Unfortunately we shall never know how the Samuel Clemens Iowa-and- beyond cocaine concession would have fared as New Orleans was as far as he reached. Perhaps unsurprisingly there were no boats to Brazil, not even slow ones, but by the time he had reached New Orleans all thoughts of Brazil had probably deserted him anyway. He had become captivated by the romance and glamour of the Mississippi River and its paddleboat steamers, and within three days of arriving in New Orleans he had signed on as a two-year apprentice pilot, a privilege for which he had to pay his master and mentor, Horace Bixby, five hundred dollars over the training period.
Sam had grown up on the banks of the Mississippi but Hannibal was too early in the great river’s journey to be of any use to the best of the river traffic. The real fun did not begin until St. Louis from where the Mississippi proper starts its twelve hundred-mile journey all the way down to New Orleans. Sam had the great privilege of being involved with the paddle steamers in their golden age, and in the days when a qualified pilot on a paddle steamer was a glamorous, responsible and well-paid profession.
It is easy to see how the paddle steamers and river life must have turned Sam’s head. To the poor home boys and newly arrived slaves standing on the river’s banks they must have been the very scene of wonder; even more worldly folk could only stand and shake their heads in awe. They would hear them first, whistles blowing behind the trees, then they would see the smoke billowing from the chimneystacks, and finally the floating wedding cake would heave into view. Soon they would see it had three storeys, each one’s awning decorated with gingerbread, the stairwells finished off with ornate carvings, the paintwork glistening alongside polished brass and varnished mahogany. Flags would billow and pennants flutter from the myriad of masts and poles. Passengers would promenade along the topside verandas; crewmen would scurry and scuttle along the lower deck. At night they anchored or tied up alongside a levee or town. If our poor boy or new slave could peer into the upper portholes he would see maids and slaves dressing their charges in their finery, oil lamps reflecting in gold frame mirrors, flickering on the brocaded walls and velvet curtains. Downstairs in the salons there would be a gaming room for the gentlemen, a withdrawing room for the ladies and a ballroom for those inclined to two- or three-step to an orchestra, a parquet floor below and chandeliers above. Inside this floating palace they would glimpse a civilization from another planet, a civilization peopled by planters, gentlefolk, slavers, farmers, gamblers, whores, soldiers, snake oil salesmen, immigrants, trappers, hustlers, cowboys, molls and preachers. It was a microcosm of all that was best and worst in this new land of freedom, hope and opportunity.
From 1856 to 1861, between the ages of 21 and 26, Sam made over one hundred and twenty passages up and down the great river piloting as many as twenty different paddle steamers. At their peak in the final antebellum years there were nigh-on a thousand steamers, many of them remarkable feats of enterprise and engineering, reflecting perfectly the young America at the height of its uppity can-do think-bigism. Some were pre-Titanic or pre-Spruce Goose monsters of over 500 feet in length and over 500 tons in weight. The safety record was appalling: as many as one hundred and fifty of them sank, either from snagging one of the ever-shifting underwater banks or running over a previously wrecked sister, or flooding as they were frequently overloaded with their cargo flush with the deck, or collisions, or most horrifyingly explosions from the overworked steamers. They were anyway built to be profitable now not indestructible later, and few paddle steamers lasted more than five years before they sank or drowned or exploded.
The Mississippi River is wide but not deep, especially in the summer. Boats going downstream would ride the current mid-river, whereas those heading north would close the banks as near as they dared. The pilot’s job was to know the river, every cable of her, and Sam said he learned it like learning a book off by heart. He would work closely with the leadsman, and the latter’s job was to throw a leaded line off the bow, mark the depth and shout it back to the pilot. The larger paddle steamers, fully laden, would have about ten feet of hull below the water line. They marked the depths in fathoms: six feet is one fathom; twelve feet is two, or twain, fathoms. At two fathoms, close to running aground, the leadsman would shout to Sam “Mark Twain”. The shout became the name and the name became the man.
“I supposed - and hoped - that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days,” he later recalled, “and die at the wheel when my mission was ended.” Alas for him, and otherwise for us, it was not to be. The new country was about to turn on itself. On 25 May 1861 the 25-year-old Sam was on the Nebraska as she approached the Unionist-blockaded Memphis. A jittery rifle shot from the barracks shattered the glass in the wheelhouse along with Sam’s blissful career. The Unionists were press-ganging the overwhelmingly secessionist Mississippi boatmen, and Sam fled back to the safety of Hannibal.
But Hannibal was itself in a bind, unsure which side to support. Missouri was a slave state, yet was surrounded by abolitionist states. Most folks were slave owners yet did not favor withdrawal from the union and the isolation that would follow. As it happened most of Hannibal joined the Union but in the early days could equally well have gone the other way; and the most never became the all, especially in the rural areas around the town. Sam just wished the whole lot would go away, but came up against Leon Trotsky’s famous dictum: “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”
Forced to make a decision, Sam joined up with his friends and formed the Marion Rangers; exactly whose side they were on remains unclear except all dozen of them proclaimed themselves to be anti-Union. They certainly weren’t fighting to retain slavery, and later Sam would remember they were motivated more by cussedness than any form of conviction. A fellow volunteer recalls Sam arrived for duty on a four-foot mule called “Paintbrush”, perched on which were a valise and an umbrella, a squirrel rifle, a homemade quilt and a frying pan. The motley crew made camp in another volunteer’s farmhouse. The Rangers made the local telegraph operator their general, and Sam was deemed second lieutenant. The mind boggles.
Sam didn’t have a great war; in fact he barely had a war worth the name at all. The only action the Rangers saw involved a sentry hearing noises off in the dead of night, and all hands rushing to blast away at the noise in the anxious darkness. The next morning they went to bury the enemy dead. The enemy dead was the brushwood that had been making a noise in the wind and a clipped horse who wasn’t too happy to see them.
Two weeks later the Marion Rangers dissolved as surreptitiously as they had evolved. Mark Twain later wrote in jest that he resigned as he had been “incapacitated by fatigue through persistent retreating”. More thoughtfully he added: “[The Civil War] seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just that - the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.”
Cue Providence, just when Sam needed her. For once in his life the hapless Orion had got lucky. As a reward for campaigning for Lincoln he had been given the job of assistant chief to the chief assistant in the governorship of Nevada. Nevada was not yet a fully-fledged state but still a Territory, a Wild West Territory. Volunteers were not exactly lining up for Orion’s job, but Sam saw Orion’s posting as the ideal way out of the theoretical battlefield that so far had been his Civil War.
Their two thousand-mile wagon journey across the magnificent vastness of this unspoilt America would remain as one of Sam’s liveliest memories. The further west they clattered the more Sam became enraptured by the whole reality that was the West. He loved the space - not just as space, of which there was plenty in Missouri, but as space in the wild Big Country setting by day, and the infinite Big Sky setting by night. He loved the characters - as much larger than life as the scenery was larger than landscape. He loved the opportunities; everyone was heading west to make t
heir fortunes, and tales of fortunes made and just missed and about to be remade were the talk of the bars. He loved the irreligiosity. He had read as a cub pilot Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason - a direct rebuttal of the hell3 and brimstone sermons of his Presbyterian youth - and he was open to Paine’s call to liberation. Paine had called Christianity “a heathen mythology”, and there in the Wild West Sam saw openness and tolerance. Why, he even heard even laughter on a Sunday, so deeply frowned upon in the mild west of Missouri.
The capital of Nevada was - and is - Carson City, and while Orion settled into his government job there Sam headed twenty miles north to the silver mines of Mount Davidson and the instant town of Virginia City. The West was in one of its Gold Rush moments. Virginia City, a city in name alone, a place of shacks and bars and brothels and shovel stores, was spreading as fast as the rumors about its hidden treasures. Sam was caught up in the fever, writing home that “[Mount Davidson] is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris, gypsum, thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen4, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, coyotes, poets, preachers and jackass rabbits.” When he wasn’t digging he was bartering shares in other claims, but he never learned the old lesson that the people making money in a mining rush are the ones selling picks and shovels.
For eighteen months Sam tried to get rich quick. He lived for months on end in camps and shacks out in the wilderness, digging earth and hustling shares. He somehow managed to set fire to a forest he had claimed, worked as a common laborer in a saw-mill just for eating money, and saw shootouts over dubious claims. He wrote letters home and letters to Orion, and from time to time sent sketches of life in the outback to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He wasn’t paid, but he was published, and his pieces were popular, his spring shoots of journalism. Sam, in some desperation, decided to see if he could make his pastime pay. He asked Orion for newspaper contacts. Orion came up trumps: the very same Territorial Enterprise owed the Territory a favor. When Orion introduced the anonymous sketch writer as the favor’s payback a deal was quickly done, and Sam took the first steps to becoming Mark Twain as a staff journalist on the Territorial Enterprise on $25 a week.
The 26-year-old cub reporter took to journalism with as much gusto as the keenest teenage cub reporter. At last the years of drift and kismet had been brought up short; at last regular dollars found their way into his pocket. Virginia City was as exciting and bustling and incredible as only a boomtown can be, and a town full of black sheep has only one rule: no questions. The booming town needed a newspaper to match its kaleidoscope of readers and the Territorial Enterprise provided the perfect response: no answers. A cross between the National Enquirer and the Kiss ‘n’ Sell, it had no pretensions of being a newspaper of record, and it didn’t let its lack of pretensions down. Sam readily took to the journalist’s credos “never let the facts stand in the way of a good story” and “everything is true except the facts.” From these loose interpretations of reality he soon dispensed with reality altogether and began inventing stories lock stock and barrel. There were no rules, only his exuberance at finding his true calling and the devil’s eye for mischief and observation.
Four months after Sam had started on the Territorial Enterprise the editor needed someone to visit Carson City to report on the Territory’s short legislative session. With some misgivings, and with a warning to keep his imagination in check, the newspaper sent Sam to report on proceedings. After sitting through the first interminable session of political waffle, and with ample time to consider all things to be considered, Sam sat down to file his report. The first sentence was: “I feel very much as if I had just awakened from a long sleep.” At this stage one might assume he was referring to having to sit through that day’s legislative assembly. He finished the piece with the byline “Mark Twain” - which puts rather a different complexion on his opening sentence. Both, for once, would appear to be true. As Sam started to call himself Mark Twain from this time, I hope it will be agreeable if this narrative does the same.
The state of journalistic bliss that was to be a single twenty-seven-year- old Territorial Enterprise staff reporter on $25 a week plus board and expenses lasted for a whole year. There were diversions, like visits to San Francisco and Sacramento. There was the constant prowling of Virginia City’s bars looking for stories from upcountry, hard luck stories, good luck stories. Here he was attending the dance halls and cabarets and writing reviews; there he was eating and drinking at the many new eateries and drinking venues that the instant Virginia City was gathering around itself. Accuracy was an option, one to be used only when the story was extraordinary enough to stand its own ground. Integrity was a quality expected in doctors, not expected in lawyers, and not considered at all by gold rush journalists. Admiration for newspapermen was still high; gullible readers saw it as a gallivanting public service and demand for this first mass media was insatiable.
Insatiable it might have been, but in May 1864 a markedly hubristic Mark Twain fed it something shocking and indigestible. He invented a story that the proceeds from the Carson City Sanitary Ball were no longer going to their designated charity but were being diverted to a “Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East” - in other words to a society that would promote interracial marriages. If Twain had been looking for the rawest nerve in America he had found it: the Emancipation Proclamation was only two years old and more honored in the breach than the observance, memories - bad memories - of the Civil War were still fresh and bitter, many whites blamed blacks for the War in the first place, and race relations were now touchier than in the slavery days as poor whites now had to compete with free blacks for bottom rung work.
Nemesis was quick to strike Twain and this piece of mischief; even the editors of the Territorial Enterprise saw this as a prank too far and he was unceremoniously run out of town - and to save Orion any embarrassment he took the opportunity to run himself out of state. He headed west to his favorite city, San Francisco, and soon landed himself a reporter’s job on the San Francisco Morning Call.
But this was an unavenging nemesis: San Francisco was hardly a hardship posting. The bohemian city on the bay of the mid-1860s was a direct precursor of the San Francisco of a century later. The countercultural arts, literary and music scenes flourished in the easygoing atmosphere. Poets held sway in the Park; dandies strolled up and down and down and up the hilly streets; all artists seemed to be performing artists too. Added to this was the frisson of earthquakes as the city shook and tremored dozens of times during Twain’s first six months there.
The Morning Call job was, like the paper itself, a stiff, the very opposite of the freewheeling Territorial Enterprise. The San Francisco paper was interested in becoming a paper of record and instructed its new reporter just to stick to the (dread-word) facts. He later claimed to have quit the “fearful drudgery, soulless drudgery, [the job] almost destitute of interest”, but actually - to use the vernacular euphemism - he was “let go”. And let go he did, freelancing around the thriving San Francisco newspaper and magazine scene and becoming involved in alternative theater. It was during this highly creative time that he wrote The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, his first attempt at outright humor, a sort of shaggy dog story whose humor has not withstood the test of time. Yet the Jumping Frog became a national hit as it was reprinted across the country and was his first national exposure, and exposure as a humorist.
The unexpected nationwide success of Jumping Frog awakened in Mark Twain a quality hiding its light under a tumbleweed bushel: ambition. He was later to become socially ambitious (successfully) and financially ambitious (unsuccessfully) but here for the first time he showed professional ambition. The whole journalistic experience, the beginnings of his vocation, had come upon him almost as an afterthought and the success of the experience came upon him almost as an aftershock. But once ambition h
ad got up and made its bed it took a firm hold of him, leading directly, and now in short order compared to the meandering that had come before, to the Holy Land and The Innocents Abroad.
His first venture abroad was to the Kingdom of Hawaii, then still more commonly known by Captain Cook’s name for the archipelago, the Sandwich Islands. Once there Twain regretted Cook had not called it by the more apt Rainbow Islands - there being more rainbows than sandwiches. The California Steam Navigation Company had responded to requests from US sugar interests to lay on a service from San Francisco to Honolulu. Their new flagship Ajax could whisk passengers, and more importantly sugar and freight, there and back in a month. The new route was in itself a significant story and Twain managed to persuade the Sacramento Union to send him to this new, and still exotic, location for three months in exchange for all expenses and twenty- five articles at twenty-five dollars a piece. Thus was started his career as a seaborne travel writer; not just that, but following the success of Jumping Frog, a travel writer with a twist of sideways humor. From one of the islands the up-market Union readers, in a still easily shocked Sacramento, read that: “At noon I observed a bevy of nude naked young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied they were running some risk.” The bevy - if they ever existed - out-patienced him; or maybe not.
They say it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and while he was in Hawaii a career-changing piece of good fortune washed up on the beach of one the Hawaii’s outer islands. Six weeks before then the Hornet, a clipper en route from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn had caught fire and sank near the equator. The crew of thirty-one boarded the three lifeboats, but two of these were subsequently lost in a storm. The third lifeboat, with the Hornet’s captain and fourteen crew, wandered aimlessly around the Pacific for forty-one days on ten days’ rations before drifting onto a beach two hundred miles south of Honolulu.
Innocence and War Page 2