Delphi complete works of.., p.562
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 562
These, of course, were the days of the rise of the American West, from a vast untraversed wilderness to an El Dorado of gold and silver. The gold discoveries in California had started the ‘ ’forty-niners’ on the trail. In the decade following, a flock of prospectors found their way into the mountains and disclosed the fabulous wealth of silver-bearing loads of the district of the Carson Valley, a part of the Mormon territory of Utah. It was the organization of this district as the territory of Nevada which gave to the two Clemens brothers the opportunity of taking part in the western movement. To get to Nevada they must go overland by the stage. There was as yet no railway across the continent, nor was there till some years after the Civil War. To reach California one might make the stormy voyage around Cape Horn; or choose the dangerous Isthmus route, by Panama or Nicaragua; or the stage route over the prairies and mountains. For Nevada the stage route — only seventeen hundred miles! — was the obvious choice.
Behold, then, the Clemens brothers mounting the coach at St. Jo, Missouri, climbing up on the mail-sacks to bid farewell to warfare in the East and seek peace among the savages.
ROUGHING IT IN THE WEST. 1861-1866
ORION CLEMENS, SECRETARY for the territory of Nevada, and his brother Sam, ex-pilot and retired Confederate soldier, set out from St. Jo for Carson City, Nevada, on the 26th of July 1861. Before them was seventeen hundred miles of prairie, mountain and desert, and nineteen days of glorious transit.
Mark Twain, in his book called Roughing It, has recalled in his own way his experience of the journey. There is no doubt of the exhilaration, the excitement, the thrill of it. But his account of it, like all his western books, is a standing perplexity to many of his British admirers. Where do the facts end and the lies begin? How much is statistical fact and how much is sheer exuberant exaggeration? For instance, is there, asks the reader, such an animal as the ‘Jackass Rabbit’? Is it true that such an animal sits and ‘thinks about its sins,’ and then moves off so fast that ‘long after he is out of sight you can hear him whizz’? Many British readers have felt that this is open to doubt.
Or take the account of the Mormon settlement at Salt Lake. Is it really true that Brigham Young looked round to find one of his children and then gave up and said, ‘I thought I would have known the little cub again, but I don’t’? Seems a little hard to believe, doesn’t it? Or again, is the water in the Humbolt county so full of alkali that it is like lye? or the water in Lake Tahoe so clear that one can see through eighty feet of it? or is there a ‘washoe’ wind which upsets stagecoaches and which blows so hard in Carson City as to account for the prevalence of so many bald-headed people, and which is described as a ‘soaring dust drift about the size of the United States’?
In this wonderland of marvel and adventure the American reader easily finds his way. He knows by instinct that Mark Twain did not hear the same story told about Horace Greeley four hundred and eighty-four times; and he knows, on the other hand, that the claims staked out on the Ophir mine were worth four thousand dollars a foot; and that Mark and his friends were caught at night in a snowstorm and did actually give themselves up for lost and huddle to sleep in the snow, waking to find a hotel forty-five feet away. But he does not believe the story, told in another connection, of the group of congressmen snowbound on a western train, driven at last to cannibalism and making their choice of successive victims with the proper forms of legislative procedure. One is reminded of poor John Bright’s perplexity over hearing Mark Twain’s contemporary, Artemus Ward, lecture in London. ‘Many of the young man’s statements,’ he said ‘appear overdrawn and open to question.’ Mark Twain himself has humorously explained this western method of his narration. ‘I speak,’ he says in the Innocents Abroad, ‘of the north shore of Lake Tahoe, where one can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet. I have tried to get this statement off at par here [he is writing from Europe], but with no success; so I have been obliged to negotiate it at fifty per cent discount. At this rate I find some takers; perhaps the reader will receive it on the same terms, ninety feet instead of a hundred and eighty.’ What is one to make of this? It seems to be giving the reader ‘what the traffic will bear.’
But though overdrawn in the single statement, Mark Twain’s western writings give in their entirety a wonderful and fascinating picture of the new land of hope. It has all passed away so long ago and the country changed so completely that perhaps the fascination is all the greater. ‘Where once the silent prairie saw the Indian and the scout, the Swede with alcoholic breath sets rows of cabbage out,’ — so has a later songster chronicled the passing of frontier west.
Mark Twain’s western life lasted in all some five and a half years. From his sinecure duties as secretary he turned to mining, caught for a time the fever of the day, and once only missed a fortune by quitting his washing-out of pay dirt a few bucketsful too soon. By a natural and easy transition he turned to journalism. These were the palmy days of the little local paper, favoured by isolation, springing up as easily as mushrooms and cultivated by hand. Such papers were the natural ground for local jests and squibs, and the practical jokes and hoaxes which passed for fun with the people of eighty years ago.
Sam Clemens, working as a surface miner, began contributing a little to a paper called the Territorial Enterprise, published by Joe Goodman at Virginia City. The editor — who was also the proprietor — was struck by the quality of the sketches, and sent to the writer a proposal to join in the editorship at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. Clemens dropped the pick and shovel, walked a hundred and thirty miles to take over the job, and with that stepped into a new life.
At the time when Sam Clemens abandoned mining and betook himself definitely to journalism (August 1862), he was twenty-six years old. He was a robust-looking young man with a mop of sandy hair turning to auburn and a blue eye filled with life and intelligence. In his infancy he had been a puny child, but the outdoor life of farm and bush and river had done its work and had presently endowed him with that deep-seated energy and vital power which is the birthright of the frontiersman.
As a young and rising pilot he had liked to make himself in point of dress a mirror of fashion. As a miner he did the exact opposite, outdoing his fellows in the careless roughness of his dress and the lazy slouch of his walk. He possessed, and accentuated by use, a slow and drawling speech. In short, he tried to make himself a ‘character,’ and succeeded to the full measure of his wish. A large part of his popularity and his local reputation in his Nevada days sprang from the attraction of this easy and careless manner and appearance. Second nature though it became, there was beneath it an eager and a restless mind, filled in his mining days with the fever of the search for gold, dreaming of fortune. At times even his robust health broke under the strain of the intensity of his pursuit of fortune.
But the outside world saw nothing of this. By nature easy and optimistic, on the surface at least, he enjoyed at this time all the careless exuberance of the morning of life, while his easy disposition and his peculiar cast of thought and drollery of speech endeared him to those about him. Many of the friends he made at this time he made for life, such as Horace Bixby his pilot-master, Joe Goodman and Steve Gillis of the Enterprise.
By disposition Mark Twain was peaceful rather than belligerent. He lived in a rough World among rough men, with untamed Indians, desperadoes and outlaws as part of the environment of a western life. Under such circumstances no one could venture to be timorous, but Mark was at least not looking for a fight. He himself has described his feelings on finding himself in close contact with Slade, the most notorious ‘bad man’ and ‘dead shot’ of the West — afterwards to be hanged by the Vigilantes of Montana. Slade was at that time in charge of one of the eating-places of the Overland Company. ‘He was about to take some coffee,’ says the author of Roughing It, ‘when he saw that my cup was empty. He politely offered to fill it, but although I wanted it, I politely declined. I was afraid he had not killed anybody that morning and might be needing diversion.’
Never was man more happily cast in his lot than young Sam Clemens when he joined the Territorial Enterprise. If he had become a reporter on the staff of an ordinary paper, he would have sickened rapidly at the drudgery of the task, the circumscribed round of duty, the necessity of carrying out the commands and ideas of other men. In fact, he did so sicken of it when later he held such a position as a reporter in San Francisco, and even as an editor and part-proprietor in Buffalo. But the Enterprise was an entirely different matter. The public of the roaring mining settlements cared nothing about foreign dispatches and world politics. Even the sound of the great war tearing the soil of the continent came faintly across the intervening two thousand miles. What the readers wanted was local stuff — news of robberies, scraps, lucky finds — and above all, such was the mood of the time and place, local ‘fun’ about ‘local’ characters, personal touches, practical jokes, lies, and interchange of sarcastic ‘cracks’ between rival papers. For all this stuff ‘Mark Twain’ and his fellows were given a free hand. They wrote what they felt like writing; they were not so much ‘reporters’ as ‘minstrels.’ Looking back now on the surviving fragments of what Mark Twain wrote then, we can see emerging in it the outline of a clear and beautiful style, we can see already a striking power of phrase to convey the sights and sounds of nature. But we could hardly see all this except in the light of what happened after. In and of themselves Mark Twain’s western sketches are of no account. Here, for example, is the Petrified Man, which set the camp in a roar because they appreciated it as the ‘crack’ at the local coroner who was supposed to hold an inquest over a body turned to rock centuries ago. But the story got somehow into the eastern papers as a fact, and that to the western mind was funnier still. The people in the West at that time seemed to have been moved to Homeric laughter every time they told a huge lie and got someone to believe it. Here again is My Bloody Massacre, as entirely imaginary as the Petrified Man, but meant as a slap against a California mining company. The terrific joke lay in the fact that the ‘Massacre’ was committed — in the story — at a place where it couldn’t have happened. The eastern papers, not knowing the locality, copied the story as an item of crime, at which the West slapped Mark on the back and roared again.
Into such life and such work the character of Sam Clemens fitted as into a mould. His skits and ‘take-offs’ and ‘write-ups’ became the delight of the territory. When he presently went to Carson City to ‘write up’ the legislature, he became about as important as the legislature itself and far more popular.
This may well have been the happiest time of Mark Twain’s life. He and his fellow-minstrels led a roaring life, painting the town red, drinking imported champagne at the French restaurant, playing cards all night and practical jokes all day. Into their midst one day blew the young man Charles F. Browne (Artemus Ward), for whom the world still has a smile and a tear. He was of the same stamp and kind as Clemens, but his feet were already higher on the ladder of success. He was ‘lecturing’ in his own droll way, about anything or nothing, making money, touching Heaven and raising Hell. He ‘caught on’ instantly to Mark Twain, not as a local ‘cut-up,’ but as a real genius — urged him to strike out, to come East, to conquer the world.
There is something in the life of a new and roaring settlement — a mining town, a boom town — cut off from the rest of the world, which intensifies local interest, local character, and local personality. All men seem giants. All character is exceptional. All jokes become a roar. All lives appear intense. All episodes become Homeric and historic. Read, if one will, the history of early San Francisco or talk with the surviving old-timers of the Manitoba boom.
Such was the setting supplied for Mark Twain by the environment of Virginia City. ‘Mark Twain’ he was now by deliberate designation. The name was first signed to an Enterprise article of February 2, 1863. Henceforth he was Mark for the West.
The merry journalistic life at Virginia City was ended in a duel, the outcome of some particularly insulting jokes. How serious or how comic the duel was, Heaven only knows. The account given in Roughing It is at least, like all else in that great work, partly true. But the new Territory in a moral moment had passed a law against duelling, and Mark Twain had to ‘skip out.’ He skipped to San Francisco. There he got a real place as a real reporter on the Call, a job which soon put the iron into his soul. It was no part of his nature to work at a routine task in a routine way. The management of the Call soon found him listless and careless in his work and ‘let him go.’ But he stayed on in San Francisco for a while — according to his own account, a poor outcast mendicant on the fringe of want. But this is only a legend, the western lie reasserting itself. In reality he never lacked the means of support; he wrote daily ‘letters’ for his old paper, the Enterprise, and did some ‘pieces’ for the Californian Magazine, and did very well. More than that, he was thrown in with Bret Harte and the group of young men whose genius was ripening under the favouring isolation of the Pacific Coast.
But again his journalism got him into trouble. His letters to the Virginia City Enterprise denouncing municipal corruption in San Francisco hurt the feelings of the city police. They decided to make it hot for him. On which Mark Twain again skipped out, this time to the hills. Here he found refuge at the mining camp of Jim Gillis, the ‘truthful James’ of Bret Harte, a brother of the Steve Gillis of Nevada. Here and in the near-by Calaveras County Mark Twain spent the rainy winter of 1864-65, scratching round for surface gold and listening to the endless yarns of the miners in the bar-room of Angel’s Camp (see Bret Harte for Abner Dean of Angel’s). Here was a solemn jackass who used to repeat to the point of weariness a solemn story about a frog — a jumping frog into which someone put shot to shut it out in what the Germans would call a frog-jump-money-bet-competition, and the English an ‘open frog jump.’ Mark Twain wrote up the story and sent it to New York for Artemus Ward’s funny book. It missed the book, drifted into a newspaper, and became the famous Jumping Frog — vastly admired by those who haven’t read it. But long before the Jumping Frog had found its way into print, its author had thrown down pick and shovel (missing a snug little fortune by one bucketful of dirt) and drifted back to San Francisco.
Here then was Mark Twain at the age of thirty, the period of his western life drawing to a close, his career of success about to begin. His biographers have greatly exaggerated the amount of his achievement at this period. His western success as a journalist and a wit was purely local. A few of his ‘pieces’ had drifted into the eastern papers, but the world at large had never heard of him.
Indeed, nothing that he had written was of any real value. The Jumping Frog he himself declared to be ‘a villainous backwoods sketch,’ and he was just about right. We are told that when it appeared in the New York press it set all America in a roar. This is nonsense. Even the America of 1865 did not roar so easily as that. The legend rests on the phrase of a California correspondent in New York who sent home items to a home paper, and is merely the kind of legend that grows up round the life-story of a great man. The truth is that Mark Twain was practically unknown, and deserved to be.
But now things changed. A San Francisco newspaper offered the young man a job as a special correspondent to go forth and ‘write up’ the Sandwich Islands, in those days (1865) an unknown paradise, lost in the Pacific. Mark Twain undertook the task and carried it out with wonderful success; saw, traversed, explored, and described the islands as no one else could have done; and sent also to his paper, by a piece of journalistic good luck, the first news of a disaster at sea — a ‘scoop’ of the first magnitude. His Sandwich Islands letters attracted great attention in California. They well deserved it. Apart from any incidental humour, they reveal that power of vivid description, that marvellous facility in conveying the sights and sounds in nature, which henceforth constitutes one of the distinctive charms of Mark Twain’s work. He returned to San Francisco in a blaze of glory.
The blaze was rapidly turned to a conflagration. His friends persuaded him to give a lecture on his Sandwich Islands trip. This was new. Until now Mark had spoken a few times ‘for fun’ and made a burlesque speech or two on Carson City politics. But to attempt to talk for money — for a dollar a seat in a big public place — to be ‘funny’ on a platform at a set hour, was as new and exciting as it was terrifying. His friends shoved him to it and took the biggest theatre in town. Mark advertised that the ‘doors open at seven o’clock. The trouble begins at eight o’clock,’ and in due course found himself thrust out before the lights, a huge manuscript in his hand, to receive a welcoming roar of applause that must be repaid in services. An hour or so later, when he ended his talk that had been carried along in billows of laughter, he left the platform with his head among the clouds, and on it a golden crown (October 2, 1866).
This was the beginning of his success as a lecturer, unrivalled except by that of his senior contemporary, Charles Dickens. The lecture on the Sandwich Islands was carried around the State of California and repeated in theatres, in halls, and on improvised platforms in mining camps, amid a continuous roar of laughter.
Mark Twain was now ‘started’ in earnest. He dreamed of wider fields — of a trip around the world. Alexander the Great wanted to conquer the world, Mark Twain wanted to write it up. He determined to follow the rising star of his success, to reverse the advice of Horace Greeley to his contemporaries and to ‘go East.’ He made a rough-and-ready arrangement with the Alta newspaper for sending them letters from somewhere or anywhere, then set off on the steamship America on December 15, 1866, to reach the east of the Isthmus route, and landed in New York on January 11, 1867. The Innocent was abroad.
