The wonder is that Samuel Clemens, always speculative and visionary, had
not fallen an earlier victim. Everywhere one heard stories of sudden
fortune--of men who had gone to bed paupers and awakened millionaires.
New and fabulous finds were reported daily. Cart-loads of bricks--silver
and gold bricks--drove through the Carson streets.
Then suddenly from the newly opened Humboldt region came the wildest
reports. The mountains there were said to be stuffed with gold. A
correspondent of the "Territorial Enterprise" was unable to find words to
picture the riches of the Humboldt mines.
The air for Samuel Clemens began to shimmer. Fortune was waiting to be
gathered in a basket. He joined the first expedition for Humboldt--in
fact, helped to organize it. In "Roughing It" he says:
"Hurry was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four
persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and
myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put
eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining-tools in the wagon
and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon.."
The two young lawyers were W. H. Clagget, whom Clemens had known in
Keokuk, and A. W. Oliver, called Oliphant in "Roughing It." The
blacksmith was named Tillou (Ballou in "Roughing It"), a sturdy, honest
man with a knowledge of mining and the repair of tools. There were also
two dogs in the party--a curly-tailed mongrel and a young hound.
The horses were the weak feature of the expedition. It was two hundred
miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand. The miners rode only a little
way, then got out to lighten the load. Later they pushed. Then it began
to snow, also to blow, and the air became filled with whirling clouds of
snow and sand. On and on they pushed and groaned, sustained by the
knowledge that they must arrive some time, when right away they would be
millionaires and all their troubles would be over.
The nights were better. The wind went down and they made a camp-fire in
the shelter of the wagon, cooked their bacon, crept under blankets with
the dogs to warm them, and Sam Clemens spun yarns till they fell asleep.
There had been an Indian war, and occasionally they passed the charred
ruin of a cabin and new graves. By and by they came to that deadly waste
known as the Alkali Desert, strewn with the carcasses of dead beasts and
with the heavy articles discarded by emigrants in their eagerness to
reach water. All day and night they pushed through that choking,
waterless plain to reach camp on the other side. When they arrived at
three in the morning, they dropped down exhausted. Judge Oliver, the
last survivor of the party, in a letter to the writer of these chapters,
said:
"The sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep
by a yelling band of Piute warriors. We were upon our feet in an
instant. The picture of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had
passed was in our minds. Our scalps were still our own, and not
dangling from the belts of our visitors. Sam pulled himself
together, put his hand on his head, as if to make sure he had not
been scalped, and, with his inimitable drawl, said 'Boys, they have
left us our scalps. Let us give them all the flour and sugar they
ask for.' And we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful."
The Indians left them unharmed, and the prospective millionaires moved
on. Across that two hundred miles to the Humboldt country they pushed,
arriving at the little camp of Unionville at the end of eleven weary
days.
In "Roughing It" Mark Twain has told us of Unionville and the mining
experience there. Their cabin was a three-sided affair with a cotton
roof. Stones rolled down the mountainside on them; also, the author
says, a mule and a cow.
The author could not gather fortune in a basket, as he had dreamed.
Masses of gold and silver were not lying about. He gathered a back-load
of yellow, glittering specimens, but they proved worthless. Gold in the
rough did not glitter, and was not yellow. Tillou instructed the others
in prospecting, and they went to work with pick and shovel--then with
drill and blasting-powder. The prospect of immediately becoming
millionaires vanished.
"One week of this satisfied me. I resigned," is Mark Twain's brief
comment.
The Humboldt reports had been exaggerated. The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-
Tillou millionaire combination soon surrendered its claims. Clemens and
Tillou set out for Carson City with a Prussian named Pfersdorff, who
nearly got them drowned and got them completely lost in the snow before
they arrived there. Oliver and Clagget remained in Unionville, began law
practice, and were elected to office. It is not known what became of the
wagon and horses and the two dogs.
It was the end of January when our miner returned to Carson. He was not
discouraged--far from it. He believed he had learned something that
would be useful to him in a camp where mines were a reality. Within a
few weeks from his return we find him at Aurora, in the Esmeralda region,
on the edge of California. It was here that the Clemens brothers owned
the 1,650 feet formerly mentioned. He had came down to work it.
It was the dead of winter, but he was full of enthusiasm, confident of a
fortune by early summer. To Pamela he wrote:
"I expect to return to St. Louis in July--per steamer. I don't say
that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it--but I
expect to--you bet . . . . If nothing goes wrong, we'll strike
the ledge in June."
He was trying to be conservative, and further along he cautions his
sister not to get excited.
"Don't you know I have only talked as yet, but proved nothing? Don't
you know I have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that
belonged to me? Don't you know that people who always feel jolly,
no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ
of hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an
uncongealable, sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about
the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any
but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and
exaggerate with a 40-horse microscopic power?
"But--but--
In the bright lexicon of youth,
There is no such word as fail,
and I'll prove it."
Whereupon he soars again, adding page after page full of glowing
expectations and plans such as belong only with speculation in treasures
buried in the ground--a very difficult place, indeed, to find them.
His money was about exhausted by this time, and funds to work the mining
claims must come out of Orion's rather modest salary. The brothers owned
all claims in partnership, and it was now the part of "Brother Sam" to do
the active work. He hated the hard picking and prying and blasting into
the flinty ledges, but the fever drove him on. He camped with a young
man named Phillips at first, and, later on, with an experienced miner,
Calvin H. Higbie, to whom "Roughing It" would one day be dedicated. They
lived in a tiny cabin with a cotton roof, and around their rusty stove
they would paw over their specimens and figure the fortune that their
mines would be worth in the spring.
Food ran low, money gave out almost entirely, but they did not give up.
When it was stormy and they could not dig, and the ex-pilot was in a
talkative vein, he would sit astride the bunk and distribute to his
hearers riches more valuable than any they would dig from the Esmeralda
hills. At other times he did not talk at all, but sat in a corner and
wrote. They thought he was writing home; they did not know that he was
"literary." Some of his home letters had found their way into a Keokuk
paper and had come back to Orion, who had shown them to an assistant on
the "Territorial Enterprise," of Virginia City. The "Enterprise" man had
caused one of them to be reprinted, and this had encouraged its author to
send something to the paper direct. He signed these contributions
"Josh," and one told of:
"An old, old horse whose name was Methusalem,
Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,
A long time ago."
He received no pay for these offerings and expected none. He considered
them of no value. If any one had told him that he was knocking at the
door of the house of fame, however feebly, he would have doubted that
person's judgment or sincerity.
His letters to Orion, in Carson City, were hasty compositions, reporting
progress and progress, or calling for remittances to keep the work going.
On April 13, he wrote:
"Work not begun on the Horatio and Derby--haven't seen it yet. It is
still in the snow. Shall begin on it within three or four weeks
--strike the ledge in July."
Again, later in the month:
"I have been at work all day, blasting and digging in one of our new
claims, 'Dashaway,' which I don't think a great deal of, but which I
am willing to try. We are down now ten or twelve feet."
It must have been disheartening work, picking away at the flinty ledges.
There is no further mention of the "Dashaway," but we hear of the
"Flyaway," the "Annipolitan," the "Live Yankee," and of many another,
each of which holds out a beacon of hope for a brief moment, then passes
from notice forever. Still, he was not discouraged. Once he wrote:
"I am a citizen here and I am satisfied, though 'Ratio and I are
'strapped' and we haven't three days' rations in the house. I shall
work the "Monitor" and the other claims with my own hands.
"The pick and shovel are the only claims I have confidence in now,"
he wrote, later; "my back is sore and my hands are blistered with
handling them to-day."
His letters began to take on a weary tone. Once in midsummer he wrote
that it was still snowing up there in the hills, and added, "It always
snows here I expect. If we strike it rich, I've lost my guess, that's
all." And the final heartsick line, "Don't you suppose they have pretty
much quit writing at home?"
In time he went to work in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week, though it
was not entirely for the money, as in "Roughing It" he would have us
believe. Samuel Clemens learned thoroughly what he undertook, and he
proposed to master the science of mining. From Phillips and Higbie he
had learned what there was to know about prospecting. He went to the
mill to learn refining, so that, when his claims developed, he could
establish a mill and personally superintend the work. His stay was
brief. He contracted a severe cold and came near getting poisoned by the
chemicals. Recovering, he went with Higbie for an outing to Mono Lake, a
ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, vividly described in
"Roughing It."
At another time he went with Higbie on a walking trip to the Yosemite,
where they camped and fished undisturbed, for in those days few human
beings came to that far isolation. Discouragement did not reach them
there--amid that vast grandeur and quiet the quest for gold hardly seemed
worth while. Now and again that summer he went alone into the wilderness
to find his balance and to get entirely away from humankind.
In "Roughing It" Mark Twain tells the story of how he and Higbie finally
located a "blind lead," which made them really millionaires, until they
forfeited their claim through the sharp practice of some rival miners and
their own neglect. It is true that the "Wide West" claim was forfeited
in some such manner, but the size of the loss was magnified in "Roughing
It," to make a good story. There was never a fortune in "Wide West,"
except the one sunk in it by its final owners. The story as told in
"Roughing It" is a tale of what might have happened, and ends the
author's days in the mines with a good story-book touch.
The mining career of Samuel Clemens really came to a close gradually, and
with no showy climax. He fought hard and surrendered little by little,
without owning, even to the end, that he was surrendering at all. It was
the gift of resolution that all his life would make his defeats long and
costly--his victories supreme.
By the end of July the money situation in the Aurora camp was getting
desperate. Orion's depleted salary would no longer pay for food, tools,
and blasting-powder, and the miner began to cast about far means to earn
an additional sum, however small. The "Josh" letters to the "Enterprise"
had awakened interest as to their author, and Orion had not failed to let
"Josh's" identity be known. The result had been that here and there a
coast paper had invited contributions and even suggested payment. A
letter written by the Aurora miner at the end of July tells this part of
the story:
"My debts are greater than I thought for . . . . The fact is, I
must have something to do, and that shortly, too . . . . Now
write to the "Sacramento Union" folks, or to Marsh, and tell them
that I will write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a
week. My board must be paid.
"Tell them I have corresponded with the "New Orleans Crescent" and
other papers--and the "Enterprise."
"If they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night
collecting material cheaper? I'll write a short letter twice a week,
for the present, for the "Age," for $5 per week. Now it has been a
long time since I couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long
time before I loaf another year."
This all led to nothing, but about the same time the "Enterprise"
assistant already mentioned spoke to Joseph T. Goodman, owner and editor
of the paper, about adding "Josh" to their regular staff. "Joe" Goodman,
a man of keen humor and literary perception, agreed that the author of
the "Josh" letters might be useful to them. One of the sketches
particularly appealed to him--a burlesque report of a Fourth of July
oration.
"That is the kind of thing we want," he said. "Write to him, Barstow,
and ask him if he wants to come up here."
Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week--a tempting sum. This
was at the end of July, 1862.
Yet the hard-pressed miner made no haste to accept the offer. To leave
Aurora meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of
another failure. He wrote Barstow, asking when he thought he might be
needed. And at the same time, in a letter to Orion, he said:
"I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of
sixty or seventy miles through a totally uninhabited country. But
do you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and, in
case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know
through you."
He had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone, postponing
the final moment of surrender--surrender that, had he known, only meant
the beginning of victory. He was still undecided when he returned eight
days later and wrote to his sister Pamela a letter in which there is no
mention of newspaper prospects.
Just how and when the end came at last cannot be known; but one hot,
dusty August afternoon, in Virginia City, a worn, travel-stained pilgrim
dragged himself into the office of the "Territorial Enterprise," then in
its new building on C Street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets
from his shoulder, dropped wearily into a chair. He wore a rusty slouch
hat, no coat, a faded blue-flannel shirt, a navy revolver; his trousers
were tucked into his boot-tops; a tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on
his shoulders; a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped
half-way to his waist.
Aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia City. He had
walked that distance, carrying his heavy load. Editor Goodman was absent
at the moment, but the other proprietor, Dennis E. McCarthy, asked the
caller to state his errand. The wanderer regarded him with a far-away
look and said, absently, and with deliberation:
"My starboard leg seems to be unshipped. I'd like about one hundred
yards of line; I think I'm falling to pieces." Then he added: "I
want to see Mr. Barstow or Mr. Goodman. My name is Clemens, and
I've come to write for the paper."
It was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom!