much fuller dimensions, the outspoken “Mr. Brown.” The still-developing author was seeking a means of expressing himself frankly but without sullying himself.
Few of the surviving pieces from the Enterprise could justifiably be called sketches. One of these, “Ye Sentimental Law Student,” quotes a letter, identified as probably by the Unreliable, effusively expressing the devotion of the writer, “the party of the second part,” to “Mary, the peerless party of the first part.” “The view from the lonely and segregated mountain peak of this portion of what is called and known as Creation,” he avers, “with all and singular the hereditaments and appurtenances thereunto appertaining and belonging, is expressively grand and inspiring.” For Mary’s benefit he extends his comically legalistic description. Another piece, published in May 1864, provides a learned essay on Washoe in response to an innocent inquiry from a Missourian. He replies, for instance, that it may rain for four to seven days in a row, after which “you may loan out your umbrella for twelve months, with the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.”
On July 26, 1863, Clemens lost everything he owned, including mining stocks, when the Virginia City hotel where he lived burned down. He may have felt this was a signal that he should leave Nevada. But he continued to identify himself with the place, though he was unwell for a time. He took advantage of the hot mineral springs at Steamboat Springs, then went to San Francisco, but only for a month.
One of the most famous, even notorious, of Mark Twain’s writings of his western years is “A Bloody Massacre near Carson” (October 1863). His purpose, he explained later, was to compose a “reformatory satire” on the “dividend-cooking system” of misleading investors, but he admitted that nobody ever saw the point of the satire.43 This hoax reported that one Hopkins, who lived in the old log house between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s at the edge of a forest, had been driven to despair by the loss of his savings through financial manipulations in San Francisco. He died after having ridden into town, his throat cut ear to ear, with his wife’s bloody scalp in his hand. The husband was discovered to have brutally murdered six of his children. The report included many gruesome details. But Hopkins was, in fact, a bachelor; there was no forest for many miles—and Dutch Nick’s and Empire City were one and the same. If the reader did not know this geography, he might have detected the hoax nonetheless: Hopkins’s riding four to five miles with his throat cut ear to ear ought to have alerted the wary. But the nearby Gold Hill Daily News picked up the story as fact, as did other papers. When Mark Twain wrote in the next issue of the Enterprise, “I take it all back,” he was widely attacked. California newspapers such as the Sacramento Daily Union demanded that he be discharged. Eventually the putative “massacre” became part of the local lore, frequently alluded to in newspapers.
In the spring of 1864, Mark Twain’s often obnoxious ways finally crossed the line and brought about his departure from Nevada. He had been feuding fiercely, in print, with the publisher of the Virginia City Union when, by chance, a piece he had written—but then held back on advice from Dan De Quille—nevertheless appeared in the Enterprise. The story had to do with local efforts to raise money for the Sanitary Fund, a Civil War organization resembling the later Red Cross. It had been stated, Mark Twain wrote, that funds raised for the organization had been misdirected to “a Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East.” He then asserted that the charge was “a hoax, but not all a hoax, for an effort is being made to divert these funds from their proper course.”44 The Union responded by referring to the writer as having “no gentlemanly sense of professional propriety” and being “a vulgar liar.”45 Clemens demanded “a public retraction” or “satisfaction” from James Laird, the editor of the Union, “the satisfaction due to a gentleman,” although privately he apologized to the women of the Sanitary Fund. “Satisfaction” meant that Clemens was challenging Laird to a duel. As he explained in 1899, “Dueling was in that day a custom there—a temporary one. The weapons were always Colt’s navy revolvers, distance 15 paces; fire, & advance; six shots allowed.” Although the duel did not take place, it was illegal to “send a challenge, carry a challenge, or receive one.”46 To escape the law, Clemens wrote his brother, “Steve & I are going to the States.” On May 29, accompanied by his friends Steve Gillis, a printer and journalist, and Joe Goodman, Clemens went to California. Partly through his love of mischief, partly as the result of others’ malice, partly through mischance, Sam Clemens had become persona non grata in the territory.
The Gold Hill Daily News bid good riddance: “Shifting the locale of his tales of fiction from the Forest of Dutch Nick’s to Carson City; the dramatis personae thereof from the Hopkins family to the Ladies of the Sanitary Fair; and the plot thereof from murder to miscegenation—he slopped. The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man, though sheathed with the brass and triple cheek of Mark Twain.” But the Virginia City Old Piute was kinder: “We shall miss Mark…. To know him was to love him…. God bless you, Mark!”47
The original and authentic Mark Twain sprang from this Nevada stint. There Samuel Clemens found that he could become a writer by dramatizing a portion of himself and then assuming this identity when he wrote. Who was “Mark Twain”? He was, first of all, a writer who had imbibed deeply in what he would describe in chapter 4 of Roughing It as “the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains.” His natural style derived from the ways of the old-timers, who had found, before him, that genteel Eastern ways fit badly in the West. Rejecting artificiality, superficiality, and the hypocritical cult of polite conformity, Mark Twain emerged as an irreverent skeptic in religion. In San Francisco, he would soon give proof of his anti-establishment views. But he was by no means an alienated loner, for he had enjoyed and valued his membership in the Territorial Enterprise group. More humorous than funny, he grew increasingly fond of burlesquing genteel attitudes. He was not able now or later to create a fully consistent literary personality, but he made his hallmark a self-assured, confidential, unhurried tone. This Mark Twain developed from an appreciation of “characters”—honest, natural, straightforward, manly people—whom he esteemed as “simple-hearted” or characterized by their “simplicity.” Although their conversational style and manners are by implication anti-genteel, any words such as low, common, vulgar, or even folk connote condescension that Mark Twain did not express. Samuel Clemens’s signal contribution to the achievement of American literature in the twentieth century lies in his respectful discovery of these vernacular values.48
CHAPTER TWO
Journalist and Lecturer
Samuel Clemens was now to make California his home for two and a half years. Welcomed by the Golden Era as “The Sage-Brush Humorist from Silver Land,”1 he shortly made his presence felt by speaking at a ceremony at Maguire’s Opera House. The occasion was less than extraordinary: the presentation of a cane to a marine engineer who had visited San Francisco in order to resurrect a steamship that had sunk in the bay. The speech, published the next day on the front page of the San Francisco Alta California (June 13, 1864), was intended to be amusing; “Mark Twain” was clearly a humorist. He chose to speak on behalf of “your countless friends, the noble sons of the forest,” such as the Diggers, the Pi-Utes, the Washoes, and the Shoshones, whom he described as “visibly black from the wear and tear of out door life, from contact with the impurities of the earth, and from absence of soap and their natural indifference to water.”
Clemens liked California; he wrote to his mother and sister, “This superb climate agrees with me. And it ought, after living where I was never out of sight of snow-banks 24 hours during 3 years.” Later, when he had experienced New England, he was less enthusiastic. In Roughing It he complained, “No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful” (chap. 56). But while he was there, he expressed great satisfaction with the place. In “‘Mark Twain’ in the Metropolis,” written sometime in June for the Territorial Enterprise, he described