form his own superiority. The roles he assigns himself are, in one critic’s words, those of the “Social Lion, the Nabob, the Entertainer, and the Ladies’ Man.”36 He had determined that his assignment was to be insulting and humiliating to others. It would be some time before he learned how much funnier he could be if he himself were humiliated, especially by becoming, in James Cox’s phrase, the fool of his own illusions.37
San Francisco was a long 150 miles west from Washoe, through the daunting Sierra Nevada range. The trip took thirty hours. But California was the source of supplies for Nevada, and all the bullion was shipped to San Francisco in bars, with three stages a day in each direction. Clemens visited San Francisco several times during his years in Nevada, and at least three times in 1863. His first trip, which lasted two months, occasioned this parting shot from the May 3 Enterprise: “As he assigned no adequate reason for this sudden step, we thought him the pitiable victim of self-conceit and the stock mania…. Yes, the poor fellow actually thought he possessed some breeding—that Virginia [City] was too narrow a field for his grace and accomplishments, and in this delusion he has gone to display his ugly person and disgusting manners and wildcat on Montgomery street.”38 In a letter published in September 1863, he describes the trip “Over the Mountains” and in it introduces perhaps the first of his antigenteel narrators. Much of the letter is devoted to Mark Twain’s account of the stagecoach driver’s conversation. For instance: “I see a poor cuss tumble off along here one night—he was monstrous drowsy, and went to sleep when I’d took my eye off of him for a moment—and he fetched up again a boulder, and in a second there wasn’t anything left of him but a promiscuous pile of hash!” The use of such an accomplished yarn-spinning figure became an important part of Mark Twain’s literary repertoire.
His narrators, usually veterans of long service in their occupations (including miners, ship captains, and stage drivers), are utterly lacking in self-consciousness. As the man behind the writer became more interested in moving upward in the social scale, he found that when he wished to avoid presenting Mark Twain as too “low” and vulgar a personage, he could introduce a vernacular narrator such as the coach driver to tell his tale. He especially enjoyed relying on characters who were both colorfully profane and profoundly innocent.
Another letter on his adventures in California went to New York, where it was published in the Sunday Mercury for February 21, 1864. Artemus Ward, whom Clemens had met when the experienced writer visited Virginia City in late 1863, had suggested that he write occasionally for that Eastern paper. In “Those Blasted Children,” Mark Twain describes his suffering at the Lick House in San Francisco, where noisy “young savages” pestered him. “It is a living wonder to me that I haven’t scalped some of those children before now,” he comments unsentimentally. “I expect I would have done it, but then I hardly felt well enough acquainted with them.” The recommended remedies for illnesses in children indicate his studied ignorance: for worms, “Administer a catfish three times a week. Keep the room very quiet; the fish won’t bite if there is the least noise.”
While visiting San Francisco, Clemens obtained a commission to write a series of letters from Nevada to the Daily Morning Call. In the summer of 1863, ten letters as well as half a dozen dispatches from Mark Twain in Nevada appeared in that paper. The Call announced that these letters “set forth in his easy, readable style the condition of matters and things in Silverland.”39 Showing journalistic competence and good humor, these pieces helped spread his reputation and prepared the way for a later position on the San Francisco newspaper. In order to emphasize wittily the vast difference between the mild San Francisco climate and that of torrid Virginia City, he reported that “last week the weather was passably cool, but it has moderated a good deal since then. The thermometer stands at a thousand, in the shade, today. It will probably go to a million before night.” In another letter he writes that Mr. G. T. Sewall was among those bruised recently in a travel accident; he reminds his readers that Sewall is the man who allegedly held the inquest on the death of the petrified man. An amusing piece published in July 1863 explains that crime is much more common in Nevada than in California. “Nothing that can be stolen is neglected. Watches that would never go in California, generally go fast enough before they have been in the Territory twenty-four hours.”40
One passage, “A Rich Decision,” published in the Call in August 1863, is particularly notable because it tells a story that Mark Twain was to return to twice. It appears in “The Facts in the Great Landslide Case” in the Buffalo Express for April 12, 1870, and (in only slightly revised form) in chapter 34 of Roughing It. The 1863 version informs the reader at the beginning that “some of the boys in Carson” were playing a hoax on old Mr. Bunker, an attorney, who was employed to bring suit for the recovery of Dick Sides’s ranch after Tom Rust’s ranch slid down the mountain and covered it. In the later versions, the hoax is played on the unwary reader as well, and the story, three times as long, is elaborated and dramatized.
In addition, Mark Twain wrote a few sketches from Nevada for the San Francisco Golden Era, a weekly founded to encourage the development of literature in the area. The eminent landscape painter Albert Bierstadt had designed the masthead, and numbered among the local writers were Joaquin Miller, Charles W. Stoddard, and Bret Harte, whose “M’liss” had proven to be the first memorable tale of the California frontier. Mark Twain had the good judgment to learn from his fellows. The editors of the Enterprise had been apprentices on the Golden Era, and its founder, Rollin M. Daggett, had also founded the Enterprise. Many items by Mark Twain appeared in the Golden Era, but probably only a few were written especially for it. They include “How to Cure a Cold,” published September 20, and “The Lick House Ball,” published September 27, both in 1863. The former would be one of the earliest to find a place, in revised form, in Sketches, New and Old (1875). It also appeared in 1867 in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, Mark Twain’s first book. It tells of the author’s efforts to get rid of that most common of ailments by adopting various cures offered by well-meaning people: cold showers, drinking a quart of salt water (which caused him, he reports, to throw up everything, including, he believes, his “immortal soul”); then a mixture of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and drugs; then gin, then gin and molasses, and gin and onions; then travel; next a mustard plaster, and eventually steam baths. He survives, with difficulty.
During his Nevada years, Mark Twain created his first fully developed character equipped to flout gentility. When a rival reporter, actually a friend named Clement T. Rice, criticized Mark Twain’s reports of a session of the Nevada legislature, he replied that Rice’s accounts were a “festering mass of misstatements the author of whom should be properly termed the ‘Unreliable.’”41 Thereafter, “the Unreliable” was to make frequent appearances in Mark Twain’s writings of the period, both as the butt of his humor and as Clemens’s alter ego—his coarser side. The Unreliable borrows, without permission, Mark Twain’s most elegant clothes, his boots, his hat, his “white kid gloves,” and his “heavy gold repeater.” Mark Twain finds him in this garb attending an evening party, where he devours huge quantities of food and drink, including a roast pig, and sings a drunken song. Mark Twain offers to duel with him, “boot-jacks at a hundred yards.” The Unreliable swindles a San Francisco hotel when the two visit it. He is constantly obnoxious and boorish. When Mark Twain plans to send back to Nevada “something glowing and poetical” on the San Francisco weather, the Unreliable tells him, “Say it’s bully, you tallow-brained idiot! that’s enough; anybody can understand that; don’t write any of those infernal, sick platitudes about sweet flowers, and joyous butterflies, and worms and things, for people to read before breakfast. You make a fool of yourself that way; everybody gets disgusted with you; stuff! be a man or a mouse.” The Unreliable is—as Mark Twain frequently chose to be—the sworn enemy of bombast and sentimentality.
In one letter Mark Twain renders an account of the Unreliable’s drunken remarks on his visit to San Jose, “Sarrozay.” Rice retaliated when Clemens was ill with a cold and had arranged for Rice to attend to Enterprise chores. Over Mark Twain’s name, Rice published an apology to all those whom he had ridiculed, especially “the Unreliable,” and promised to go “in sackcloth and ashes for the next forty days.” The next day, Clemens