members as a result. They rose to questions of privilege & answered the criticisms of the correspondent with bitterness, customarily describing him with elaborate & uncomplimentary phrases, for lack of a briefer way. To save their time he presently began to sign the letters, using the Mississippi leadsman’s call, “Mark Twain” (2 fathoms =12 feet) for this purpose.24
A few years later, in his autobiography, he explained that while a pilot he composed a “rude and crude satire” of a steamboat man who wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain.25 In 1874 he was more specific: “Mark Twain was the nom de plume of one Capt. Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune. He died in 1863, & as he would no longer need that signature I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the prophet’s remains.”26 But Sellers did not die until a year after Clemens began to call himself “Mark Twain,” and no evidence has yet been found that Sellers actually used that pen name. Why Clemens repeatedly asserted that “borrowing” from Sellers is not known.
On the other hand, Clemens did indeed satirize Sellers, whom he called “Sergeant Fathom” in “River Intelligence,” a piece he published in the New Orleans Crescent in May 1859. He depicted Sellers as reminiscing ludicrously while offering predictions of phenomenally high water. “In the summer of 1763 [ninety-six years before the date of the report] I came down the river on the old first ‘Jubilee.’ She was new, then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew.” According to the account in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (chap. 50), this satire deeply affected Sellers, to the regret of the young Clemens. Another satire that Clemens wrote was a brief “Pilot’s Memorandum,” which burlesqued the standard reports on river traffic appearing in newspapers. Its humor assumed a good deal of familiarity with the steam-boating of that day.
Four other pieces by Clemens the steamboatman were discovered and reprinted in 1982. Three are mere journalism, first published in 1858. More ambitious was “Soleleather Cultivates His Taste for Music,” which appeared in the New Orleans Crescent in 1859. In it the brash narrator told of his experiences at a St. Louis boardinghouse, where he soothed a sick fellow boarder with his attempts to play first a violin, then a trombone. Soleleather is another version of Snodgrass, but better educated.27
Of the two attempts at fiction Clemens made during his years on the river, one is a gothic tale of murder and revenge set in Germany, but with a plot borrowed from Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837). The other tells of a pilot who returns from the dead to perform an unusually difficult task of piloting. Aside from attesting to Clemens’s continuing serious interest in writing, the stories are unmemorable.
With the coming of the Civil War, Clemens left the river, since the war effectively disrupted commercial traffic. In 1899 he described the situation, using the third person: “He was in New Orleans when Louisiana went out of the Union, Jan. 26, 1861, & started North the next day. Every day on the trip a blockade was closed by the boat, & the batteries of Jefferson Barracks (below St Louis) fired two shots through her chimney the last night of her voyage.” He returned home and soon joined a group of volunteers who were taking the Confederate side in the conflict, but within two weeks he left them. “‘Incapacitated by fatigue’ through persistent retreating” is the way he described the volunteers in a statement from the source just quoted.28 This service was too informal and irregular for it to be said with any truthfulness that he was a deserter, as is sometimes reported. Nearly twenty-five years after the event, he rendered a somewhat fictionalized account of his “war” experiences in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”
Sam’s next adventure was more crucial than his gesture at combat. In July 1861, he accompanied his brother to the West, where Orion, who had identified himself strongly with the Union side as the great conflict shaped itself, was rewarded with the office of the secretaryship of the territory of Nevada. Sam was eventually hired to be a government clerk at eight dollars a day, but not as Orion’s official secretary, as Sam reported in the entertaining account in Roughing It (1872).29
The trip westward to the territory was long and slow. Leaving on July 18, 1861, they went up the Missouri River to St. Joseph, then travelled by overland stagecoach by way of Salt Lake City. They reached Carson City on August 14. Having finally arrived, Sam found himself in a world that strangely combined ugliness and beauty. He soon undertook some exploring and examined Lake Tahoe, only twenty miles or so from his headquarters in Carson City. He greatly admired the lake, but his negligence there resulted in his starting a forest fire in its tinder-dry terrain. He wrote a vivid account of the lake and the fire to his mother and sister in the early fall. A letter sent a little later, in October 1861, is one of his best early pieces. Testifying to Sam’s succumbing to the get-rich-quick fever of the silver miners, it also provides a description of the landscape:
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,” is mean enough to grow. If you will take a liliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire—set them one foot apart and then try to walk through them—you will understand (provided the floor is covered twelve inches deep with sand) what it is to travel through a sagebrush desert. When crushed, sage-brush emits an odor which isn’t exactly magnolia and equally isn’t exactly polecat—but a sort of compromise between the two. It looks a good deal like greasewood, and is the ugliest plant that was ever conceived of.
A version of this letter was published in the Keokuk Gate City in November.
Two subsequent letters, written in January and March 1862 and also addressed to Clemens’s mother, seem to have been intended for publication; they also appeared in the Gate City. In them Clemens assigns Jane Clemens the role of a worshiping disciple of Fenimore Cooper and admirer of the romantic Noble Savage and portrays himself as a disenchanted old-timer. Later, when he used these same materials in Roughing It, he played both roles: he had arrived in the West, he explains, as an innocent tenderfoot, full of book learning, but now years later he was writing as a hardened veteran. While the 1872 book version is deservedly better known, these previous letters are a valuable indication of Clemens’s development as a writer: he was beginning to assign himself more interesting roles.
The second of these early Nevada letters describes a trip Clemens and three others made to Unionville, Humboldt County, where silver was being discovered and mined. In this letter Clemens mixes information and anecdote just as he was to do in his travel books. In a March letter, he responds to an imagined plea from his mother to “tell me all about the lordly sons of the forest.” Clemens’s response reveals a scornful attitude toward American Indians that would not mellow for decades, unlike his racist views of African Americans, which dissipated in later years. The description of a representative Indian, whose name is given as Hoop-dedoodle-do, is thoroughly repulsive. In 1897, Mark Twain wrote that in his youth, “Any young person would have been proud of a ‘strain’ of Indian blood”; Cooper’s great popularity was responsible.30 But on the basis of his experience in Nevada, Clemens’s advice is, “Now, if you are acquainted with any romantic young ladies or gentlemen who dote on these loves of Indians, send them out here before the disease strikes in.”
These long descriptive letters home indicate how thoroughly Clemens was beginning to enjoy playing the skeptic. Chiefly, however, he wanted to get rich quick, and the means was obviously silver. In a letter written to Orion on May II and 12, 1862, he reported that he owned a one-eighth interest in a ledge, and “I know it to contain our fortune” in gold and silver. The same letter refers to Sam’s contributions to the local newspaper; he assumed that Orion was seeing his letters in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. By June he was thinking seriously of his work as a writer, for he instructs Orion, “Put all of my Josh’s letters in my scrap book. I may have use for them some day.” (The “Josh” letters written for the Enterprise have not survived.)