Mark Twain in the West

It’s been nearly 150 years since Mark Twain’s very formative years in Nevada and California, and it’s been just over a century since he passed away.

MARK TWAIN (as read by David Latulippe): The report of my death must have been an exaggeration.

Actually, Mr. Twain, I’m sorry to say you did die. It was April 21, 1910. You were 74 years old. Heart disease. But for a storyteller like yourself, death isn’t necessarily an end, is it? Rather, it can be something of a rebirth.

TWAIN: I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.

Ah. Perhaps that thought prompted you to insist your autobiography remain unreleased until a century after your death. Two publishers actually violated your wishes, but now, after 100 years, scholars at the University of California at Berkeley, where your collected papers reside, have put together your autobiography exactly as you wanted it. Not a cradle-to-grave recounting of your eventful life, but the rambling reminiscences you dictated, complete with potshots at some of the least favorite folks in your life. 

TWAIN: A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his last gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.

Well put, Mr. Twain. You always did have a way with words. Well today, you’ll be happy to hear we’re going back to the time that launched your career as a writer – your Western years. You were known as Samuel Clemens, then – a 26-year-old former steamboat pilot from Hannibal, Missouri. And while you may have had a quick wit, you’d hardly set pen to paper. That is until you went West, and the story of your life began to unfold in very unexpected ways.

David Ross tells your tale.

*     *     *

DAVID ROSS: One day in August of 1861, two men got off the overland stage at Carson City, capital of the newly-created territory of Nevada. They’re the Clemens brothers, Orion and Samuel. Coming cross-country from Missouri, they were surprised at the landscape before them – a tiny little town with hardly more than a few buildings, smack in the middle of a vast and mountainous desert. 

They came to this little dot on the map for jobs. Orion Clemens had been appointed Nevada’s secretary – second-in-command to the governor, who like most politicians was back east, much more concerned with the outbreak of the War Between the States. After several business failures, the 36-year-old needed the work. But young Sam Clemens, who had been well-employed piloting steamboats on the Mississippi River, had another reason to come West.

ROBERT HIRST: He was a pilot and loved that role. 

Robert Hirst is general editor and curator of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley.

HIRST: The Civil War shuts down the river because it’s a strategic element. The only kind of navigation that’s going on on the river are war boats. And Clemens was quite clear that he didn’t want to be a pilot on a war steamship, because of course, the pilot sits in this little glass case on top of the boat and is a pretty good target, and he really had no appetite for war.

Their Nevada jobs didn’t pay much, and Sam Clemens was lured by the fantastic thing that was happening practically in his backyard. At the nearby Comstock Lode, fortunes in gold and silver were being made almost daily, and he couldn’t resist. He headed for the mining camps, outfitted himself for prospecting and tried his luck. 

A new line of work was nothing new for Sam Clemens. Back in Missouri, before he had gotten his license to pilot steamboats, he worked as a typesetter in print shops, including one owned by his older brother. There, he became a voracious reader and sometime writer. He had a rather combative nature and exercised it in occasionally producing an outrageous story when his boss was out of town.

So now, here he was, in the hills of Nevada in 1862, and in between shifts scouring the mountains for precious metals, Sam Clemens kept little notebooks full of stories he heard and descriptions of the colorful characters he met. From his notes he began putting together stories and sending them to a little paper back in Virginia City, Nevada called the Territorial Enterprise.

MARK TWAIN (from “Petrified Man,” published in the Territorial Enterprise): A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stone mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which had evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner – which lifetime, by the way, came to a close about a century ago, in the opinion of a savant who has examined the defunct.

The writing was well-received, but the prospecting was a failure.  And after enough of Sam’s bad bets on mining claims depleted his savings, he turned to writing – this time not as a hobby, but to make a living. 

In a play called “Sam & Laura,” about Clemens and one of his early love interests, Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award winner Ron Powers dramatized the first day Sam Clemens introduced himself to the editor of the Enterprise.

SAM CLEMENS (from “Sam & Laura”): This here the Territorial Enterprise? Which one of you jaybirds is Goodman? I’m Sam Clemens, the reporter.

JOE GOODMAN (from “Sam & Laura”): I’m Joe Goodman.  Are you here to work for us or to stick us up?

CLEMENS: I reckon that after I’m here for awhile you won’t be able to tell the difference.

The Enterprise was one of the many chatty and lively little papers of the times. It thrived on hyperbole and controversy. Sam Clemens fit right in. In a story that appeared in December of 1862, the new reporter wrote of a rather rollicking party for members of the Nevada legislature. 

TWAIN (from “A Big Thing in Washoe City,” published in the Territorial Enterprise): The supper and the champagne were excellent and abundant, and I offer no word of blame against anybody for eating and drinking pretty freely.  When I went to bed this morning, Mr. Lovejoy, arranged in fiery red night clothes, was dancing the war dance of his tribe (he is President of the Paiute Association) around a spittoon and Colonel Howard, dressed in a similar manner, was trying to convince him that he was a humbug. A suspicion crossed my mind that they were partially intoxicated.

Newspaper reporters of the time worked without a byline. And if a writer indulged in commentary, he usually wrote with a pen name. Sam Clemens had a few different noms de plum, but after several months at the Enterprise, he gave himself one he would never change – Mark Twain, after the old steamboat task of dropping a line into the water to mark the depth of the river.

That name gave him the anonymity and the freedom to sometimes, shall we say, stretch the truth, as he did constantly in the Territorial Enterprise.

CLEMENS (from “Sam & Laura”): About 7 o’clock Tuesday evening a sudden blast of wind picked up a shooting gallery, two whorehouses and a drug store and set them down some 10 or 12 feet from their original location. There were many guests in the whorehouses at the time. It is pleasant to reflect that they seized their luggage and vacated the premises with an alacrity suited to the occasion.

GOODMAN (from “Sam & Laura”): Is there one single, solitary goddamn fact in this piece?

CLEMENS: I believe I found one in the first draft. I cut it out.

GOODMAN: Print it!

As Mark Twain, Clemens began sending reports, sketches and commentary on life in Nevada, not only to the Enterprise, but to publications in California. The stories were entertaining and sometimes quite controversial. Twain was making a name for himself. He was promoted to city editor, but it wasn’t long before his feisty prose got him into a very nasty literary rumble with a rival newspaperman in Virginia City. Just how bad things got between the two is described by Mark Twain Project director Robert Hirst.

HIRST: At one point another newspaper editor insults Clemens, or Clemens feels that he insults him, and Clemens insults him back, and then he sends a challenge to this guy and then the guy sends another challenge back and then another challenge. And these are all very heated, extreme expressions of disapproval, let’s put it that way. They’re all illegal as well. That is to say, even to carry a challenge in Nevada at the time was illegal. If you were, caught, if you were convicted, you would be in prison for it. Nevertheless, this is all taking place very much in public. And when the other editor doesn’t respond as Clemens wants him to, he publishes the whole correspondence in the Enterprise. And at that point there’s a duel that’s about to take place. But he and his friend Steve Gillis get wind that the governor’s out to imprison them. And so they pack up, pretty fast, and leave for San Francisco. 

TWAIN: I was looking for a job out there in San Francisco, but I was verrrrry particular about the kind of job I would get. I didn’t want to work. So I became a newspaper reporter.

He found a job with one of the city’s five major newspapers, The Call. He’d been their Nevada correspondent and they made him a staff reporter.

RON POWERS: It’s about now, it’s about 1863, and he has this radar for being at the right place at the right time.

That’s Ron Powers: like Twain a native of Hannibal, Missouri. Before writing the play “Sam & Laura,” he authored one of the most acclaimed of the 40 biographies of Mark Twain: Mark Twain, A Life. He explains that as a newcomer in San Francisco, the young journalist quickly became part of the city’s growing colony of raffish writers and artists.

POWERS: He walks into the dawn of the counter-culture in San Francisco. They called themselves bohemians back then and he met Bret Harte...

BRET HARTE (as read by an actor): Never a tear bedims the eye that time and patience will not dry.

POWERS: He met Adela Isaacs Menkin, who was the wild Madonna of her time.

HARTE: Never a lip is curved with pain that can’t be kissed into smiles again.

POWERS: He met all of these eccentric, wild, zany, gifted artists and poets, and he learned from them, he sort of took their point of view, the skepticism toward mainstream culture, made it his own, and I think it was really San Francisco and Nevada that was his finishing school as an American writer. 

Inspired by this group of innovators, Sam Clemens was becoming something new. He was beginning to make American literature speak in the voices of real people.

POWERS: Way out west there were no rules, and that was wonderful, because you could hear the common language spoken by common people: gamblers, miners, Chinese railroad workers, cutthroats, gunslingers – and Sam got it all.

…as he did years later in his book Roughing It, published in 1871.

TWAIN: We changed horses every 10 miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the hard, level road. After supper a woman got in, who lived about 50 miles further on. Apparently, she was not a talkative woman. She would sit there in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would have jolted a cow. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill 30 or 40 mosquitoes – watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she never did.  So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said:

TWAIN: The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.

SPHYNX:  You bet!

TWAIN:  What did I understand you to say, madam?

SYPHNX:  You bet!

TWAIN:  Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:

SPHYNX:  Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. I did, b’gosh. Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust’n muskeeters and wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin’, and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn’t think of nothing to say. Wher’d ye come from?

TWAIN: The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech 40 days and 40nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation! She never did stop again until she got to her journey’s end near daylight.

It wasn’t only the characters and dialect that made Twain so appealing. It was often the poetry in his prose. He had a fantastic ear for the spoken word. I always think that he heard language as music.

HIRST: He had a fantastic ear for the spoken word. I always thought that he heard language as music.

As he did with the classic character in his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884.

TWAIN (from Huckleberry Finn): We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed – only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all – that night, nor the next, nor the next.

Many scholars regard Huckleberry Finn, with its empathetic relationship between a white adolescent and a black runaway slave, to be a subversive book in a time of Jim Crow. And in later years, hypocritical religion, unbridled patriotism and imperialism were frequent targets of Mark Twain’s invective.

TWAIN: I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Those words appeared in the New York Tribune in 1906. By then, Mark Twain was an American icon. But some 40 years earlier, he had to struggle just to keep his day job. As it turned out, he and the San Francisco Call were not a comfortable marriage. He wasn’t very good at his dry and tedious assignments, writing up sessions of police court, board of education meetings and the shipping business. 

But even these articles, as scholars have collected them, sometimes bear the unmistakable twist that was Mark Twain’s stock-in-trade.

TWAIN (from “More Steamship Suits Brewing,” published in the San Francisco Call): Judgments were given for plaintiffs in the Justice's Court, and an appeal, also, in the County Court. The Company have appealed to the Supreme Court solely on a point of jurisdiction. Like Jarndyce and Jarndyce in chancery, the steamship plaintiffs will probably bequeath these suits to their children of a long succession of future generations, for it is hardly possible that they themselves will live long enough to see one of them through its endless career in the United States Supreme Court.

But while Twain wrote mostly colorless stuff for The Call, he sent many provocative articles back to the Territorial Enterprise as their San Francisco correspondent. Some reflected Twain’s interest in social justice, including stories criticizing the San Francisco police for harsh treatment of the denizens of Chinatown.

When they found out about the articles from friends in Nevada, the police were not at all pleased with Mark Twain, a.k.a. Sam Clemens. And that led to the end of his stay in the City by the Bay. Within five months, the man who would become the most famous of all American writers was fired from the San Francisco Call.

Soon, the cops were after him for another reason and again, Clemens’ best friend, Steve Gillis, was involved. He had gotten into a bar fight and was thrown in jail. Clemens had bailed him out with a straw bond: a pledge that if his friend didn’t show up in court, Clemens would suffer the consequences. When Steve Gillis decided that he would rather go to his brother Jim’s cabin up in the Sierra foothills than go to court, Sam Clemens was forced to leave town too to avoid going to jail. It was the winter of 1864.

TWAIN: I spent three months in the log-cabin home of Jim Gillis and his “pard” Dick Stoker, in Jackass Gulch, that serene and reposeful and dreamy and delicious sylvan paradise.

A paradise of pouring rain, anyway. Jim Gillis, Dick Stoker and Sam Clemens were pretty much confined indoors. Remember, now, it’s the mid-19^th century. There were no electronic diversions: no radio, no television, no movies or computers. None of that. People entertained themselves. And as it happened, Jim Gillis was a master storyteller. And when he weaved through his repertoire, out came Clemens’ notebook.

TWAIN: Evry now and then Jim would have an inspiration, and he would stand up before the great log fire, and with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him and deliver himself an elaborate impromptu lie – a fairy tale, an extravagant romance…

In between the rain and the stories, Jim Gillis and his guests were miners, scouring the hills in search of a rich strike. And, that search took them from the cabin to a nearby village in pursuit of a promising mining claim there.

VICTOR FISHER: They went to Angels Camp and then the weather really turned bad, really wet, muddy.

Victor Fisher is an editor with the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley.

FISHER: And then they were very much stuck in either the place where they were staying or in the bars. And they went to the bars a lot, and in those bars were some great talkers, some of whom wrote stories and talked in a fashion that Clemens tried to capture. He wrote little notes to himself in his notebook about using some of these things, and one of the stories became “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog.”

The story is about a hustler who gets hustled.

TWAIN (from “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog”): …he was the curiosest man about always betting on any thing that turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to bet on the other side, and if he couldn't he'd change sides -- any way that suited the other man would suit him -- any way just so's he got a bet, he was satisfied.

Twain’s story was first published by The New York Saturday Press in 1865.

TWAIN (from “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog”): He was always ready and laying for a chance; there couldn't be no solitry thing mentioned but that feller'd offer to bet on it – and take any side you please, as I was just telling you. If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush, or you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first.

The story was so well received – it appeared in many newspapers and magazines. And what was first called “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog” came to be known under another title: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Suddenly, Mark Twain was getting much notice nationally, and he finally came to grips with the fact that writing, nothing else, was his destiny. He explained that in a letter to his family dated October 19, 1865.

TWAIN: I have never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, and that other a preacher of the gospel; I accomplished the one and failed in the other, because I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade – i.e. religion. I have given it up forever. I never had a “call” in that direction, anyhow, and my aspirations were the very ecstasy of presumption. But I have had a call to literature, of a low order – i.e. humorous.

By age 35 his fame was spreading rapidly, but there were those who opposed him. The prominent writers known as the Boston Brahmins saw his work as crude and pushing the nascent American literature in the wrong direction.

POWERS: They had a lot influence. If you wanted to be an American writer and you lived in the east, you’d better write like the Brahmins wrote or you wouldn’t get published.

But Twain’s approach found converts, especially the critic and writer William Dean Howells, an advocate of realism. And, the protests of the group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes could not block out the immense contributions of Mark Twain.

POWERS: So he brought this rough, tough authentic, truth-telling language back east with him from California and was able to convince some of the gatekeepers of the high culture that he really had something to say, despite the fact that he smoked cigars, had sagebrush on his pants, and didn’t talk very nice. And in that way I really believe that Mark Twain completed the American Revolution. He took the language away from the Old World Brahmins and he gave it back to the common people.

In a strong sense, the rest, as they say, is history. Lucrative offers for his writing and lecturing began to pour in, and Sam Clemens left the west to live in Washington and then New York. He eventually settled in Hartford Connecticut, where he became one the most productive and famous of all Americans.

TWAIN: Robert Louis Stevenson and I, sitting in Union Square and Washington Square a great many years ago, tried to find a name for, the submerged fame, that fame that permeates the great crowd of people you never see and never mingle with; people with whom you have no speech, but who read your books and become admirers of your work and have an affection for you. You may never find it out in the world, but there it is, and it is the faithfulness of the friendship, of the homage of those men, never criticizing, that began when they were children. They have nothing but compliments they never see the criticisms, they never hear any disparagement of you, and you will remain in the home of their hearts' affection forever and ever. And Louis Stevenson and I decided that of all fame, that was the best, the very best.

For Crosscurrents, I’m David Ross.

*     *     *

The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, was recently published by the UC Press – 100 years after the death of Sam Clemens. There’s much, much more to the life of the great writer, of course, including the publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when he was 49 years old. While its popularity was immediate, Huck Finn has been controversial from day one, sometimes rejected as crude, sometimes as racist. Today, it’s considered a classic. But as Robert Hirst, head of the Mark Twain Project at U.C. Berkeley, says, it’s one of the most read, and least understood, American novels.

ROBERT HIRST: You’re made to read Huckleberry Finn. That’s not good for Huckleberry Finn, and that’s not good for most people, in my opinion. It’s much better if you come to it on your own and read it for the pleasure of it. And my guess is that that pleasure isn’t available to somebody who’s a little bit more sophisticated than you are when you are in tenth grade. 

In a superficial way it’s an adventure story, and a simple adventure story. And I think that’s why young people can read it and not be too taken with it and not be bothered by it. But it’s much more than that.  

And much more to Twain, too. The next two volumes of his autobiography will be released next year.

TWAIN: I – well I was an exception, you understand – my kind don't turn up every day. We are very rare. We are a sort of human century plant, and we don't blossom in everybody's front yard.

"Mark Twain in the West" is an original production of KALW News. The voice of Mark Twain was by David Latulippe. Thanks to Ron Powers for his valuable assistance and for excerpts of his play “Sam & Laura,” performed by students of the University of Missouri drama department. And to Robert Hirst and Victor Fischer of the Mark Twain Project at University of California, Berkeley.

This story originally aired on December 8, 2010.