets on his back. He was on foot because horses cost money, and being a gold and silver miner, he didn’t have any. He showed up at the Territorial Enterprise offices with the salutation, “Dang my buttons, if I don’t believe I’m lousy,” and no one who saw him was prone to disagree. He looked less like somebody who’d come to write for the paper than like somebody who’d come to rob it. He later recalled that he was coatless, and wearing a slouch hat and blue woolen shirt; his pantaloons were stuffed into his boots, and he sported a beard that foliated halfway down to his waist. Thrust under his belt was a navy revolver, his lone conventional piece of Virginia City accessorizing.

  The Territorial Enterprise was easily the liveliest, if not exactly the most reliable newspaper on the American continent. Much of what it printed could be summed up in a two-syllable phrase, had there been enough bulls in the region to anchor the metaphor. In the three years of its existence, it had attracted a coterie of brilliant, adventuring young poets and misfit writers who had found their way to the Enterprise generally by accident.

  Three years earlier, Virginia City had been a mud-hole on Mount Davidson, a mile and a half above sea level on the moonscape that was Washoe. After the inevitable tent city sprang up around McLaughlin’s and O’Reilly’s new digs, a miner named James “Ole Virginny” Finney (actually, Fennimore) smashed his whiskey bottle on the ground one night and named the campsite in honor of himself. When the building boom erupted, “Virginny” received its more dignified name, and became a hive of grasping ambition, excess, treachery, vice, dissipation, murder, and lost hopes.

  As riches flowed out of the mines, the hive expanded into a throbbing dynamo of tiered streets—A, B, C, and D—slashed across the mountainside. Vertical connecting streets didn’t exist, and so anyone wishing to get from A to B had to do something like enter a building, descend a staircase, and exit on the next street down. The mercantile barons lived on A and B streets. C was the commercial thoroughfare—the Enterprise offices were there, above a clothing store. D was home to the town’s fifty-one bars and its whorehouses. Below D, the alphabet stopped and the soup began: the stew of hovels for Chinese laborers; miners’ slums; and, at the mountain’s base, the families of Indians who survived on what was left over from the ongoing orgy above.

  Sam started his newspaper career in time to witness the greatest eruption of wealth from the Comstock mines. The bonanza yielded $20 million in ore between 1863 and 1867, and triggered a jackleg gentrification, the materials hauled in from San Francisco. Sam was present at the creation.

  There were…fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, “hurdy-gurdy” houses, wide-open gambling palaces…civic processions, street fights, murders…a dozen breweries and half a dozen jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church.1

  Even the prostitutes gained civic renown, of various sorts: the scary “Buffalo Joe” Dodge, because she liked to duke it out with her professional rivals on the street; the British-born madam Julie Bulette, because she drove around in a gleaming carriage, prevailed on the city fathers to build clean cabins on D street for her daughters of desire, and decorated her own cottage, “Julie’s Castle,” with geraniums and roses. (She ultimately experienced a bad day at the office—strangled and shot in her bed for her jewelry.) Day and night, you could find and do just about anything in Virginia City.

  SAM STARTED out writing conventional news items. His tutor was William Wright, a brilliant and fragile poet/essayist whose pen name, Dan De Quille, may have been a subtle pen-pun (Dandy Quill). Sam was soon on his own. De Q
uille left town in December to visit his wife and children in Iowa, whom he seldom saw over a forty-year period, the commute being difficult. The other Enterprise veterans did not quite get De Quille’s replacement at first. They sensed a reserve beneath his surface jokey charm. His exaggerated drawl and his peculiar movements—that rocking and rolling gait—led people to assume that he was lazy, or drunk. (The Enterprise staff knew a thing or two about being drunk.) The paper’s suave young editor, Joe Goodman, pegged him as lacking in industry. The portly and mustachioed Rollin Mallory Daggett, who’d made a reputation in San Francisco and now worked part-time for the paper, thought him slothful, even “abnormally lazy.”2 To C. C. Goodwin, an Enterprise reporter before he became a judge, Sam was unseasoned, and “more or less uncouth.”3

  These sentiments were modified as the fledgling reporter began to prove his worth. Rather than focusing on the facts that any fool could observe and report, Sam reported facts that would have occurred in a better and more interesting world.

  A GALE—About 7 o’clock Tuesday evening…a sudden blast of wind picked up a shooting gallery, two lodging houses and a drug store from their tall wooden stilts and set them down again some ten or twelve feet from their original location…There were many guests in the lodging houses at the time…it is pleasant to reflect that they seized their carpet sacks and vacated the premises with an alacrity suited to the occasion.4

  He didn’t need to explain to his readers what “lodging houses” were.

  Less than a week after being hired, Sam graduated from exaggerations to outright hoaxes. His deceptively deadpan sketch of October 4, “Petrified Man,” gave him his first real West Coast notoriety. A man’s body, Sam wrote, had been discovered in a sitting position in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford.

  …[T]he attitude was pensive, the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the fore-finger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.5

  What was more, he continued, the local folks attempting to “bury the poor unfortunate” discovered that he had been glued to the bedrock by limestone sediment that had dripped down on him throughout the centuries. The faithful reporter noted that an inquest, performed by “Justice Sewell or Sowell, of Humboldt City,” determined that the stone man had died of “protracted exposure,” and that the judge had ruled against a suggestion to dynamite him from his limestone confines. Some three hundred people have “visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.”

  A private purpose lay beneath the public fun—an early manifestation of Samuel Clemens’s legendary vindictiveness. The purpose was to drive G. T. Sewall nuts. Sewall had somehow offended Clemens, perhaps in a mining rights dispute, perhaps by his sectional loyalties. Papers all over Washoe reprinted the story, and Sam made sure that his victim received every issue—half a bushel of papers a day for eleven months, as he insisted in print years later.6 “I hated Sewall in those days,” he told his readers, “and these things pacified me and pleased me. I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him.”7

  This was mildly audacious stuff from a newcomer, though not out of place in the Enterprise, which might as well have been named for its reporters’ imaginations. Before leaving town, De Quille had turned in a piece about a fellow who invented a suit made of India rubber that would offer protection for the wearer from the desert heat via a battery-controlled “air compressor.” The inventor launched out on a hike across Death Valley and was later found on the valley floor, frozen: he’d flicked the compressor on, but had forgotten to flick it off. An eighteen-inch icicle hung from his nose.8

  After De Quille, Goodwin, and Daggett, the Enterprise cast of characters included Steve Gillis, a printer and lethal barroom fighter who weighed ninety-five pounds; Denis McCarthy, a twenty-one-year-old co-owner of the paper and saloon raconteur; William Gillespie, a speculator-politico-newsman whom Sam used as a comic foil; and Joe Goodman.

  Goodman was the Enterprise’s co-owner and its legitimizing force. As a twenty-two-year-old transplanted New Yorker, Goodman had bought into the newspaper with McCarthy in March 1861. He was a figure apart in the rough-house Enterprise offices, slim and elegant, favoring gray vested suits and watch chains, his face wreathed by thick dark hair and a well-shaped mustache. Goodman’s youthfulness and good looks belied a shrewd mind (he may have hired Sam for his writing, but it didn’t escape him that Sam’s brother the territorial Secretary awarded governmental printing contracts to firms that owned presses). Although he accepted the public-service responsibilities of newspapers, he was attuned to the wild energies erupting in this remote enclave in the West. He hired the wild-eyed poets in mufti who drifted his way, and let them interpret and amplify these energies however they might. A journalistic counterculture coalesced at the Enterprise, and improvised a new literature-on-deadline that caught the emerging voice of a self-defined America.

  The West may have been the only place where this could happen. The dutiful Augustans of Emerson’s circle lacked the temperament to infuse their high philosophies with robust diction. Their robust Southwestern shadow images never advanced beyond narrow political resentment. Save for Whitman, the Civil War was casting a chill on the national literature, as partisan polemics replaced aesthetic innovation. Out west, there were no rules, no frowning Calvinist pieties—only energy and freedom. The voice that emerged and eventually swept eastward was iconoclastic, exuberantly outsized, funny, instinctively populist, and intensely observant.

  “Western” writing did not spring full-blown in Virginia City with the Enterprise. One progenitor of the form was George Horatio Derby, a young military surveyor stationed in California who gained national popularity under the pen name John Phoenix. Writing for the San Diego Herald while on military duty in 1853, Phoenix developed a Western-humor signature style: solemn, mock-serious, with piled-on detail that revealed his narrative to be a tall tale. Phoenix made use of animals, smells, irrelevant dialogue, and irreverence toward great men and sacred ideas. In 1870, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin compared Mark Twain’s work to that of Phoenix—although to Twain’s advantage, calling him “more extravagant and preposterous.”9

  The Pacific Coast had attracted poets and essayists since the early 19th century, though few bothered to develop a style that departed from the classical-sentimental. Bookstores and publishers specializing in Western topics soon flourished in San Francisco, distant ancestors of City Lights. Rollin Daggett founded the literary-minded Golden Era in San Francisco in 1852. Seven years later, a twenty-year-old native of Albany, New York, Francis Bret Harte, began working at the journal. By the time Sam arrived in the West, Harte was a rising literary figure with his own circle of admirers and protégés.

  The most distinctive gestation, without question, happened in Virginia City, with Sam Clemens at its center.

  Sam dove into life at the Enterprise. He probably slept at first on the premises, which were redolent of printer’s ink and tobacco and sweat and the leftovers of Chinese food, before he found a room at a boardinghouse. He regularly sent ten or twenty dollars to his mother, when he had it.

  At first, Goodman kept him on a tight leash, assigning him the dreary “local” beat of freight shipment figures, courthouse items, and mining yields. But Sam soon made himself into a man about town. The newspaper went to press at 2 a.m., so Sam began his day around noon, hitting the hotels, police stations, and the stock exchange, for information—or gossip—about mines or murders. He also hit the bars: Jane’s teetotaling boy had discovered liquor. Liquor lubricated his entrée into the moiling town. He became a figure welcomed for his conviviality as much as for his access to the press. Mining people bought his good companionship with a lager beer or two, and bought mention of their mines in the Enterprise with gifts of “feet” in those mines. Late afternoons, he would write up what he had learned at a wooden table crowd
ed with other reporters, noshing on noodles as he scribbled.

  After sundown, when gaslights lent the tiered mountainside city the outlines of a steamboat, Sam’s beat would shift to nocturnal pleasures: the theaters, opera houses, music halls, and billiard tables. He rekindled his fascination with the stage, hung out with actors and showgirls; he wrote adroit capsule reviews of plays based on a few minutes of action he’d watched before moving on down the street to the next hall. (Sadly, none of these survive.) Back to the office for last-minute items and editing the copy, then off for a late dinner or marathon drinking at a bar where patrons could wash down free cheese and mustard with pots of foaming beer. He was never far from the lethal terrors of the boomtown night. “P.S.,” he added in a nocturnal letter to Jane and Pamela, “I have just heard five pistol shots down street—as such things are in my line, I will go and see about it.

  “P.S. N° 2—5 A.M.—The pistol did its work well—one man—a Jackson County Missourian, shot two of my friends, (police officers,) through the heart—both died within three minutes. Murderer’s name is John Campbell.”10 To bed at sunrise. Up again at noon.

  Early on, the newsroom staff discovered Sam’s edgy underside, and got their kicks coaxing him into a tantrum laced with pure-grade Mississippi River swearing. Hide his pipe or his favorite writing-table candle; then watch him go crazy in quick, well-grooved increments: the search, the distracted circular pacing in that odd half-capsized gait of his, and finally the screaming, cursing war dance. Many people in Sam Clemens’s lifetime were to go slack-jawed at this transformation.