SAM.

In the light of preceding and subsequent events, we must confess that

Madame Caprell was “indeed a right smart little woman.” She made

mistakes enough (the letter is not quoted in full), but when we

remember that she not only gave his profession at the moment, but at

least suggested his career for the future; that she approximated the

year of his father’s death as the time when he was thrown upon the

world; that she admonished him against his besetting habit, tobacco;

that she read. minutely not only his characteristics, but his brother

Orion’s; that she outlined the struggle in his conquest of the river;

that she seemingly had knowledge of Orion’s legal bent and his

connection with the Tennessee land, all seems remarkable enough,

supposing, of course, she had no material means of acquiring

knowledge—one can never know certainly about such things.

XXIX

THE END OF PILOTING

It is curious, however, that Madame Caprell, with clairvoyant vision,

should not have seen an important event then scarcely more than two

months distant: the breaking-out of the Civil War, with the closing of

the river and the end of Mark Twain’s career as a pilot. Perhaps these

things were so near as to be “this side” the range of second sight.

There had been plenty of war-talk, but few of the pilots believed that

war was really coming. Traveling that great commercial highway, the

river, with intercourse both of North and South, they did not believe

that any political differences would be allowed to interfere with the

nation’s trade, or would be settled otherwise than on the street

corners, in the halls of legislation, and at the polls. True, several

States, including Louisiana, had declared the Union a failure and

seceded; but the majority of opinions were not clear as to how far a

State had rights in such a matter, or as to what the real meaning of

secession might be. Comparatively few believed it meant war. Samuel

Clemens had no such belief. His Madame Caprell letter bears date of

February 6, 1861, yet contains no mention of war or of any special

excitement in New Orleans —no forebodings as to national conditions.

Such things came soon enough: President Lincoln was inaugurated on the

4th of March, and six weeks later Fort Sumter was fired upon. Men began

to speak out then and to take sides.

It was a momentous time in the Association Rooms. There were pilots who

would go with the Union; there were others who would go with the

Confederacy. Horace Bixby was one of the former, and in due time became

chief of the Union River Service. Another pilot named Montgomery

(Samuel Clemens had once steered for him) declared for the South, and

later commanded the Confederate Mississippi fleet. They were all good

friends, and their discussions, though warm, were not always

acrimonious; but they took sides.

A good many were not very clear as to their opinions. Living both North

and South as they did, they saw various phases of the question and

divided their sympathies. Some were of one conviction one day and of

another the next. Samuel Clemens was of the less radical element. He

knew there was a good deal to be said for either cause; furthermore, he

was not then bloodthirsty. A pilot-house with its elevated position and

transparency seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. “I’m not very anxious to get up into a

glass perch and be shot at by either side. I’ll go home and reflect on

the matter.”

He did not realize it, but he had made his last trip as a pilot. It is

rather curious that his final brief note-book entry should begin with

his future nom de plume—a memorandum of soundings—“mark twain,” and

should end with the words “no lead.”

He went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the _Uncle Sam_.

Zeb Leavenworth was one of the pilots, and Sam Clemens usually stood

watch with him. They heard war-talk all the way and saw preparations,

but they were not molested, though at Memphis they barely escaped the

blockade. At Cairo, Illinois, they saw soldiers drilling—troops later

commanded by Grant. The _Uncle Sam_ came steaming up toward St. Louis,

those on board congratulating themselves on having come through

unscathed. They were not quite through, however. Abreast of Jefferson

Barracks they suddenly heard the boom of a cannon and saw a great whorl

of smoke drifting in their direction. They did not realize that it was

a signal—a thunderous halt—and kept straight on. Less than a minute

later there was another boom, and a shell exploded directly in front of

the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and destroying a good deal of

the upper decoration. Zeb Leavenworth fell back into a corner with a

yell.

“Good Lord Almighty! Sam;” he said, “what do they mean by that?”

Clemens stepped to the wheel and brought the boat around. “I guess they

want us to wait a minute, Zeb,” he said.

They were examined and passed. It was the last steamboat to make the

trip from New Orleans to St. Louis. Mark Twain’s pilot-days were over.

He would have grieved had he known this fact.

“I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since,” he

long afterward declared, “and I took a measureless pride in it.”

The dreamy, easy, romantic existence suited him exactly. A sovereign

and an autocrat, the pilot’s word was law; he wore his responsibilities

as a crown. As long as he lived Samuel Clemens would return to those

old days with fondness and affection, and with regret that they were no

more.

XXX

THE SOLDIER

Clemens spent a few days in St. Louis (in retirement, for there was a

pressing war demand for Mississippi pilots), then went up to Hannibal

to visit old friends. They were glad enough to see him, and invited him

to join a company of gay military enthusiasts who were organizing to

“help Gov. ‘Claib’ Jackson repel the invader.” A good many companies

were forming in and about Hannibal, and sometimes purposes were

conflicting and badly mixed. Some of the volunteers did not know for a

time which invader they intended to drive from Missouri soil, and more

than one company in the beginning was made up of young fellows whose

chief ambition was to have a lark regardless as to which cause they

might eventually espouse.*

* The military organizations of Hannibal and Palmyra, in 1861, were as

follows: The Marion Artillery; the Silver Grays; Palmyra Guards; the W.

E. Dennis company, and one or two others. Most of them were small

private affairs, usually composed of about half-and-half Union and

Confederate men, who knew almost nothing of the questions or

conditions, and disbanded in a brief time, to attach themselves to the

regular service according as they developed convictions. The general

idea of these companies was a little camping-out expedition and a good

time. One such company one morning received unexpected reinforcements.

They saw the approach of the recruits, and, remarking how well drilled

the new arrivals seemed to be, mistook them for the enemy and fled.

Samuel Clemens had by this time decided, like Lee, that he would go

with his State and lead battalions to victory. The “battalion” in this

instance consisted of a little squad of young fellows of his own age,

mostly pilots and schoolmates, including Sam Bowen, Ed Stevens, and Ab

Grimes, about a dozen, all told. They organized secretly, for the Union

militia was likely to come over from Illinois any time and look up any

suspicious armies that made an open demonstration. An army might lose

enthusiasm and prestige if it spent a night or two in the calaboose.

So they met in a secret place above Bear Creek Hill, just as Tom

Sawyer’s red-handed bandits had gathered so long before (a good many of

them were of the same lawless lot), and they planned how they would

sell their lives on the field of glory, just as Tom Sawyer’s band might

have done if it had thought about playing “War,” instead of “Indian”

and “Pirate” and “Bandit” with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon

patches. Then, on the evening before marching away, they stealthily

called on their sweethearts—those who had them did, and the others

pretended sweethearts for the occasion—and when it was dark and

mysterious they said good-by and suggested that maybe those girls would

never see them again. And as always happens in such a case, some of

them were in earnest, and two or three of the little group that slipped

away that night never did come back, and somewhere sleep in unmarked

graves.

The “two Sams”—Sam Bowen and Sam Clemens—called on Patty Gore and Julia

Willis for their good-by visit, and, when they left, invited the girls

to “walk through the pickets” with them, which they did as far as Bear

Creek Hill. The girls didn’t notice any pickets, because the pickets

were away calling on girls, too, and probably wouldn’t be back to begin

picketing for some time. So the girls stood there and watched the

soldiers march up Bear Creek Hill and disappear among the trees.

The army had a good enough time that night, marching through the brush

and vines toward New London, though this sort of thing grew rather

monotonous by morning. When they took a look at themselves by daylight,

with their nondescript dress and accoutrements, there was some thing

about it all which appealed to one’s sense of humor rather than to his

patriotism. Colonel Ralls, of Ralls County, however, received them

cordially and made life happier for them with a good breakfast and some

encouraging words. He was authorized to administer the oath of office,

he said, and he proceeded to do it, and made them a speech besides;

also he sent out notice to some of the neighbors—to Col. Bill Splawn,

Farmer Nuck Matson, and others—that the community had an army on its

hands and perhaps ought to do something for it. This brought in a

number of contributions, provisions, paraphernalia, and certain

superfluous horses and mules, which converted the battalion into a

cavalry, and made it possible for it to move on to the front without

further delay. Samuel Clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose

tail had been trimmed down to a tassel at the end in a style that

suggested his name, Paint Brush, upholstered and supplemented with an

extra pair of cowskin boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made

quilt, frying-pan, a carpet sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an

old-fashioned Kentucky rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella,

was a representative unit of the brigade. The proper thing for an army

loaded like that was to go into camp, and they did it. They went over

on Salt River, near Florida, and camped not far from a farm-house with

a big log stable; the latter they used as headquarters. Somebody

suggested that when they went into battle they ought to have short

hair, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold

of it. Tom Lyon found a pair of sheep-shears in the stable and acted as

barber. They were not very sharp shears, but the army stood the torture

for glory in the field, and a group of little darkies collected from

the farm-house to enjoy the performance. The army then elected its

officers. William Ely was chosen captain, with Asa Glasscock as first

lieutenant. Samuel Clemens was then voted second lieutenant, and there

were sergeants and orderlies. There were only three privates when the

election was over, and these could not be distinguished by their

deportment. There was scarcely any discipline in this army.

Then it set in to rain. It rained by day and it rained by night. Salt

River rose until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms. Twice

there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the

battalion went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark,

picking out the best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp

when the alarm was over. Once they fired a volley at a row of mullen

stalks, waving on the brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own

horse that had got loose and had wandered toward him in the dusk.

The rank and file did not care for picket duty. Sam Bowen—ordered by

Lieutenant Clemens to go on guard one afternoon—denounced his superior

and had to be threatened with court-martial and death. Sam went

finally, but he sat in a hot open place and swore at the battalion and

the war in general, and finally went to sleep in the broiling sun.

These things began to tell on patriotism. Presently Lieutenant Clemens

developed a boil, and was obliged to make himself comfortable with some

hay in a horse-trough, where he lay most of the day, violently

denouncing the war and the fools that invented it. Then word came that

“General” Tom Harris, who was in command of the district, was stopping

at a farmhouse two miles away, living on the fat of the land.

That settled it. Most of them knew Tom Harris, and they regarded his

neglect of them as perfidy. They broke camp without further ceremony.

Lieutenant Clemens needed assistance to mount Paint Brush, and the

little mule refused to cross the river; so Ab Grimes took the coil of

rope, hitched one end of it to his own saddle and the other end to

Paint Brush’s neck. Grimes was mounted on a big horse, and when he

started it was necessary for Paint Brush to follow. Arriving at the

farther bank, Grimes looked around, and was horrified to see that the

end of the rope led down in the water with no horse and rider in view.

He spurred up the bank, and the hat of Lieutenant Clemens and the ears

of Paint Brush appeared.

“Ah,” said Clemens, as he mopped his face, “do you know that little

devil waded all the way across?”

A little beyond the river they met General Harris, who ordered them

back to camp. They admonished him to “go there himself.” They said they

had been in that camp and knew all about it. They were going now where

there was food—real food and plenty of it. Then he begged them, but it

was no use. By and by they stopped at a farm-house for supplies. A

tall, bony woman came to the door:

“You’re secesh, ain’t you?”

They acknowledged that they were defenders of the cause and that they

wanted to buy provisions. The request seemed to inflame her.

“Provisions!” she screamed. “Provisions for secesh, and my husband a

colonel in the Union Army. You get out of here!”

She reached for a hickory hoop-pole that stood by the door, and the

army moved on. When they arrived at Col. Bill Splawn’s that night

Colonel Splawn and his family had gone to bed, and it seemed unwise to

disturb them. The hungry army camped in the barnyard and crept into the

hay-loft to sleep. Presently somebody yelled “Fire!” One of the boys

had been smoking and started the hay. Lieutenant Clemens suddenly

wakened, made a quick rolling movement from the blaze, and rolled out

of a big hay-window into the barnyard below. The rest of the army,

startled into action, seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the

same window. The lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck the

ground, and his boil was far from well, but when the burning hay

descended he forgot his disabilities. Literally and figuratively this

was the final straw. With a voice and vigor suited to the urgencies of

the case, he made a spring from under the burning stuff, flung off the

remnants, and with them his last vestige of interest in the war. The

others, now that the fire was, out, seemed to think the incident

boisterously amusing. Whereupon the lieutenant rose up and told them,

collectively and individually, what he thought of them; also he spoke

of the war and the Confederacy, and of the human race at large. They

helped him in, then, for his ankle was swelling badly. Next morning,

when Colonel Splawn had given them a good breakfast, the army set out

for New London.

But Lieutenant Clemens never got any farther than Nuck Matson’s

farm-house. His ankle was so painful by that time that Mrs. Matson had

him put to bed, where he stayed for several weeks, recovering from the

injury and stress of war. A little negro boy was kept on watch for

Union detachments—they were passing pretty frequently now—and when one

came in sight the lieutenant was secluded until the danger passed. When

he was able to travel, he had had enough of war and the Confederacy. He

decided to visit Orion in Keokuk. Orion was a Union abolitionist and

might lead him to mend his doctrines.

As for the rest of the army, it was no longer a unit in the field. Its

members had drifted this way and that, some to return to their

occupations, some to continue in the trade of war. Sam Bowen is said to

have been caught by the Federal troops and put to sawing wood in the

stockade at Hannibal. Ab (A. C.) Grimes became a noted Confederate spy

and is still among those who have lived to furnish the details here set

down. Properly officered and disciplined, that detachment would have

made as brave soldiers as any. Military effectiveness is a matter of

leaders and tactics.

Mark Twain’s own Private History of a ‘Campaign that Failed’ is, of

course, built on this episode. He gives us a delicious account, even if

it does not strikingly resemble the occurrence. The story might have

been still better if he had not introduced the shooting of the soldier

in the dark. The incident was invented, of course, to present the real

horror of war, but it seems incongruous in this burlesque campaign,

and, to some extent at least, it missed fire in its intention.*

* In a book recently published, Mark Twain’s “nephew” is quoted as

authority for the statement that Mark Twain was detailed for river

duty, captured, and paroled, captured again, and confined in a

tobacco-warehouse in St. Louis, etc. Mark Twain had but one nephew:

Samuel E. Moffett, whose Biographical Sketch (vol. xxii, Mark Twain’s

Works) contains no such statement; and nothing of the sort occurred.

XXXI

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY

When Madame Caprell prophesied that Orion Clemens would hold office

under government, she must have seen with true clairvoyant vision. The

inauguration of Abraham Lincoln brought Edward Bates into his Cabinet,

and Bates was Orion’s friend. Orion applied for something, and got it.

James W. Nye had been appointed Territorial governor of Nevada, and

Orion was made Territorial secretary. You could strain a point and

refer to the office as “secretary of state,” which was an imposing

title. Furthermore, the secretary would be acting governor in the

governor’s absence, and there would be various subsidiary honors. When

Lieutenant Clemens arrived in Keokuk, Orion was in the first flush of

his triumph and needed only money to carry him to the scene of new

endeavor. The late lieutenant C. S. A. had accumulated money out of his

pilot salary, and there was no comfortable place just then in the

active Middle West for an officer of either army who had voluntarily

retired from the service. He agreed that if Orion would overlook his

recent brief defection from the Union and appoint him now as his

(Orion’s) secretary, he would supply the funds for both overland

passages, and they would start with no unnecessary delay for a country

so new that all human beings, regardless of previous affiliations and

convictions, were flung into the common fusing-pot and recast in the

general mold of pioneer.

The offer was a boon to Orion. He was always eager to forgive, and the

money was vitally necessary. In the briefest possible time he had

packed his belongings, which included a large unabridged dictionary,

and the brothers were on their way to St. Louis for final leave-taking

before setting out for the great mysterious land of promise—the Pacific

West. From St. Louis they took the boat for St. Jo, whence the Overland

stage started, and for six days “plodded” up the shallow, muddy, snaggy

Missouri, a new experience for the pilot of the Father of Waters.

In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo by land, for

she was walking most of the time, anyhow—climbing over reefs and

clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. The

captain said she was a “bully” boat, and all she wanted was some

“shear” and a bigger wheel. I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but

I had the deep sagacity not to say so.’*

* ‘Roughing It’.

At St. Jo they paid one hundred and fifty dollars apiece for their

stage fare (with something extra for the dictionary), and on the

twenty-sixth of July, 1861, set out on that long, delightful trip

behind sixteen galloping horses—or mules—never stopping except for

meals or to change teams, heading steadily into the sunset, following

it from horizon to horizon over the billowy plains, across the

snow-clad Rockies, covering the seventeen hundred miles between St. Jo

and Carson City (including a two-day halt in Salt Lake City) in

nineteen glorious days. What an inspiration in such a trip! In

‘Roughing It’ he tells it all, and says: “Even at this day it thrills

me through and through to think of the life, the gladness, and the wild

sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my face on those

fine Overland mornings.”

The nights, with the uneven mail-bags for a bed and the bounding

dictionary for company, were less exhilarating; but then youth does not

mind.

All things being now ready, stowed the uneasy dictionary where it would

lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteen and pistols

where we could find them in the dark. Then we smoked a final pipe and

swapped a final yarn; after which we put the pipes, tobacco, and bag of

coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-bags, and made the place as

dark as the inside of a cow, as the conductor phrased it in his

picturesque way. It was certainly as dark as any place could be—nothing

was even dimly visible in it. And finally we rolled ourselves up like

silkworms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to

sleep.

Youth loves that sort of thing, despite its inconvenience. And

sometimes the clatter of the pony-rider swept by in the night, carrying

letters at five dollars apiece and making the Overland trip in eight

days; just a quick beat of hoofs in the distance, a dash, and a hail

from the darkness, the beat of hoofs again, then only the rumble of the

stage and the even, swinging gallop of the mules. Sometimes they got a

glimpse of the ponyrider by day—a flash, as it were, as he sped by. And

every morning brought new scenery, new phases of frontier life,

including, at last, what was to them the strangest phase of all,

Mormonism.

They spent two wonderful days at Salt Lake City, that mysterious and

remote capital of the great American monarchy, who still flaunts her

lawless, orthodox creed the religion of David and Solomon—and thrives.

An obliging official made it his business to show them the city and the

life there, the result of which would be those amusing chapters in

‘Roughing It’ by and by. The Overland travelers set out refreshed from

Salt Lake City, and with a new supply of delicacies—ham, eggs, and

tobacco—things that make such a trip worth while. The author of

‘Roughing It’ assures us of this:

Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these

a pipe—an old, rank, delicious pipe—ham and eggs and scenery, a

“down-grade,” a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented

heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.

But one must read all the story of that long-ago trip. It was a trip so

well worth taking, so well worth recording, so well worth reading and

rereading to-day. We can only read of it now. The Overland stage long

ago made its last trip, and will not start any more. Even if it did,

the life and conditions, the very scenery itself, would not be the

same.

XXXII

THE PIONEER

It was a hot, dusty August 14th that the stage reached Carson City and

drew up before the Ormsby Hotel. It was known that the Territorial

secretary was due to arrive; and something in the nature of a

reception, with refreshments and frontier hospitality, had been

planned. Governor Nye, formerly police commissioner in New York City,

had arrived a short time before, and with his party of retainers

(“heelers” we would call them now), had made an imposing entrance.

Perhaps something of the sort was expected with the advent of the

secretary of state. Instead, the committee saw two way-worn individuals

climb down from the stage, unkempt, unshorn—clothed in the roughest of

frontier costume, the same they had put on at St. Jo—dusty, grimy,

slouchy, and weather-beaten with long days of sun and storm and alkali

desert dust. It is not likely there were two more unprepossessing

officials on the Pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived

Territorial secretary and his brother: Somebody identified them, and

the committee melted away; the half-formed plan of a banquet faded out

and was not heard of again. Soap and water and fresh garments worked a

transformation; but that first impression had been fatal to festivities

of welcome.

Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a “wooden town,” with a

population of two thousand souls. Its main street consisted of a few

blocks of small frame stores, some of which are still standing. In

‘Roughing It’ the author writes:

In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was a “Plaza,” which is

native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains, a large, unfenced,

level vacancy with a Liberty Pole in it, and very useful as a place for

public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and likewise for

teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the Plaza were faced by

stores, offices, and stables. The rest of Carson City was pretty

scattering.

One sees the place pretty clearly from this brief picture of his, but

it requires an extract from a letter written to his mother somewhat

later to populate it. The mineral excitement was at its height in those

days of the early sixties, and had brought together such a congress of

nations as only the greed for precious metal can assemble. The

sidewalks and streets of Carson, and the Plaza, thronged all day with a

motley aggregation—a museum of races, which it was an education merely

to gaze upon. Jane Clemens had required him to write everything just as

it was —“no better and no worse.”

Well—[he says]—, “Gold Hill” sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down; “Wild

Cat” isn’t worth ten cents. The country 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,

sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo-ties), poets, preachers, and

jackass rabbits. I overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it

was “the d—-dest country under the sun,” and that comprehensive

conception I fully subscribe to. It never rains here, and the dew never

falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The

birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the

crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a

desert of the purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand, in

which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation,

“sage-brush,” ventures to grow. . . . I said we are situated in a flat,

sandy desert—true. And surrounded on all sides by such prodigious

mountains that when you look disdainfully down (from them) upon the

insignificant village of Carson, in that instant you are seized with a

burning desire to stretch forth your hand, put the city in your pocket,

and walk off with it.

As to churches, I believe they have got a Catholic one here, but,

like that one the New York fireman spoke of, I believe “they don’t

run her now.”

Carson has been through several phases of change since this was written

—for better and for worse. It is a thriving place in these later days,

and new farming conditions have improved the country roundabout. But it

was a desert outpost then, a catch-all for the human drift which every

whirlwind of discovery sweeps along. Gold and silver hunting and mine

speculations were the industries—gambling, drinking, and murder were

the diversions—of the Nevada capital. Politics developed in due course,

though whether as a business or a diversion is not clear at this time.

The Clemens brothers took lodging with a genial Irishwoman, Mrs.

Murphy, a New York retainer of Governor Nye, who boarded the

camp-followers.* This retinue had come in the hope of Territorial

pickings and mine adventure—soldiers of fortune they were, and a

good-natured lot all together. One of them, Bob Howland, a nephew of

the governor, attracted Samuel Clemens by his clean-cut manner and

commanding eye.

* The Mrs. O’Flannigan of ‘Roughing It’.

“The man who has that eye doesn’t need to go armed,” he wrote later.

“He can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him a

prisoner without saying a single word.” It was the same Bob Howland who

would be known by and by as the most fearless man in the Territory;

who, as city marshal of Aurora, kept that lawless camp in subjection,

and, when the friends of a lot of condemned outlaws were threatening an

attack with general massacre, sent the famous message to Governor Nye:

“All quiet in Aurora. Five men will be hung in an hour.” And it was

quiet, and the programme was carried out. But this is a digression and

somewhat premature.

Orion Clemens, anxious for laurels, established himself in the meager

fashion which he thought the government would approve; and his brother,

finding neither duties nor salary attached to his secondary position,

devoted himself mainly to the study of human nature as exhibited under

frontier conditions. Sometimes, when the nights were cool, he would

build a fire in the office stove, and, with Bob Howland and a few other

choice members of the “Brigade” gathered around, would tell river yarns

in that inimitable fashion which would win him devoted audiences all

his days. His river life had increased his natural languor of habit,

and his slow speech heightened the lazy impression which he was never

unwilling to convey. His hearers generally regarded him as an

easygoing, indolent good fellow with a love of humor—with talent,

perhaps—but as one not likely ever to set the world afire. They did not

happen to think that the same inclination which made them crowd about

to listen and applaud would one day win for him the attention of all

mankind.

Within a brief time Sam Clemens (he was never known as otherwise than

“Sam” among those pioneers) was about the most conspicuous figure on

the Carson streets. His great bushy head of auburn hair, his piercing,

twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of

dress, drew the immediate attention even of strangers; made them turn

to look a second time and then inquire as to his identity.

He had quickly adapted himself to the frontier mode. Lately a river

sovereign and dandy, in fancy percales and patent leathers, he had

become the roughest of rough-clad pioneers, in rusty slouch hat,

flannel shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of the

heavy cowskin boots Always something of a barbarian in love with the

loose habit of unconvention, he went even further than others and

became a sort of paragon of disarray. The more energetic citizens of

Carson did not prophesy much for his future among them. Orion Clemens,

with the stir and bustle of the official new broom, earned their quick

respect; but his brother—well, they often saw him leaning for an hour

or more at a time against an awning support at the corner of King and

Carson streets, smoking a short clay pipe and staring drowsily at the

human kaleidoscope of the Plaza, scarcely changing his position, just

watching, studying, lost in contemplation—all of which was harmless

enough, of course, but how could any one ever get a return out of

employment like that?

Samuel Clemens did not catch the mining fever immediately; there was

too much to see at first to consider any special undertaking. The mere

coming to the frontier was for the present enough; he had no plans. His

chief purpose was to see the world beyond the Rockies, to derive from

it such amusement and profit as might fall in his way. The war would

end, by and by, and he would go back to the river, no doubt. He was

already not far from homesick for the “States” and his associations

there. He closed one letter:

I heard a military band play “What Are the Wild Waves Saying” the other

night, and it brought Ella Creel and Belle (Stotts) across the desert

in an instant, for they sang the song in Orion’s yard the first time I

ever heard it. It was like meeting an old friend. I tell you I could

have swallowed that whole band, trombone and all, if such a compliment

would have been any gratification to them.

His friends contracted the mining mania; Bob Howland and Raish Phillips

went down to Aurora and acquired “feet” in mini-claims and wrote him

enthusiastic letters. With Captain Nye, the governor’s brother, he

visited them and was presented with an interest which permitted him to

contribute an assessment every now and then toward the development of

the mine; but his enthusiasm still languished.

He was interested more in the native riches above ground than in those

concealed under it. He had heard that the timber around Lake Bigler

(Tahoe) promised vast wealth which could be had for the asking. The

lake itself and the adjacent mountains were said to be beautiful beyond

the dream of art. He decided to locate a timber claim on its shores.

He made the trip afoot with a young Ohio lad, John Kinney, and the

account of this trip as set down in ‘Roughing It’ is one of the best

things in the book. The lake proved all they had expected—more than

they expected; it was a veritable habitation of the gods, with its

delicious, winy atmosphere, its vast colonnades of pines, its

measureless depths of water, so clear that to drift on it was like

floating high aloft in mid-nothingness. They staked out a timber claim

and made a semblance of fencing it and of building a habitation, to

comply with the law; but their chief employment was a complete

abandonment to the quiet luxury of that dim solitude: wandering among

the trees, lounging along the shore, or drifting on that transparent,

insubstantial sea. They did not sleep in their house, he says:

“It never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to

hold the ground, and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it.”

They lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the lake, and one

day—it was just at nightfall—it got away from them, fired the forest,

and destroyed their fence and habitation. His picture in ‘Roughing It’

of the superb night spectacle, the mighty mountain conflagration

reflected in the waters of the lake, is splendidly vivid. The reader

may wish to compare it with this extract from a letter written to

Pamela at the time.

The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the

standard-bearers, as we called the tall, dead trees, wrapped in fire,

and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. Then we

could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf

and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a

gleaming, fiery mirror. The mighty roaring of the conflagration,

together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was

no one within six miles of us), rendered the scene very impressive.

Occasionally one of us would remove his pipe from his mouth and say,

“Superb, magnificent!—beautifull—but—by the Lord God Almighty, if we

attempt to sleep in this little patch to-night, we’ll never live till

morning!”

This is good writing too, but it lacks the fancy and the choice of

phrasing which would develop later. The fire ended their first

excursion to Tahoe, but they made others and located other

claims—claims in which the “folks at home,” Mr. Moffett, James Lampton,

and others, were included. It was the same James Lampton who would one

day serve as a model for Colonel Sellers. Evidently Samuel Clemens had

a good opinion of his business capacity in that earlier day, for he

writes:

This is just the country for cousin Jim to live in. I don’t believe it

would take him six months to make $100,000 here if he had $3,000 to

commence with. I suppose he can’t leave his family, though.

Further along in the same letter his own overflowing Seller’s optimism

develops.

Orion and I have confidence enough in this country to think that if the

war lets us alone we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its ever costing

him a cent or a particle of trouble.

This letter bears date of October 25th, and from it we gather that a

certain interest in mining claims had by this time developed.

We have got about 1,650 feet of mining ground, and, if it proves good,

Mr. Moffett’s name will go in, and if not I can get “feet” for him in

the spring.

You see, Pamela, the trouble does not consist in getting mining

ground—for there is plenty enough—but the money to work it with

after you get it.

He refers to Pamela’s two little children, his niece Annie and Baby

Sam,* and promises to enter claims for them—timber claims probably—for

he was by no means sanguine as yet concerning the mines. That was a

long time ago. Tahoe land is sold by the lot, now, to summer residents.

Those claims would have been riches to-day, but they were all abandoned

presently, forgotten in the delirium which goes only with the pursuit

of precious ores.

* Samuel E. Moffett, in later life a well-known journalist and editor.

XXXIII

THE PROSPECTOR

It was not until early winter that Samuel Clemens got the real mining

infection. Everybody had it by that time; the miracle is that he had

not fallen an earlier victim. The wildest stories of sudden fortune

were in the air, some of them undoubtedly true. Men had gone to bed

paupers, on the verge of starvation, and awakened to find themselves

millionaires. Others had sold for a song claims that had been suddenly

found to be fairly stuffed with precious ores. Cart-loads of

bricks—silver and gold—daily drove through the streets.

In the midst of these things reports came from the newly opened

Humboldt region—flamed up with a radiance that was fairly blinding. The

papers declared that Humboldt County “was the richest mineral region on

God’s footstool.” The mountains were said to be literally bursting with

gold and silver. A correspondent of the daily Territorial Enterprise

fairly wallowed in rhetoric, yet found words inadequate to paint the

measureless wealth of the Humboldt mines. No wonder those not already

mad speedily became so. No wonder Samuel Clemens, with his natural

tendency to speculative optimism, yielded to the epidemic and became as

“frenzied as the craziest.” The air to him suddenly began to shimmer;

all his thoughts were of “leads” and “ledges” and “veins”; all his

clouds had silver linings; all his dreams were of gold. He joined an

expedition at once; he reproached himself bitterly for not having

started earlier.

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 1,800 pounds of

provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a

chilly December afternoon.

In a letter to his mother he states that besides provisions and mining

tools, their load consisted of certain luxuries viz., ten pounds of

killikinick, Watts’s Hymns, fourteen decks of cards, Dombey and Son, a

cribbage-board, one small keg of lager-beer, and the “Carmina Sacra.”

The two young lawyers were A. W.(Gus) Oliver (Oliphant in ‘Roughing

It’), and W. H. Clagget. Sam Clemens had known Billy Clagget as a law

student in Keokuk, and they were brought together now by this

association. Both Clagget and Oliver were promising young men, and

would be heard from in time. The blacksmith’s name was Tillou (Ballou),

a sturdy, honest soul with a useful knowledge of mining and the repair

of tools. There were also two dogs in the party—a small curly-tailed

mongrel, Curney, the property of Mr. Tillou, and a young hound. The

combination seemed a strong one.

It proved a weak one in the matter of horses. Oliver and Clemens had

furnished the team, and their selection had not been of the best. It

was two hundred miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand. The horses could

not drag their load and the miners too, so the miners got out. Then

they found it necessary to push.

Not because we were fond of it, Ma—oh, no! but on Bunker’s account.

Bunker was the “near” horse on the larboard side, named after the

attorney-general of this Territory. My horse—and I am sorry you do not

know him personally, Ma, for I feel toward him, sometimes, as if he

were a blood relation of our family—he is so lazy, you know—my horse—I

was going to say, was the “off” horse on the starboard side. But it was

on Bunker’s account, principally, that we pushed behind the wagon. In

fact, Ma, that horse had something on his mind all the way to

Humboldt.*

* S. L. C. to his mother. Published in the Keokuk (Iowa) Gate city.

So they had to push, and most of that two hundred miles through snow

and sand storm they continued to push and swear and groan, sustained

only by the thought that they must arrive at last, when their troubles

would all be at an end, for they would be millionaires in a brief time

and never know want or fatigue any more.

There were compensations: the camp-fire at night was cheerful, the food

satisfying. They bundled close under the blankets and, when it was too

cold to sleep, looked up at the stars, while the future entertainer of

kings would spin yarn after yarn that made his hearers forget their

discomforts. Judge Oliver, the last one of the party alive, in a recent

letter to the writer of this history, says:

He was the life of the camp; but sometimes there would come a reaction

and he could hardly speak for a day or two. One day a pack of wolves

chased us, and the hound Sam speaks of never stopped to look back till

he reached the next station, many miles ahead.

Judge Oliver adds that an Indian war had just ended, and that they

occasionally passed the charred ruin of a shack, and new graves: This

was disturbing enough. Then they came to that desolation of

desolations, the Alkali Desert, where the sand is of unknown depth,

where the road is strewn thickly with the carcasses of dead beasts of

burden, the charred remains of wagons, chains, bolts, and screws, which

thirsty emigrants, grown desperate, have thrown away in the grand hope

of being able, when less encumbered, to reach water.

They traveled all day and night, pushing through that fierce, waterless

waste to reach camp on the other side. It was three o’clock in the

morning when they got across and dropped down utterly exhausted. Judge

Oliver in his letter tells what happened then:

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 pictures of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had passed were

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 then with his

inimitable drawl said: “Boys, they have left us our scalps. Let’s give

them all the flour and sugar they ask for.” And we did give them a good

supply, for we were grateful.

They were eleven weary days pushing their wagon and team the two

hundred miles to Unionville, Humboldt County, arriving at last in a

driving snow-storm. Unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in

the bottom of a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the

other. They were poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side

formed by the hill; the roof, a spread of white cotton. Stones used to

roll down on them sometimes, and Mark Twain tells of live

stock—specifically of a mule and cow—that interrupted the patient,

long-suffering Oliver, who was trying to write poetry, and only

complained when at last “an entire cow came rolling down the hill,

crashed through on the table, and made a shapeless wreck of

everything.”*

* ‘The Innocents Abroad.’

Judge Oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow. He says

there were no cows in Humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a

literary cow, though in any case it will long survive. Judge Oliver’s

name will go down with it to posterity.

In the letter which Samuel Clemens wrote home he tells of what they

found in Unionville.

“National” there was selling at $50 per foot and assayed $2,496 per ton

at the mint in San Francisco. And the “Alda Nueva,” “Peru,” “Delirio,”

“Congress,” “Independent,” and others were immensely rich leads. And

moreover, having winning ways with us, we could get “feet” enough to

make us all rich one of these days.

“I confess with shame,” says the author of ‘Roughing It’, “that I

expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground.” And he

adds that he slipped away from the cabin to find a claim on his own

account, and tells how he came staggering back under a load of golden

specimens; also how his specimens proved to be only worthless mica; and

how he learned that in mining nothing that glitters is gold. His

account in ‘Roughing It’ of the Humboldt mining experience is

sufficiently good history to make detail here unnecessary. Tillou

instructed them in prospecting, and in time they located a fairly

promising claim. They went to work on it with pick and shovel, then

with drill and blasting-powder. Then they gave it up.

“One week of this satisfied me. I resigned.”

They tried to tunnel, but soon resigned again. It was pleasanter to

prospect and locate and trade claims and acquire feet in every new

ledge than it was to dig-and about as profitable. The golden reports of

Humboldt had been based on assays of selected rich specimens, and were

mainly delirium and insanity. The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-Tillou

combination never touched their claims again with pick and shovel,

though their faith, or at least their hope, in them did not immediately

die. Billy Clagget put out his shingle as notary public, and Gus Oliver

put out his as probate judge. Sam Clemens and Tillou, with a

fat-witted, arrogant Prussian named Pfersdoff (Ollendorf) set out for

Carson City. It is not certain what became of the wagon and team, or of

the two dogs.

The Carson travelers were water-bound at a tavern on the Carson River

(the scene of the “Arkansas” sketch), with a fighting, drinking lot.

Pfersdoff got them nearly drowned getting away, and finally succeeded

in getting them absolutely lost in the snow. The author of ‘Roughing

It’ tells us how they gave themselves up to die, and how each swore off

whatever he had in the way of an evil habit, how they cast their

tempters-tobacco, cards, and whisky-into the snow. He further tells us

how next morning, when they woke to find themselves alive, within a few

rods of a hostelry, they surreptitiously dug up those things again and,

deep in shame and luxury, resumed their fallen ways: It was the 29th of

January when they reached Carson City. They had been gone not quite two

months, one of which had been spent in travel. It was a brief period,

but it contained an episode, and it seemed like years.

XXXIV

TERRITORIAL CHARACTERISTICS

Meantime, the Territorial secretary had found difficulties in launching

the ship of state. There was no legislative hall in Carson City; and if

Abram Curry, one of the original owners of the celebrated Gould and

Curry mine—“Curry—old Curry—old Abe Curry,” as he called himself—had

not tendered the use of a hall rent free, the first legislature would

have been obliged to “sit in the desert.” Furthermore, Orion had met

with certain acute troubles of his own. The government at Washington

had not appreciated his economies in the matter of cheap office rental,

and it had stipulated the price which he was to pay for public printing

and various other services-prices fixed according to Eastern standards.

These prices did not obtain in Nevada, and when Orion, confident that

because of his other economies the comptroller would stretch a point

and allow the increased frontier tariff, he was met with the usual

thick-headed official lack of imagination, with the result that the

excess paid was deducted from his slender salary. With a man of less

conscience this condition would easily have been offset by another

wherein other rates, less arbitrary, would have been adjusted to

negotiate the official deficit. With Orion Clemens such a remedy was

not even considered; yielding, unstable, blown by every wind of

influence though he was, Orion’s integrity was a rock.

Governor Nye was among those who presently made this discovery. Old

politician that he was—former police commissioner of New York City—Nye

took care of his own problems in the customary manner. To him, politics

was simply a game—to be played to win. He was a popular, jovial man,

well liked and thought of, but he did not lie awake, as Orion did,

planning economies for the government, or how to make up excess charges

out of his salary. To him Nevada was simply a doorway to the United

States Senate, and in the mean time his brigade required official

recognition and perquisites. The governor found Orion Clemens an

impediment to this policy. Orion could not be brought to a proper

political understanding of “special bills and accounts,” and relations

between the secretary of state and the governor were becoming strained.

It was about this time that the man who had been potentate of the

pilot-house of a Mississippi River steamer returned from Humboldt. He

was fond of the governor, but he had still higher regard for the family

integrity. When he had heard Orion’s troubled story, he called on

Governor Nye and delivered himself in his own fashion. In his former

employments he had acquired a vocabulary and moral backbone sufficient

to his needs. We may regret that no stenographic report was made of the

interview. It would be priceless now. But it is lost; we only know that

Orion’s rectitude was not again assailed, and that curiously enough

Governor Nye apparently conceived a strong admiration and respect for

his brother.

Samuel Clemens, miner, remained but a brief time in Carson City—only

long enough to arrange for a new and more persistent venture. He did

not confess his Humboldt failure to his people; in fact, he had not as

yet confessed it to himself; his avowed purpose was to return to

Humboldt after a brief investigation of the Esmeralda mines. He had

been paying heavy assessments on his holdings there; and, with a

knowledge of mining gained at Unionville, he felt that his personal

attention at Aurora might be important. As a matter of fact, he was by

this time fairly daft on the subject of mines and mining, with the rest

of the community for company.

His earlier praises of the wonders and climate of Tahoe had inspired

his sister Pamela, always frail, with a desire to visit that

health-giving land. Perhaps he felt that he recommended the country

somewhat too highly.

“By George, Pamela,” he said, “I begin to fear that I have invoked a

spirit of some kind or other, which I will find more than difficult to

allay.” He proceeds to recommend California as a residence for any or

all of them, but he is clearly doubtful concerning Nevada.

Some people are malicious enough to think that if the devil were set at

liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would come

here and look sadly around awhile, and then get homesick and go back to

hell again …. Why, I have had my whiskers and mustaches so full of

alkali dust that you’d have thought I worked in a starch factory and

boarded in a flour barrel.

But then he can no longer restrain his youth and optimism. How could

he, with a fortune so plainly in view? It was already in his grasp in

imagination; he was on the way home with it.

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. I came down here from Humboldt, in order to look after our

Esmeralda interests. Yesterday, Bob Howland arrived here, and I have

had a talk with him. He owns with me in the “Horatio and Derby” ledge.

He says our tunnel is in 52 feet, and a small stream of water has been

struck, which bids fair to become a “big thing” by the time the ledge

is reached—sufficient to supply a mill. Now, if you knew anything of

the value of water here, you would perceive at a glance that if the

water should amount to 50 or 100 inches, we wouldn’t care whether

school kept or not. If the ledge should prove to be worthless, we’d

sell the water for money enough to give us quite a lift. But, you see,

the ledge will not prove to be worthless. We have located, near by, a

fine site for a mill, and when we strike the ledge, you know, we’ll

have a mill-site, water-power, and payrock, all handy. Then we sha’n’t

care whether we have capital or not. Mill folks will build us a mill,

and wait for their pay. If nothing goes wrong, we’ll strike the ledge

in June—and if we do, I’ll be home in July, you know.

He pauses at this point for a paragraph of self-analysis—characteristic

and crystal-clear.

So, just keep your clothes on, Pamela, until I come. Don’t you know

that undemonstrated human calculations won’t do to bet on? Don’t you

know that I have only talked, as yet, but proved nothing? Don’t you

know that I have expended money in this country but have made none

myself? Don’t you know that I have never held in my hands a gold or

silver bar that belonged to me? Don’t you know that it’s all talk and

no cider so far? 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 unconcealable

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

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 lets himself go again, full-tilt:

By George, if I just had a thousand dollars I’d be all right! Now

there’s the “Horatio,” for instance. There are five or six shareholders

in it, and I know I could buy half of their interests at, say $20 per

foot, now that flour is worth $50 per barrel and they are pressed for

money, but I am hard up myself, and can’t buy —and in June they’ll

strike the ledge, and then “good-by canary.” I can’t get it for love or

money. Twenty dollars a foot! Think of it! For ground that is proven to

be rich. Twenty dollars, Madam—and we wouldn’t part with a foot of our

75 for five times the sum. So it will be in Humboldt next summer. The

boys will get pushed and sell ground for a song that is worth a

fortune. But I am at the helm now. I have convinced Orion that he

hasn’t business talent enough to carry on a peanut-stand, and he has

solemnly promised me that he will meddle no more with mining or other

matters not connected with the secretary’s office. So, you see, if

mines are to be bought or sold, or tunnels run or shafts sunk, parties

have to come to me—and me only. I’m the “firm,” you know.

There are pages of this, all glowing with golden expectations and

plans. Ah, well! we have all written such letters home at one time and

another-of gold-mines of one form or another.

He closes at last with a bit of pleasantry for his mother.

Ma says: “It looks like a man can’t hold public office and be honest.”

Why, certainly not, Madam. A man can’t hold public office and be

honest. Lord bless you, it is a common practice with Orion to go about

town stealing little things that happen to be lying around loose. And I

don’t remember having heard him speak the truth since we have been in

Nevada. He even tries to prevail upon me to do these things, Ma, but I

wasn’t brought up in that way, you know. You showed the public what you

could do in that line when you raised me, Madam. But then you ought to

have raised me first, so that Orion could have had the benefit of my

example. Do you know that he stole all the stamps out of an 8-stamp

quartz-mill one night, and brought them home under his overcoat and hid

them in the back room?

XXXV

THE MINER

He had about exhausted his own funds by this time, and it was necessary

that Orion should become the financier. The brothers owned their

Esmeralda claims in partnership, and it was agreed that Orion, out of

his modest depleted pay, should furnish the means, while the other

would go actively into the field and develop their riches. Neither had

the slightest doubt but that they would be millionaires presently, and

both were willing to struggle and starve for the few intervening weeks.

It was February when the printer-pilot-miner arrived in Aurora, that

rough, turbulent camp of the Esmeralda district lying about one hundred

miles south of Carson City, on the edge of California, in the Sierra

slopes. Everything was frozen and covered with snow; but there was no

lack of excitement and prospecting and grabbing for “feet” in this

ledge and that, buried deep under the ice and drift. The new arrival

camped with Horatio Phillips (Raish), in a tiny cabin with a domestic

roof (the ruin of it still stands), and they cooked and bunked together

and combined their resources in a common fund. Bob Howland joined them

presently, and later an experienced miner, Calvin H. Higbie (Cal), one

day to be immortalized in the story of ‘Roughing It’ and in the

dedication of that book. Around the cabin stove they would gather, and

paw over their specimens, or test them with blow-pipe and “horn” spoon,

after which they would plan tunnels and figure estimates of prospective

wealth. Never mind if the food was poor and scanty, and the chill wind

came in everywhere, and the roof leaked like a filter; they were living

in a land where all the mountains were banked with nuggets, where all

the rivers ran gold. Bob Howland declared later that they used to go

out at night and gather up empty champagne-bottles and fruit-tins and

pile them in the rear of their cabin to convey to others the appearance

of affluence and high living. When they lacked for other employment and

were likely to be discouraged, the ex-pilot would “ride the bunk” and

smoke and, without money and without price, distribute riches more

valuable than any they would ever dig out of those Esmeralda Hills. At

other times he talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and

wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings. They thought he was

writing letters, though letters were not many and only to Orion during

this period. It was the old literary impulse stirring again, the desire

to set things down for their own sake, the natural hunger for print.

One or two of his earlier letters home had found their way into a

Keokuk paper —the ‘Gate City’. Copies containing them had gone back to

Orion, who had shown them to a representative of the Territorial

Enterprise, a young man named Barstow, who thought them amusing. The

Enterprise reprinted at least one of these letters, or portions of it,

and with this encouragement the author of it sent an occasional

contribution direct to that paper over the pen-name “Josh.” He did not

care to sign his own name. He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate;

he had no desire to be known as a camp scribbler.

He received no pay for these offerings, and expected none. They were

sketches of a broadly burlesque sort, the robust horse-play kind of

humor that belongs to the frontier. They were not especially promising

efforts. One of them was about an old rackabones of a horse, a sort of

preliminary study for “Oahu,” of the Sandwich Islands, or “Baalbec” and

“Jericho,” of Syria. If any one had told him, or had told any reader of

this sketch, that the author of it was knocking at the door of the

house of fame such a person’s judgment or sincerity would have been

open to doubt. Nevertheless, it was true, though the knock was timid

and halting and the summons to cross the threshold long delayed.

A winter mining-camp is the most bleak and comfortless of places. The

saloon and gambling-house furnished the only real warmth and cheer. Our

Aurora miners would have been less than human, or more, if they had not

found diversion now and then in the happy harbors of sin. Once there

was a great ball given at a newly opened pavilion, and Sam Clemens is

said to have distinguished himself by his unrestrained and spontaneous

enjoyment of the tripping harmony. Cal Higbie, who was present, writes:

In changing partners, whenever he saw a hand raised he would grasp it

with great pleasure and sail off into another set, oblivious to his

surroundings. Sometimes he would act as though there was no use in

trying to go right or to dance like other people, and with his eyes

closed he would do a hoe-down or a double-shuffle all alone, talking to

himself and saying that he never dreamed there was so much pleasure to

be obtained at a ball. It was all as natural as a child’s play. By the

second set, all the ladies were falling over themselves to get him for

a partner, and most of the crowd, too full of mirth to dance, were

standing or sitting around, dying with laughter.

What a child he always was—always, to the very end? With the first

break of winter the excitement that had been fermenting and stewing

around camp stoves overflowed into the streets, washed up the gullies,

and assailed the hills. There came then a period of madness, beside

which the Humboldt excitement had been mere intoxication. Higbie says:

It was amazing how wild the people became all over the Pacific coast.

In San Francisco and other large cities barbers, hack-drivers,

servant-girls, merchants, and nearly every class of people would club

together and send agents representing all the way from $5,000 to

$500,000 or more to buy mines. They would buy anything. in the shape of

quartz, whether it contained any mineral value or not.

The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion are humanly

documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they

show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed

excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous,

except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be

violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth

has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the

gambling mania of which mining is the ultimate form. An extract from a

letter of April is a fair exhibit:

Work not yet begun on the “Horatio and Derby”—haven’t seen it yet. It

is still in the snow. Shall begin on it within 3 or 4 weeks —strike the

ledge in July: Guess it is good—worth from $30 to $50 a foot in

California….

Man named Gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim on

Last Chance Hill. Expect he will die.

These mills here are not worth a d—n—except Clayton’s—and it is not in

full working trim yet.

Send me $40 or $50—by mail-immediately. I go to work to-morrow with

pick and shovel. Something’s got to come, by G—, before I let go here.

By the end of April work had become active in the mines, though the

snow in places was still deep and the ground stony with frost. On the

28th he writes:

I have been at work all day blasting and digging, and d—ning 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, 10 or 12 a feet. We are following

down under the ledge, but not taking it out. If we get up a windlass

to-morrow we shall take out the ledge, and see whether it is worth

anything or not.

It must have been hard work picking away at the flinty ledges in the

cold; and the “Dashaway” would seem to have proven a disappointment,

for there is no promising mention of it again. Instead, we hear of the

“Flyaway;” and “Annipolitan” and the “Live Yankee” and of a dozen

others, each of which holds out the beacon of hope for a little while

and then passes from notice forever. In May it is the “Monitor” that is

sure to bring affluence, though realization is no longer regarded as

immediate.

To use a French expression, I have “got my d—-d satisfy” at last. Two

years’ time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything.

Therefore we need fret and fume and worry and doubt no more, but just

lie still and put up with privation for six months. Perhaps 3 months

will “let us out.” Then, if government refuses to pay the rent on your

new office we can do it ourselves. We have got to wait six weeks,

anyhow, for a dividend—maybe longer—but that it will come there is no

shadow of a doubt. I have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral

certainty. I own one-eighth of the new “Monitor Ledge, Clemens

Company,” and money can’t buy a foot of it; because I know it to

contain our fortune. The ledge is six feet wide, and one needs no glass

to see gold and silver in it….

When you and I came out here we did not expect ’63 or ’64 to find us

rich men—and if that proposition had been made we would have accepted

it gladly. Now, it is made. I am willing, now, that “Neary’s tunnel” or

anybody else’s tunnel shall succeed. Some of them may beat us a few

months, but we shall be on hand in the fullness of time, as sure as

fate. I would hate to swap chances with any member of the tribe . . . .

It is the same man who twenty-five years later would fasten his faith

and capital to a type-setting machine and refuse to exchange stock in

it, share for share, with the Mergenthaler linotype. He adds:

But I have struck my tent in Esmeralda, and I care for no mines but

those which I can superintend myself. I am a citizen here now, and I am

satisfied, although 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. I prospected 3/4 of a pound of “Monitor”

yesterday, and Raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and got about 10 or

12 cents in gold and silver, besides the other half of it which we

spilt on the floor and didn’t get….

I tried to break a handsome chunk from a huge piece of my darling

“Monitor” which we brought from the croppings yesterday, but it all

splintered up, and I send you the scraps. I call that “choice”—any d—-d

fool would.

Don’t ask if it has been assayed, for it hasn’t. It don’t need it. It

is simply able to speak for itself. It is six feet wide on top, and

traversed through with veins whose color proclaims their worth.

What the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in the

invincible bomb-proof “Monitor”?

There is much more of this, and other such letters, most of them ending

with demands for money. The living, the tools, the blasting-powder, and

the help eat it up faster than Orion’s salary can grow.

“Send me $50 or $100, all you can spare; put away $150 subject to my

call—we shall need it soon for the tunnel.” The letters are full of

such admonition, and Orion, more insane, if anything, than his brother,

is scraping his dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going.

He is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and

promises faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits

are laid before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent

and profane protests from Aurora.

“The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now,”

the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst. “My back is sore, and

my hands are blistered with handling them to-day.”

But even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later.

He writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still

hope to strike it some day. “But—if we strike it rich—I’ve lost my

guess, that’s all.” Then he adds: “Couldn’t go on the hill to-day. It

snowed. It always snows here, I expect”; and the final heart-sick line,

“Don’t you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?”

This is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work. One feels

the dreary uselessness of the quest.

Yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm. These things

were as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough. In a

still subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his

mother’s face again, or his sister’s, or get married, or revisit the

“Banner State,” until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance

than desperation in the words.

In ‘Roughing It’ the author tells us that, when flour had reached one

dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned

mining and went to milling “as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten

dollars a week.” This statement requires modification. It was not

entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing

“riffles” and “screening tailings.” The money was welcome enough, no

doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his

mines developed he could establish his own mill and personally

superintend the work. It is like him to wish us to believe that he was

obliged to give up being a mining magnate to become a laborer in a

quartz-mill, for there is a grim humor in the confession. That he

abandoned the milling experiment at the end of a week is a true

statement. He got a violent cold in the damp place, and came near

getting salivated, he says in a letter, “working in the quicksilver and

chemicals. I hardly think I shall try the experiment again. It is a

confining business, and I will not be confined for love or money.”

As recreation after this trying experience, Higbie took him on a tour,

prospecting for the traditional “Cement Mine,” a lost claim where, in a

deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as

raisins in a fruitcake. They did not find the mine, but they visited

Mono Lake —that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in

‘Roughing It’ he has so vividly pictured. It was good to get away from

the stress of things; and they repeated the experiment. They made a

walking trip to Yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in

that far, tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings

had ever visited at all. Such trips furnished a delicious respite from

the fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft. Amid mountain-peaks and

giant forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed

worth while. More than once that summer he went alone into the

wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind.

XXXVI

LAST MINING DAYS

It was late in July when he wrote:

If I do not forget it, I will send you, per next mail, a pinch of

decom. (decomposed rock) which I pinched with thumb and finger from

Wide West ledge a while ago. Raish and I have secured 200 out of a

company with 400 ft. in it, which perhaps (the ledge, I mean) is a spur

from the W. W.—our shaft is about 100 ft. from the W. W. shaft. In

order to get in, we agreed to sink 30 ft. We have sublet to another man

for 50 ft., and we pay for powder and sharpening tools.

This was the “Blind Lead” claim of Roughing It, but the episode as set

down in that book is somewhat dramatized. It is quite true that he

visited and nursed Captain Nye while Higbie was off following the

“Cement” ‘ignus fatuus’ and that the “Wide West” holdings were

forfeited through neglect. But if the loss was regarded as a heavy one,

the letters fail to show it. It is a matter of dispute to-day whether

or not the claim was ever of any value. A well-known California author*

declares:

No one need to fear that he ran any chance of being a millionaire

through the “Wide West” mine, for the writer, as a child, played over

that historic spot and saw only a shut-down mill and desolate hole in

the ground to mark the spot where over-hopeful men had sunk thousands

and thousands, that they never recovered.

* Ella Sterling Cummins, author of The Story of the Files, etc.

The “Blind Lead” episode, as related, is presumably a tale of what

might have happened—a possibility rather than an actuality. It is

vividly true in atmosphere, however, and forms a strong and natural

climax for closing the mining episode, while the literary privilege

warrants any liberties he may have taken for art’s sake.

In reality the close of his mining career was not sudden and

spectacular; it was a lingering close, a reluctant and gradual

surrender. The “Josh” letters to the Enterprise had awakened at least a

measure of interest, and Orion had not failed to identify their author

when any promising occasion offered; as a result certain tentative

overtures had been made for similar material. Orion eagerly

communicated such chances, for the money situation was becoming a

desperate one. A letter from the Aurora miner written near the end of

July presents the situation very fully. An extract or two will be

sufficient:

My debts are greater than I thought for—I bought $25 worth of clothing

and sent $25 to Higbie, in the cement diggings. I owe about $45 or $50,

and have got about $45 in my pocket. But how in the h—l I am going to

live on something over $100 until October or November is singular. 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 I’ll 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 N. 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.

Nothing came of these possibilities, but about this time Barstow, of

the Enterprise, conferred with Joseph T. Goodman, editor and owner of

the paper, as to the advisability of adding the author of the “Josh”

letters to their local staff. Joe Goodman, who had as keen a literary

perception as any man that ever pitched a journalistic tent on the

Pacific coast (and there could be no higher praise than that), looked

over the letters and agreed with Barstow that the man who wrote them

had “something in him.” Two of the sketches in particular he thought

promising. One of them was a burlesque report of an egotistical

lecturer who was referred to as “Professor Personal Pronoun.” It closed

by stating that it was “impossible to print his lecture in full, as the

type-cases had run out of capital I’s.” But it was the other sketch

which settled Goodman’s decision. It was also a burlesque report, this

time of a Fourth-of-July oration. It opened, “I was sired by the Great

American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam.” This was followed by a

string of stock patriotic phrases absurdly arranged. But it was the

opening itself that won Goodman’s heart.

“That is the sort 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.

In ‘Roughing It’ we are led to believe that the author regarded this as

a gift from heaven and accepted it straightaway. As a matter of fact,

he fasted and prayed a good while over the “call.” To Orion he wrote:

Barstow has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at

$25 a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail,

if possible.

There was no desperate eagerness, you see, to break into literature,

even under those urgent conditions. It meant the surrender of all hope

in the mines, the confession of another failure. On August 7th he wrote

again to Orion. He had written to Barstow, he said, asking when they

thought he might be needed. He was playing for time to consider.

Now, I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk

of 60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is

barely possible that mail facilities may prove infernally “slow.” 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.

So he had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone. But

eight days later, when he had returned, there was still no decision. In

a letter to Pamela of this date he refers playfully to the discomforts

of his cabin and mentions a hope that he will spend the winter in San

Francisco; but there is no reference in it to any newspaper prospects

—nor to the mines, for that matter. Phillips, Howland, and Higbie would

seem to have given up by this time, and he was camping with Dan Twing

and a dog, a combination amusingly described. It is a pleasant enough

letter, but the note of discouragement creeps in:

I did think for a while of going home this fall—but when I found that

that was, and had been, the cherished intention and the darling

aspiration every year of these old care-worn Californians for twelve

weary years, I felt a little uncomfortable, so I stole a march on

Disappointment and said I would not go home this fall. This country

suits me, and it shall suit me whether or no.

He was dying hard, desperately hard; how could he know, to paraphrase

the old form of Christian comfort, that his end as a miner would mean,

in another sphere, “a brighter resurrection” than even his rainbow

imagination could paint?

XXXVII

THE NEW ESTATE

It was the afternoon of a hot, dusty August day when a worn,

travel-stained pilgrim drifted laggingly into the office of the

Virginia City Enterprise, then in its new building on C Street, and,

loosening a heavy roll of blankets from his shoulders, dropped wearily

into a chair. He wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel

shirt, a Navy revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops. A

tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny

beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist.

Aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia. He had walked

that distance, carrying his heavy load. Editor Goodman was absent at

the moment, but the other proprietor, Denis E. McCarthy, signified that

the caller might 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 am 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:

William Wright, who had won a wide celebrity on the Coast as Dan de

Quille, was in the editorial chair and took charge of the new arrival.

He was going on a trip to the States soon; it was mainly on this

account that the new man had been engaged. The “Josh” letters were very

good, in Dan’s opinion; he gave their author a cordial welcome, and

took him around to his boarding-place. It was the beginning of an

association that continued during Samuel Clemens’s stay in Virginia

City and of a friendship that lasted many years.

The Territorial Enterprise was one of the most remarkable frontier

papers ever published. Its editor-in-chief, Joseph Goodman, was a man

with rare appreciation, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive

newspaper policy. Being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond

the general purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely

free speech, provided any serious statement it contained was based upon

knowledge. His instructions to the new reporter were about as follows:

“Never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so

and so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak

out and say it is so and so. In the one case you are likely to be shot,

and in the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve

the public confidence.”

Goodman was not new to the West. He had come to California as a boy and

had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns. Early in

’61, when the Comstock Lode* was new and Virginia in the first flush of

its monster boom, he and Denis McCarthy had scraped together a few

dollars and bought the paper. It had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a

while, but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty the

Enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift

compositors brought up from San Francisco, had become altogether

metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the Coast.

It had been borne upward by the Comstock tide, though its fearless,

picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere. Goodman

himself was a fine, forceful writer, and Dan de Quille and R. M.

Daggett (afterward United States minister to Hawaii) were

representative of Enterprise men.**

* Named for its discoverer, Henry T. P. Comstock, a half-crazy miner,

who realized very little from his stupendous find.

** The Comstock of that day became famous for its journalism.

Associated with the Virginia papers then or soon afterward were such

men as Tom Fitch (the silver-tongued orator), Alf Doten, W. J. Forbes,

C. C. Goodwin, H. R. Mighels, Clement T. Rice, Arthur McEwen, and Sam

Davis—a great array indeed for a new Territory.

Samuel Clemens fitted precisely into this group. He added the fresh,

rugged vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the

Comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a

more lavish, more overwhelming scale.

There was no uncertainty about the Comstock; the silver and gold were

there. Flanking the foot of Mount Davidson, the towns of Gold Hill and

Virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and

underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode

whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the

world. The streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine

owners, and adventurers—riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always

ready to drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as

of gold. Comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the

better. The town of Virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of

them. Everybody had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good

time. The Enterprise, “Comstock to the backbone,” did what it could to

help things along.

It was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself. Goodman let the

boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any

subject. Often they wrote of each other—squibs and burlesques, which

gratified the Comstock far more than mere news.* It was the proper

class-room for Mark Twain, an encouraging audience and free utterance:

fortune could have devised nothing better for him than that.

* The indifference to ‘news’ was noble—none the less so because it was

so blissfully unconscious. Editors Mark or Dan would dismiss a murder

with a couple of inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy

sketch: “Arthur McEwen”

He was peculiarly fitted for the position. Unspoiled humanity appealed

to him, and the Comstock presented human nature in its earliest

landscape forms. Furthermore, the Comstock was essentially

optimistic—so was he; any hole in the ground to him held a possible,

even a probable, fortune.

His pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering. Remembering

marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in

the same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of

news. He could travel all day without a note-book and at night

reproduce the day’s budget or at least the picturesqueness of it,

without error. He was presently accounted a good reporter, except where

statistics —measurements and figures—were concerned. These he gave “a

lick and a promise,” according to De Quille, who wrote afterward of

their associations. De Quille says further:

Mark and I agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was a

rush of events; but we often cruised in company, he taking the items of

news he could handle best, and I such as I felt competent to work up.

However, we wrote at the same table and frequently helped each other

with such suggestions as occurred to us during the brief consultations

we held in regard to the handling of any matters of importance. Never

was there an angry word between us in all the time we worked together.

De Quille tells how Clemens clipped items with a knife when there were

no scissors handy, and slashed through on the top of his desk, which in

time took on the semblance “of a huge polar star, spiritedly dashing

forth a thousand rays.”

The author of ‘Roughing It’ has given us a better picture of the

Virginia City of those days and his work there than any one else will

ever write. He has made us feel the general spirit of affluence that

prevailed; how the problem was not to get money, but to spend it; how

“feet” in any one of a hundred mines could be had for the asking; how

such shares were offered like apples or cigars or bonbons, as a natural

matter of courtesy when one happened to have his supply in view; how

any one connected with a newspaper would have stocks thrust upon him,

and how in a brief time he had acquired a trunk ful of such riches and

usually had something to sell when any of the claims made a stir on the

market. He has told us of the desperadoes and their trifling regard for

human life, and preserved other elemental characters of these prodigal

days. The funeral of Buck Fanshaw that amazing masterpiece—is a

complete epitome of the social frontier.

It would not be the part of wisdom to attempt another inclusive

presentation of Comstock conditions. We may only hope to add a few

details of history, justified now by time and circumstances, to

supplement the picture with certain data of personality preserved from

the drift of years.

XXXVIII

ONE OF THE “STAFF”

The new reporter found acquaintance easy. The office force was like one

family among which there was no line of caste. Proprietors, editors,

and printers were social equals; there was little ceremony among

them—none at all outside of the office.* Samuel Clemens immediately

became “Sam,” or “Josh,” to his associates, just as De Quille was “Dan”

and Goodman “Joe.” He found that he disliked the name of Josh, and, as

he did not sign it again, it was presently dropped. The office, and

Virginia City generally, quickly grew fond of him, delighting in his

originality and measured speech. Enterprise readers began to identify

his work, then unsigned, and to enjoy its fresh phrasing, even when it

was only the usual local item or mining notice. True to its name and

reputation, the paper had added a new attraction.

* “The paper went to press at two in the morning, then all the staff

and all the compositors gathered themselves together in the

composing-room and drank beer and sang the popular war-songs of the day

until dawn.”—S. L. C., in 1908.

It was only a brief time after his arrival in Virginia City that

Clemens began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation,

not always in an enviable fashion, across the Sierras and down the

Pacific coast. With one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as

known there is not a single file of the Enterprise in existence. Only a

few stray copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of

some of these literary pranks and of their results. They were usually

intended as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper

or locality; but victims were gathered by the wholesale in their

seductive web. Mark Twain himself, in his book of Sketches, has set

down something concerning the first of these, “The Petrified Man,” and

of another, “My Bloody Massacre,” but in neither case has he told it

all. “The Petrified Man” hoax was directed at an official named Sewall,

a coroner and justice of the peace at Humboldt, who had been pompously

indifferent in the matter of supplying news. The story, told with great

circumstance and apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a

petrified prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in

the desert more than one hundred miles from Humboldt, and how Sewall

had made the perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an

inquest over a man that had been dead three hundred years; also how,

“with that delicacy so characteristic of him,” Sewall had forbidden the

miners from blasting him from his position. The account further stated

that the hands of the deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion; and

the description of the arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other

matters that at first, or even second, reading one might not see that

the position indicated was the ancient one which begins with the thumb

at the nose and in many ages has been used impolitely to express

ridicule and the word “sold.” But the description was a shade too

ingenious. The author expected that the exchanges would see the joke

and perhaps assist in the fun he would have with Sewall. He did not

contemplate a joke on the papers themselves. As a matter of fact, no

one saw the “sell” and most of the papers printed his story of the

petrified man as a genuine discovery. This was a surprise, and a

momentary disappointment; then he realized that he had builded better

than he knew. He gathered up a bundle of the exchanges and sent them to

Sewall; also he sent marked copies to scientific men in various parts

of the United States. The papers had taken it seriously; perhaps the

scientists would. Some of them did, and Sewall’s days became unhappy

because of letters received asking further information. As literature,

the effort did not rank high, and as a trick on an obscure official it

was hardly worth while; but, as a joke on the Coast exchanges and press

generally, it was greatly regarded and its author, though as yet

unnamed, acquired prestige.

Inquiries began to be made as to who was the smart chap in Virginia

that did these things. The papers became wary and read Enterprise items

twice before clipping them. Clemens turned his attention to other

matters to lull suspicion. The great “Dutch Nick Massacre” did not

follow until a year later.

Reference has already been made to the Comstock’s delight in humor of a

positive sort. The practical joke was legal tender in Virginia. One

might protest and swear, but he must take it. An example of Comstock

humor, regarded as the finest assay, is an incident still told of

Leslie Blackburn and Pat Holland, two gay men about town. They were

coming down C Street one morning when they saw some fine watermelons on

a fruit-stand at the International Hotel corner. Watermelons were rare

and costly in that day and locality, and these were worth three dollars

apiece. Blackburn said:

“Pat, let’s get one of those watermelons. You engage that fellow in

conversation while I stand at the corner, where I can step around out

of sight easily. When you have got him interested, point to something

on the back shelf and pitch me a melon.”

This appealed to Holland, and he carried out his part of the plan

perfectly; but when he pitched the watermelon Blackburn simply put his

hands in his pockets, and stepped around the corner, leaving the melon

a fearful disaster on the pavement. It was almost impossible for Pat to

explain to the fruit-man why he pitched away a three-dollar melon like

that even after paying for it, and it was still more trying, also more

expensive, to explain to the boys facing the various bars along C

Street.

Sam Clemens, himself a practical joker in his youth, found a healthy

delight in this knock-down humor of the Comstock. It appealed to his

vigorous, elemental nature. He seldom indulged physically in such

things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the

ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper,

droll manner, and rare gift of invective made him an enticing victim.

Among the Enterprise compositors was one by the name of Stephen E.

Gillis (Steve, of course—one of the “fighting Gillises”), a small,

fearless young fellow, handsome, quick of wit, with eyes like

needle-points.

“Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds,” Mark Twain once wrote of him,

“but it was well known throughout the Territory that with his fists he

could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science

be what they might.”

Clemens was fond of Steve Gillis from the first. The two became closely

associated in time, and were always bosom friends; but Steve was a

merciless joker, and never as long as they were together could he

“resist the temptation of making Sam swear,” claiming that his

profanity was grander than any music.

A word hereabout Mark Twain’s profanity. Born with a matchless gift of

phrase, the printing-office, the river, and the mines had developed it

in a rare perfection. To hear him denounce a thing was to give one the

fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves. Every characterization

seemed the most perfect fit possible until he applied the next. And

somehow his profanity was seldom an offense. It was not mere idle

swearing; it seemed always genuine and serious. His selection of

epithet was always dignified and stately, from whatever source—and it

might be from the Bible or the gutter. Some one has defined dirt as

misplaced matter. It is perhaps the greatest definition ever uttered.

It is absolutely universal in its application, and it recurs now,

remembering Mark Twain’s profanity. For it was rarely misplaced; hence

it did not often offend. It seemed, in fact, the safety-valve of his

high-pressure intellectual engine. When he had blown off he was always

calm, gentle; forgiving, and even tender. Once following an outburst he

said, placidly:

“In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate

circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.”

It seems proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to

magnify or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which

forms its chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of

course, but with good conscience and clear intent.

Led by Steve Gillis, the Enterprise force used to devise tricks to set

him going. One of these was to hide articles from his desk. He detested

the work necessary to the care of a lamp, and wrote by the light of a

candle. To hide “Sam’s candle” was a sure way to get prompt and

vigorous return. He would look for it a little; then he would begin a

slow, circular walk—a habit acquired in the limitations of the

pilot-house —and his denunciation of the thieves was like a great

orchestration of wrong. By and by the office boy, supposedly innocent,

would find another for him, and all would be forgotten. He made a

placard, labeled with fearful threats and anathemas, warning any one

against touching his candle; but one night both the placard and the

candle were gone.

Now, among his Virginia acquaintances was a young minister, a Mr.

Rising, “the fragile, gentle new fledgling” of the Buck Fanshaw

episode. Clemens greatly admired Mr. Rising’s evident sincerity, and

the young minister had quickly recognized the new reporter’s

superiority of mind. Now and then he came to the office to call on him.

Unfortunately, he happened to step in just at that moment when,

infuriated by the latest theft of his property, Samuel Clemens was

engaged in his rotary denunciation of the criminals, oblivious of every

other circumstance. Mr. Rising stood spellbound by this, to him, new

phase of genius, and at last his friend became dimly aware of him. He

did not halt in his scathing treadmill and continued in the slow

monotone of speech:

“I know, Mr. Rising, I know it’s wicked to talk like this; I know it is

wrong. I know I shall certainly go to hell for it. But if you had a

candle, Mr. Rising, and those thieves should carry it off every night,

I know that you would say, just as I say, Mr. Rising, G-d d—n their

impenitent souls, may they roast in hell for a million years.”

The little clergyman caught his breath.

“Maybe I should, Mr. Clemens,” he replied, “but I should try to say,

‘Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.’”

“Oh, well! if you put it on the ground that they are just fools, that

alters the case, as I am one of that class myself. Come in and we’ll

try to forgive them and forget about it.”*

* Mark Twain had a good many experiences with young ministers. He was

always fond of them, and they often sought him out. Once, long

afterward, at a hotel, he wanted a boy to polish his shoes, and had

rung a number of times without getting any response. Presently, he

thought he heard somebody approaching in the hall outside. He flung

open the door, and a small, youngish-looking person, who seemed to have

been hesitating at the door, made a movement as though to depart

hastily. Clemens grabbed him by the collar.

“Look here,” he said, “I’ve been waiting and ringing here for half

an hour. Now I want you to take those shoes, and polish them,

quick. Do you hear?”

The slim, youthful person trembled a good deal, and said: “I would,

Mr. Clemens, I would indeed, sir, if I could. But I’m a minister of

the Gospel, and I’m not prepared for such work.”

XXXIX

PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY

There was a side to Samuel Clemens that in those days few of his

associates saw. This was the poetic, the philosophic, the contemplative

side. Joseph Goodman recognized this phase of his character, and, while

he perhaps did not regard it as a future literary asset, he delighted

in it, and in their hours of quiet association together encouraged its

exhibition. It is rather curious that with all his literary penetration

Goodman did not dream of a future celebrity for Clemens. He afterward

said:

“If I had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, Dan de Quille or

Sam, would become distinguished, I should have said De Quille. Dan was

talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. Of

course, I recognized the unusualness of Sam’s gifts, but he was

eccentric and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that I should

have prophesied fame for him then.”

Goodman, like MacFarlane in Cincinnati, half a dozen years before,

though by a different method, discovered and developed the deeper vein.

Often the two, dining together in a French restaurant, discussed life,

subtler philosophies, recalled various phases of human history,

remembered and recited the poems that gave them especial enjoyment.

“The Burial of Moses,” with its noble phrasing and majestic imagery,

appealed strongly to Clemens, and he recited it with great power. The

first stanza in particular always stirred him, and it stirred his

hearer as well. 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 sepulchre,

And no man saw it e’er,

For the angels of God, upturned the sod,

And laid the dead man there.

Another stanza that he cared for almost as much was the one beginning:

And had he not high honor

—The hill-side for a pall,

To lie in state while angels wait

With stars for tapers tall,

And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes,

Over his bier to wave,

And God’s own hand in that lonely land,

To lay him in the grave?

Without doubt he was moved to emulate the simple grandeur of that poem,

for he often repeated it in those days, and somewhat later we find it

copied into his notebook in full. It would seem to have become to him a

sort of literary touchstone; and in some measure it may be regarded as

accountable for the fact that in the fullness of time “he made use of

the purest English of any modern writer.” These are Goodman’s words,

though William Dean Howells has said them, also, in substance, and

Brander Matthews, and many others who know about such things. Goodman

adds, “The simplicity and beauty of his style are almost without a

parallel, except in the common version of the Bible,” which is also

true. One is reminded of what Macaulay said of Milton:

“There would seem at first sight to be no more in his words than in

other words. But they are words of enchantment. No sooner are they

pronounced than the past is present and the distance near. New forms of

beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the

memory give up their dead.”

One drifts ahead, remembering these things. The triumph of words, the

mastery of phrases, lay all before him at the time of which we are

writing now. He was twenty-seven. At that age Rudyard Kipling had

reached his meridian. Samuel Clemens was still in the classroom.

Everything came as a lesson-phrase, form, aspect, and combination;

nothing escaped unvalued. The poetic phase of things particularly

impressed him. Once at a dinner with Goodman, when the lamp-light from

the chandelier struck down through the claret on the tablecloth in a

great red stain, he pointed to it dramatically “Look, Joe,” he said,

“the angry tint of wine.”

It was at one of these private sessions, late in ’62, that Clemens

proposed to report the coming meeting of the Carson legislature. He

knew nothing of such work and had small knowledge of parliamentary

proceedings. Formerly it had been done by a man named Gillespie, but

Gillespie was now clerk of the house. Goodman hesitated; then,

remembering that whether Clemens got the reports right or not, he would

at least make them readable, agreed to let him undertake the work.

XL

“MARK TWAIN”

The early Nevada legislature was an interesting assembly. All State

legislatures are that, and this was a mining frontier. No attempt can

be made to describe it. It was chiefly distinguished for a large

ignorance of procedure, a wide latitude of speech, a noble appreciation

of humor, and plenty of brains. How fortunate Mark Twain was in his

schooling, to be kept away from institutional training, to be placed in

one after another of those universities of life where the sole

curriculum is the study of the native inclinations and activities of

mankind! Sometimes, in after-years, he used to regret the lack of

systematic training. Well for him—and for us—that he escaped that

blight.

For the study of human nature the Nevada assembly was a veritable

lecture-room. In it his understanding, his wit, his phrasing, his

self-assuredness grew like Jack’s bean-stalk, which in time was ready

to break through into a land above the sky. He made some curious

blunders in his reports, in the beginning; but he was so frank in his

ignorance and in his confession of it that the very unsophistication of

his early letters became their chief charm. Gillespie coached him on

parliamentary matters, and in time the reports became technically as

well as artistically good. Clemens in return christened Gillespie

“Young, Jefferson’s Manual,” a title which he bore, rather proudly

indeed, for many years.

Another “entitlement” growing out of those early reports, and possibly

less satisfactory to its owner, was the one accorded to Clement T.

Rice, of the Virginia City Union. Rice knew the legislative work

perfectly and concluded to poke fun at the Enterprise letters.

But this was a mistake. Clemens in his next letter declared that Rice’s

reports might be parliamentary enough, but that they covered with

glittering technicalities the most festering mass of misstatement, and

even crime. He avowed that they were wholly untrustworthy; dubbed the

author of them “The Unreliable,” and in future letters never referred

to him by any other term. Carson and the Comstock and the papers of the

Coast delighted in this burlesque journalistic warfare, and Rice was

“The Unreliable” for life.

Rice and Clemens, it should be said, though rivals, were the best of

friends, and there was never any real animosity between them.

Clemens quickly became a favorite with the members; his sharp letters,

with their amusing turn of phrase and their sincerity, won general

friendship. Jack Simmons, speaker of the house, and Billy Clagget, the

Humboldt delegation, were his special cronies and kept him on the

inside of the political machine. Clagget had remained in Unionville

after the mining venture, warned his Keokuk sweetheart, and settled

down into politics and law. In due time he would become a leading light

and go to Congress. He was already a notable figure of forceful

eloquence and tousled, unkempt hair. Simmons, Clagget, and Clemens were

easily the three conspicuous figures of the session.

It must have been gratifying to the former prospector and miner to come

back to Carson City a person of consequence, where less than a year

before he had been regarded as no more than an amusing indolent fellow,

a figure to smile at, but unimportant. There is a photograph extant of

Clemens and his friends Clagget and Simmons in a group, and we gather

from it that he now arrayed himself in a long broadcloth cloak, a

starched shirt, and polished boots. Once more he had become the glass

of fashion that he had been on the river. He made his residence with

Orion, whose wife and little daughter Jennie had by this time come out

from the States. “Sister Mollie,” as wife of the acting governor, was

presently social leader of the little capital; her brilliant

brother-in-law its chief ornament. His merriment and songs and good

nature made him a favorite guest. His lines had fallen in pleasant

places; he could afford to smile at the hard Esmeralda days.

He was not altogether satisfied. His letters, copied and quoted all

along the Coast, were unsigned. They were easily identified with one

another, but not with a personality. He realized that to build a

reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name.

He gave the matter a good deal of thought. He did not consider the use

of his own name; the ‘nom de plume’ was the fashion of the time. He

wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a

good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing. Just

then—this was early in 1863—news came to him that the old pilot he had

wounded by his satire, Isaiah Sellers, was dead. At once the pen-name

of Captain Sellers recurred to him. That was it; that was the sort of

name he wanted. It was not trivial; it had all the qualities—Sellers

would never need it again. Clemens decided he would give it a new

meaning and new association in this far-away land. He went up to

Virginia City.

“Joe,” he said, to Goodman, “I want to sign my articles. I want to be

identified to a wider audience.”

“All right, Sam. What name do you want to use ‘Josh’?”

“No, I want to sign them ‘Mark Twain.’ It is an old river term, a

leads-man’s call, signifying two fathoms—twelve feet. It has a richness

about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark

night; it meant safe water.”

He did not then mention that Captain Isaiah Sellers had used and

dropped the name. He was ashamed of his part in that episode, and the

offense was still too recent for confession. Goodman considered a

moment:

“Very well, Sam,” he said, “that sounds like a good name.”

It was indeed a good name. In all the nomenclature of the world no more

forceful combination of words could have been selected to express the

man for whom they stood. The name Mark Twain is as infinite, as

fundamental as that of John Smith, without the latter’s wasting

distribution of strength. If all the prestige in the name of John Smith

were combined in a single individual, its dynamic energy might give it

the carrying power of Mark Twain. Let this be as it may, it has proven

the greatest ‘nom de plume’ ever chosen—a name exactly in accord with

the man, his work, and his career.

It is not surprising that Goodman did not recognize this at the moment.

We should not guess the force that lies in a twelve-inch shell if we

had never seen one before or heard of its seismic destruction. We

should have to wait and see it fired, and take account of the result.

It was first signed to a Carson letter bearing date of February 2,

1863, and from that time was attached to all Samuel Clemens’s work. The

work was neither better nor worse than before, but it had suddenly

acquired identification and special interest. Members of the

legislature and friends in Virginia and Carson immediately began to

address him as “Mark.” The papers of the Coast took it up, and within a

period to be measured by weeks he was no longer “Sam” or “Clemens” or

“that bright chap on the Enterprise,” but “Mark”—“Mark Twain.” No ‘nom

de plume’ was ever so quickly and generally accepted as that. De

Quille, returning from the East after an absence of several months,

found his room and deskmate with the distinction of a new name and

fame.

It is curious that in the letters to the home folks preserved from that

period there is no mention of his new title and its success. In fact,

the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to

tell of the mining shares he has accumulated, their present and

prospective values. However, many of the letters are undoubtedly

missing. Such as have been preserved are rather airy epistles full of

his abounding joy of life and good nature. Also they bear evidence of

the renewal of his old river habit of sending money home—twenty dollars

in each letter, with intervals of a week or so between.

XLI

THE CREAM OF COMSTOCK HUMOR

With the adjournment of the legislature, Samuel Clemens returned to

Virginia City distinctly a notability—Mark Twain. He was regarded as

leading man on the Enterprise—which in itself was high distinction on

the Comstock—while his improved dress and increased prosperity

commanded additional respect. When visitors of note came

along—well-known actors, lecturers, politicians—he was introduced as

one of the Comstock features which it was proper to see, along with the

Ophir and Gould and Curry mines, and the new hundred-stamp quartz-mill.

He was rather grieved and hurt, therefore, when, after several

collections had been taken up in the Enterprise office to present

various members of the staff with meerschaum pipes, none had come to

him. He mentioned this apparent slight to Steve Gillis:

“Nobody ever gives me a meerschaum pipe,” he said, plaintively. “Don’t

I deserve one yet?”

Unhappy day! To that remorseless creature, Steve Gillis, this was a

golden opportunity for deviltry of a kind that delighted his soul. This

is the story, precisely as Gillis himself told it to the writer of

these annals more than a generation later:

“There was a German kept a cigar store in Virginia City and always had

a fine assortment of meerschaum pipes. These pipes usually cost

anywhere from forty to seventy-five dollars.

“One day Denis McCarthy and I were walking by the old German’s place,

and stopped to look in at the display in the window. Among other things

there was one large imitation meerschaum with a high bowl and a long

stem, marked a dollar and a half.

“I decided that that would be just the pipe for Sam. We went in and

bought it, also a very much longer stem. I think the stem alone cost

three dollars. Then we had a little German-silver plate engraved with

Mark’s name on it and by whom presented, and made preparations for the

presentation. Charlie Pope—[afterward proprietor of Pope’s Theater, St.

Louis]—was playing at the Opera House at the time, and we engaged him

to make the presentation speech.

“Then we let in Dan de Quille, Mark’s closest friend, to act the part

of Judas—to tell Mark privately that he, was going to be presented with

a fine pipe, so that he could have a speech prepared in reply to

Pope’s. It was awful low-down in Dan. We arranged to have the affair

come off in the saloon beneath the Opera House after the play was over.

“Everything went off handsomely; but it was a pretty remorseful

occasion, and some of us had a hang-dog look; for Sam took it in such

sincerity, and had prepared one of the most beautiful speeches I ever

heard him make. Pope’s presentation, too, was beautifully done. He told

Sam how his friends all loved him, and that this pipe, purchased at so

great an expense, was but a small token of their affection. But Sam’s

reply, which was supposed to be impromptu, actually brought the tears

to the eyes of some of us, and he was interrupted every other minute

with applause. I never felt so sorry for anybody.

“Still, we were bent on seeing the thing through. After Sam’s speech

was finished, he ordered expensive wines—champagne and sparkling

Moselle. Then we went out to do the town, and kept things going until

morning to drown our sorrow.

“Well, next day, of course, he started in to color the pipe. It

wouldn’t color any more than a piece of chalk, which was about all it

was. Sam would smoke and smoke, and complain that it didn’t seem to

taste right, and that it wouldn’t color. Finally Denis said to him one

day:

“‘Oh, Sam, don’t you know that’s just a damned old egg-shell, and that

the boys bought it for a dollar and a half and presented you with it

for a joke?’

“Then Sam was furious, and we laid the whole thing on Dan de Quille. He

had a thunder-cloud on his face when he started up for the Local Room,

where Dan was. He went in and closed the door behind him, and locked

it, and put the key in his pocket—an awful sign. Dan was there alone,

writing at his table.

“Sam said, ‘Dan, did you know, when you invited me to make that speech,

that those fellows were going to give me a bogus pipe?’

“There was no way for Dan to escape, and he confessed. Sam walked up

and down the floor, as if trying to decide which way to slay Dan.

Finally he said:

“‘Oh, Dan, to think that you, my dearest friend, who knew how little

money I had, and how hard I would work to prepare a speech that would

show my gratitude to my friends, should be the traitor, the Judas, to

betray me with a kiss! Dan, I never want to look on your face again.

You knew I would spend every dollar I had on those pirates when I

couldn’t afford to spend anything; and yet you let me do it; you aided

and abetted their diabolical plan, and you even got me to get up that

damned speech to make the thing still more ridiculous.’

“Of course Dan felt terribly, and tried to defend himself by saying

that they were really going to present him with a fine pipe—a genuine

one, this time. But Sam at first refused to be comforted; and when, a

few days later, I went in with the pipe and said, ‘Sam, here’s the pipe

the boys meant to give you all the time,’ and tried to apologize, he

looked around a little coldly, and said:

“‘Is that another of those bogus old pipes?’