In 1852 Virginia City, Nevada, was the most flourishing of mining towns.
A half-crazy miner, named Comstock, had discovered there a vein of such
richness that the "Comstock Lode" was presently glutting the mineral
markets of the world. Comstock himself got very little out of it, but
those who followed him made millions. Miners, speculators, adventurers
swarmed in. Every one seemed to have money. The streets seethed with an
eager, affluent, boisterous throng whose chief business seemed to be to
spend the wealth that the earth was yielding in such a mighty stream.
Business of every kind boomed. Less than two years earlier, J. T.
Goodman, a miner who was also a printer and a man of literary taste, had
joined with another printer, Dennis McCarthy, and the two had managed to
buy a struggling Virginia City paper, the "Territorial Enterprise." But
then came the hightide of fortune. A year later the "Enterprise," from a
starving sheet in a leaky shanty, had become a large, handsome paper in a
new building, and of such brilliant editorial management that it was the
most widely considered journal on the Pacific coast.
Goodman was a fine, forceful writer, and he surrounded himself with able
men. He was a young man, full of health and vigor, overflowing with the
fresh spirit and humor of the West. Comstockers would always laugh at a
joke, and Goodman was always willing to give it to them. The
"Enterprise" was a newspaper, but it was willing to furnish entertainment
even at the cost of news. William Wright, editorially next to Goodman,
was a humorist of ability. His articles, signed Dan de Quille, were
widely copied. R. M. Daggett (afterward United States Minister to
Hawaii) was also an "Enterprise" man, and there were others of their
sort.
Samuel Clemens fitted precisely into this group. He brought with him a
new turn of thought and expression; he saw things with open eyes, and
wrote of them in a fresh, wild way that Comstockers loved. He was
allowed full freedom. Goodman suppressed nothing; his men could write as
they chose. They were all young together--if they pleased themselves,
they were pretty sure to please their readers. Often they wrote of one
another--squibs and burlesques, which gratified the Comstock far more
than mere news. It was just the school to produce Mark Twain.
The new arrival found acquaintance easy. The whole "Enterprise" force
was like one family; proprietors, editor, and printers were social
equals. Samuel Clemens immediately became "Sam" to his associates, just
as De Quille was "Dan," and Goodman "Joe." Clemens was supposed to
report city items, and did, in fact, do such work, which he found easy,
for his pilot-memory made notes unnecessary.
He could gather items all day, and at night put down the day's budget
well enough, at least, to delight his readers. When he was tired of
facts, he would write amusing paragraphs, as often as not something about
Dan, or a reporter on a rival paper. Dan and the others would reply, and
the Comstock would laugh. Those were good old days.
Sometimes he wrote hoaxes. Once he told with great circumstance and
detail of a petrified prehistoric man that had been found embedded in a
rock in the desert, and how the coroner from Humboldt had traveled more
than a hundred miles to hold an inquest over a man dead for centuries,
and had refused to allow miners to blast the discovery from its position.
The sketch was really intended as a joke on the Humboldt coroner, but it
was so convincingly written that most of the Coast papers took it
seriously and reprinted it as the story of a genuine discovery. In time
they awoke, and began to inquire as to who was the smart writer on the
"Enterprise."
Mark Twain did a number of such things, some of which are famous on the
Coast to this day.
Clemens himself did not escape. Lamps were used in the "Enterprise"
office, but he hated the care of a lamp, and worked evenings by the light
of a candle. It was considered a great joke in the office to "hide Sam's
candle" and hear him fume and rage, walking in a circle meantime--a habit
acquired in the pilothouse--and scathingly denouncing the culprits.
Eventually the office-boy, supposedly innocent, would bring another
candle, and quiet would follow. Once the office force, including De
Quille, McCarthy, and a printer named Stephen Gillis, of whom Clemens was
very fond, bought a large imitation meerschaum pipe, had a German-silver
plate set on it, properly engraved, and presented it to Samuel Clemens as
genuine, in testimony of their great esteem. His reply to the
presentation speech was so fine and full of feeling that the jokers felt
ashamed of their trick. A few days later, when he discovered the
deception, he was ready to destroy the lot of them. Then, in atonement,
they gave him a real meerschaum. Such things kept the Comstock
entertained.
There was a side to Samuel Clemens that, in those days, few of his
associates saw. This was the poetic, the reflective side. Joseph
Goodman, like Macfarlane in Cincinnati several years earlier, recognized
this phase of his character and developed it. Often these two, dining or
walking together, discussed the books and history they had read, quoted
from poems that gave them pleasure. Clemens sometimes recited with great
power the "Burial of Moses," whose noble phrasing and majestic imagery
seemed to move him deeply. With eyes half closed and chin lifted, a
lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of
the stately lines:
By Nebo's lonely mountain,
On this side Jordan's wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab
There lies a lonely grave.
And no man knows that sepulcher,
And no man saw it e'er,
For the angels of God upturned the sod,
And laid the dead man there.
That his own writing would be influenced by the simple grandeur of this
poem we can hardly doubt. Indeed, it may have been to him a sort of
literary touchstone, that in time would lead him to produce, as has been
said, some of the purest English written by any modern author.