he was obliged to take on a job that was nothing but manual labor. Ten years later he wrote, “I shoveled quartz in a silver mill at ten dollars a week, for one entire week, & then resigned, with the consent & even the gratitude of the entire mill company.”31 A month later he told Orion to write to the Sacramento Union or to members of its staff to announce that “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. California is full of people who have interests here, and its d—d seldom they hear from this country.” The explanation for his job hunting is that he was in debt: “The fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too.”
What happened next is not quite clear, though it turned out to have great consequences. According to his autobiography, Clemens now became so desperate that he “stood on the verge of the ministry or the penitentiary.” Fortunately, he recounted, he found occasion to submit to the Enterprise for publication a clever burlesque of a speech by the chief justice of Nevada just when his services became necessary: the city editor of the Enterprise, Dan De Quille (William E. Wright) was planning a trip home to Iowa. Sam’s piece was considered witty, and he was hired.32 A more probable scenario is that Sam was taken on because of the “Josh” series and because employing Sam might mean that the Enterprise printing house would get patronage from Sam’s brother, the territorial secretary. In any event, within a short time Clemens was a full-time writer for the Enterprise, and the Enterprise did obtain the printing contract.33 Clemens soon adopted the pen name “Mark Twain” for his humorous writings, but probably used his real name for serious news stories. Seemingly he identified in important ways with the adopted name, for now he signed a letter to his mother and sister “Mark.” According to one letter he sent to them, “I take great pains to let the public know that ‘Mark Twain’ hails from there [i.e., Missouri].” For his newspaper work, “They pay me,” he wrote home, “six dollars a day, and I make 50 per cent profit by doing only three dollars’ worth of work.”
The development of Samuel Clemens as a writer cannot be fully documented, since a large portion of what he wrote for publication in Nevada was lost. It has been estimated that he published fifteen hundred to three thousand local items, but there is no file of the Enterprise, and one can consult only such sources as the slim collection of clippings in a surviving Clemens notebook and the pieces reprinted in other newspapers. These provide a total of fewer than fifty items, although many of them are notable pieces. The earliest extant pieces signed “Mark Twain” are three letters from Carson City dated January 31 and February 3 and 6, 1863. Written while he was on a week’s vacation, they are notable chiefly for their tone: good-natured, confidential, nonchalant. For instance, discussing a wedding he had attended, Mark Twain writes that it was “mighty pleasant, and jolly, and sociable, and I wish to thunder I was married myself. I took a large slab of the bridal cake home with me to dream on, and dreamt that I was still a single man, and likely to remain so, if I live and nothing happens—which has given me a greater confidence in dreams than I ever felt before.” The name “Mark Twain” was to be identified with the voice heard here: unpretentious, self-assured, good-natured, accessible.
Another development was taking place within Samuel Clemens. He had gone west after having identified himself, if only briefly, with the Confederate cause. At the same time that he was creating “Mark Twain,” Clemens was gradually becoming a Union man, though in Nevada he was largely able to avoid the issue of slavery. He was to confront that issue only after the Civil War.
For the Enterprise, Mark Twain wrote local items, unsigned editorials, and reports from San Francisco, Carson City, and the territorial legislature and constitutional convention. (For the convention, he and another reporter provided full and in part verbatim accounts. These are of no literary value, and it is impossible to distinguish Clemens’s writing from that of his coworker.)34 Even routine items frequently have a humorous touch. He suggests in “The Spanish Mine,” for instance, that “stout-legged persons with an affinity to darkness” might enjoy an hour-long visit to the mine on which he was reporting. Such unsigned items as the following appeared soon after Clemens joined the Enterprise staff. “A beautiful and ably conducted free fight came off in C street yesterday, but as nobody was killed or mortally wounded in manner sufficiently fatal to cause death, no particular interest attaches to the matter, and we shall not publicize the details. We pine for murder—these fist fights are of no consequence to anybody.” In this piece—written before the earliest appearance of Clemens’s nom de plume—one hears for the first time the voice that was to become famous. Excitement made life tolerable in the dull towns of the West, and Clemens was to celebrate his boyish appreciation of it. As diverting as frontier violence was, if necessary one could always resort to theatrics.
In Nevada, Mark Twain was a successful journalist. Some of his stories were picked up by other papers, especially in California, even though few of the surviving ones give an indication of his later abilities. In the boom-or-bust atmosphere of Nevada, he became especially identified with hoaxes; among other things, these were preparations for Huck Finn’s admired imaginative deceptions. One of the earliest hoaxes dates from October 15, 1862. It reports the startling discovery of a “petrified man,” found “in a sitting posture” with “the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supporting the chin, the fore-finger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart. This strange freak of nature” was examined by a local judge, “Justice Sewell or Sowell, of Humboldt City,” who convened a jury to hold an inquest, according to this account. The jury concluded that “deceased came to his death from protracted exposure.” Published in the Enterprise, the story was picked up by twelve credulous newspapers in Nevada and California. Only the San Francisco publication, headed “A Washoe Joke” (Washoe was a native American name given to Nevada), was appropriately captioned by someone who recognized that the petrified man was winking and thumbing his nose.
At the Enterprise, Mark Twain was associated with other stimulating young writers, such as the twenty-four-year-old editor, Joseph Goodman, and Dan De Quille, with whom he roomed. (De Quille had already written up his own effective hoax about a personal portable air-conditioning system.) The new journalist soon discovered that his work was not arduous. Reporters from other journals were ready to swap “regulars,” reports from continuing sources of news such as the courts and the registry of bullion. If news was short, it could promptly be invented. For a time Clemens lost his ambition, drank a good deal, and gained a reputation for flippancy, bohemianism, and irreverence. He was proud enough of his direct language to defend it in print: “If I choose to use the language of the vulgar, the low-flung and the sinful, and such as will shock the ears of the highly civilized, I don’t want him [a compositor] to appoint himself an editorial critic and proceed to tone me down and save me from the consequences of my conduct; that is, unless I pay him for it, which I won’t.”35
The Enterprise phase enabled the writer to discover himself—or, more accurately, allowed Sam Clemens to create “Mark Twain.” He learned here about the close connection between the comic and the forbidden—the permissible and those aspects of life not to be mentioned in polite society. He intuited, too, that humor is gratifying because it relaxes a repressive atmosphere. Obviously the raw, blustering frontier environment encouraged his explorations. He was, however, never quite able to determine precisely how far he could go without being offensive, although he sensed that he could amusingly violate inhibiting strictures by satirizing the fastidiousness of the genteel and their attitudes toward romantic love, childhood, grand opera, admiration for the “sublime” in nature, even benevolent humanitarianism. He could offend the pretentiousness of the proper by referring to the unmentionable: sows, nose-picking, vomit, spit, warts, singed cats, body odor. (He was never to outgrow the conviction that bad smells are funny.) A mild specimen of this brand of humor is in a “Letter from Mark Twain” published in August 1863 in which he provides an account of his adventures after taking a tonic called “Wake-up Jake.” It affected him for forty-eight hours. “And during all that time, I could not have enjoyed a viler taste in my mouth if I had swallowed a slaughter-house.” He almost died, he says,