Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer

by Robert Graysmith

  “He was about twenty years old when he went on the Mississippi as a pilot,” Twain’s invalid mother recalled. “I gave up on him then, for I always thought steamboating was a wicked business, and was sure he would meet some bad associates.” When he was a cub in the pilothouse of the Aleck Scott, freighting cotton from Memphis to New Orleans, the first engineer had gotten even with Twain (then Sam Clemens) for his practical jokes. “After working Sam to a nervous state about fire,” the engineer recalled with glee, “I waited until he was alone in the pilothouse and then set fire to a little wad of cotton, stuffed it into the speaking tube [running from the engine room to the pilothouse] and the smell came out right under his nose … hair on end, his face like a corpse’s, and his eyes sticking out so far you could have knocked them off with a stick, he danced around the pilothouse … pulled every bell, turned the boat’s nose for the bank and yelled, ‘FIRE!’ ”

  As Twain heard Sawyer’s story of saving the passengers on the burning steamer Independence, in which hundreds were scalded to death by steam, his eyes grew wide. He had a deathly fear of exploding steamers and felt responsible for his brother’s death aboard one. His mother had asked him to kneel and swear on the Bible that he would look out for his slender, bookish, and frail younger brother, Henry. He had agreed.

  In early 1858, he had a nightmare in which he saw his brother Henry’s corpse in a metal coffin resting on two chairs in his sister’s sitting room. A bouquet of white flowers, a single red rose in the center, lay on his chest. “In the morning when I awoke,” he wrote, “I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real.” Convinced Henry was dead, he walked one-half block up Locust Street toward Fourteenth when he realized it had only been a nightmare. He ran back and rushed into the sitting room. “And I was made glad again,” he said, “for there was no casket there.” A few weeks later Henry did die, in a boiler explosion onboard a steamer. Twain had gotten Henry the job that killed him, an unpaid post on the New Orleans and St. Louis steam packet Pennsylvania. “He obtained for his brother Henry a place on the same boat as clerk,” his mother said, her voice trembling and eyes filling with tears, “and soon after Sam left the river Henry was blown up with the boat by an explosion and killed.” On the steamer Henry served as a mud clerk, a junior purser who checked freight at landings and often returned aboard from the riverbank with muddy feet. Twain’s own job as second clerk was to watch the freight piles from 7:00 P.M. until 7:00 A.M. for three nights every thirty-five days. Henry always joined his brother’s watch at 9:00 P.M. to walk his rounds with him and chat for hours. Their first voyage together was uneventful until Tom Brown, the Pennsylvania’s pilot, unjustly tried to strike Henry with a ten-pound lump of coal. Twain let go the wheel, picked up a heavy stool, and hit Brown “a good honest blow which stretched him out.” Captain John Klinefelter, mightily impressed, offered Twain Brown’s job, but he declined and decided to depart the steamer at New Orleans and leave Henry behind.

  The night before he left, he sat with Henry on a freight pile on the levee and talked till midnight of steamboat disasters. “In case of disaster to the boat,” Twain advised, “don’t lose your head—leave that to the passengers.” He ordered Henry to rush for the hurricane deck and astern to the lifeboats lashed aft at the wheelhouse and obey the mate’s orders. “Thus, you will be useful,” he said, adding that the river is only a mile wide and he could swim that easily. At 6:00 A.M., June 13, a full week after Twain deserted the Pennsylvania, the steamer, under a half head of steam, exploded sixty miles below Memphis at the foot of Old Bordeaux Chute and four miles ahead of Ship Island. Four of the eight boilers blew up the forward third of the boat. Beefy Captain Klinefelter had been preparing to be shaved when the explosion left the barber’s chair with him in it overhanging a gaping chasm. “Everything forward of it, floor and all,” Twain recalled, “had disappeared.” The ship’s carpenter, asleep on his mattress, was hoisted into the sky by the blast and struck the water seventy-five feet away. Shrieks and groans filled the air. Many were burned to the bone or crippled. The detonation drove an iron crowbar though one man’s body. After the explosion, Brown, the pilot, and George Clark, the chief, were never seen again. Twain, following on the A. T. Lacey from Greenville, had the full story by the time he reached Memphis.

  “Henry was asleep,” Twain said, “blown up—then fell back on the hot boilers.” A reporter wrote that Twain was “almost crazed with grief” at the sight of Henry’s burned form on a mattress surrounded by thirty-two parboiled and mangled victims on pallets. His head was shapelessly swathed in a wad of loose raw cotton. “His feelings so much overcame him, at the scalded and emaciated form before him, that he sank to the floor overpowered.” Henry had inhaled the lethal steam. His entire body was badly scalded, but he helped passengers evacuate before he lay on the riverbank under a burning sun for eight hours. Dr. Peyton, an old physician, took charge of Henry and at 11:00 P.M. told Twain that Henry was out of danger. “On the evening of the sixth day, [Henry’s] wandering mind busied itself with matters far away and his nerveless fingers picked at his coverlet,” Twain recalled. Every day doctors removed the doomed to a partitioned chamber adjoining the recovery room so other patients might not be affected by seeing the dying moments. Twain watched the “death-room” fill with bodies as one victim after another succumbed. “[Henry] lingered in fearful agony seven days and a half during which time he had full possession of his senses … and then but for a few moments at a time. His brain was injured by the concussion, and from that moment his great intellect was a ruin.”

  Dr. Peyton asked the young, barely trained doctors on watch to give Henry an eighth of a grain of morphine if he showed signs of being disturbed by the screams of the wounded. Because the neophyte physicians had no way to measure an eighth of a grain of morphine, they heaped a quantity on the tip of a knife blade and administered that to Henry. When one of his frenzies seized him, he tore off handfuls of cotton and exposed his cooked flesh. Three times Henry was covered and brought to the death-room and three times brought back to the recovery room. He died close to dawn. “His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.… For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised, but uncomplaining brother and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair.… O, God! This is hard to bear.” They placed Henry in an unpainted white pine coffin and Twain went away to a nearby house to sleep. In his absence, some Memphis ladies bought a metallic coffin for Henry, who had been a great favorite of theirs. When Twain returned to the death-room to pay his respects, he found his brother dressed in a suit of Twain’s clothing and laid out in a metallic coffin exactly as in his dream. All that was missing was the unique bouquet. “I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail, but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the center of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.” After Henry and 150 other human beings perished, Twain blamed himself and was still working the problem over in his mind by day and in vivid dreams at night. “My nightmares to this day,” he said, “take the form of my dead brother and of running down into an overshadowing bluff, with a steamboat—showing that my earliest dread made the strongest impression on me.” Twain left the steam baths determined to find a subject for his first novel that matched the rousing excitement of Sawyer’s real-life recounting of an exploding steamer. Always on the lookout for a young hero, he filed the story away. He had yet to hear of the six great fires that had destroyed San Francisco and to learn that Sawyer, too, was plagued by nightmares of exploding steamboats.

  While in San Francisco, Twain tried to arrange employment as the Nevada correspondent for the Daily Morning Call. He picked up news wherever he could: the docks, the firehouse, the police station, the Bank
Exchange cigar kiosk, and the Montgomery Street Turkish Baths. “Your deal, Sam,” Stahle said the next day. Neither Ed Stahle nor Sawyer called the red-haired journalist Twain. They called him Sam Clemens. “Mark Twain” was only one of dozens of playful pen names the writer had used since he was teenaged Samuel Langhorne Clemens. “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins” was another. He had recently adopted his most famous sobriquet on the third of February and used it again on the fifth and the eighth in a letter from Carson City to the Enterprise while reporting legislative proceedings. Twain was river jargon for two fathoms (twelve feet) of water under the keel, the shallowest depth a steamboat could safely negotiate a river like the Mississippi. A half twain is fifteen feet. Captain Josiah Sellers, a masterful river pilot of greater navigational talent than the comparatively inept boatman Sam Clemens, supposedly had the nom de plume first while writing river news for the New Orleans Daily Picayune. He apparently thought nothing of appropriating Sellers’s name. “I laid violent hands upon [his signature] without asking permission of the prophet’s remains,” he drawled. “Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth.” With Sellers’s death a year earlier, the name was solely Twain’s. The truth was that Sellers had never used that pseudonym and Sam had perversely launched the self-deprecating myth himself.

  His sojourn in San Francisco was profitable. “Ma,” he wrote, “I have got five twenty-dollar greenbacks—the first kind of money I ever had. I’ll send them to you—one at a time, so that if one or two get lost, it will not amount to anything.” Yes, these were rosy times. During his news-papering days in Nevada, he had gotten some free mining stocks as kickbacks for favorable mentions in the Territorial Enterprise. His Gould and Curry stock was soaring. He had bought fifty shares of Hale and Norcross silver stocks on margin that he still had not sold and the share price was now a thousand dollars. “I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then concluded not to sell. Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad; bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very washer women and servant girls were putting their earnings on silver stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers enriched and rich men beggared. What a gambling carnival it was! I’m close to selling and am anxious to embark upon a life of ease. My ambition is to become a millionaire in a day or two.”

  On May 16, he and Rice moved out of the Occidental a block up Montgomery into a newer, more sumptuous hotel. The palatial Lick House at the corner of Sutter Street had flagged marble floors and a banquet hall that is a perfect replica of the Palace of Versailles. At the Lick House he “lived like a lord” in room number 165, “a pleasant room at the head of a long hall.” He wrote his mother and sister that “the Unreliable and myself are still here and still enjoying ourselves. We go to sleep without rocking, every night. We dine out, and we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were … I am going the Dickens mighty fast.” His only exercise was sleeping and resting, generally waking at 11:00 A.M. because he was “naturally lazy.” When the proprietors sent him and Rice bottles of champagne and claret at dinner, they put on “the most disgusting airs.” Twain bought two new suits, put $1,200 in his bank account, attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, and simpered and displayed his “graces like a born beau.” After breakfast, he often did not see the hotel again until after midnight. He took trips across the bay to Oakland, up to Benicia, and down to Alameda and out to the Willows and Fort Point. He and Rice sailed on the fastest yacht on the Pacific coast.

  Twain took a carriage out to the Ocean House, south of the Cliff House, to hear the surf crash and sea lions roar. Standing ankle deep in the surf, he studied the wide expanse of the bay. In the distance fleecy white clouds massed and a flock of gulls blackened the mudflats to the north. Returning to Montgomery Street, he realized that the old-fashioned architecture that appeared so stately and handsome from a distance was really made up of “decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses.” He temporarily left his good life and went back to Virginia City. He had mined a few months in Washoe, the popular name for Nevada, and on the Stanislaus River across the California border, and served a venue as a wandering printer before becoming a Virginia City reporter. He made plans to return to San Francisco in June and wrote Sawyer.

  “When I had come back from a trip,” Sawyer said, “Sam wrote, asking me to pay him a visit. Well, I was pretty well-heeled—had eight hundred dollars in my inside pocket and since there was nothing much doing in Frisco, I went.” Sawyer rocked on the rugged stagecoach ride there, jolting over the mountain roads and feeling sick to his stomach. Warily he studied the chasms on both sides. San Francisco considered Virginia City its lucrative mining suburb, though it presented a tiresome and dangerous mountainous commute of two hundred miles across the Sierra. Wells Fargo’s express stage rode with the stages of the Pioneer Stage Line from San Francisco to Virginia City. On Sawyer’s journey to visit Twain, Hank Monk, “the Prince of Stage Divers,” laid down a blue streak of profanity and “gid-daps” as he lashed his six-horse team through the Sierras. Monk wore the same battered hat and brown corduroy suit he had mended with copper rivets. He handled the ribbons over his teams’ backs expertly, though to Sawyer it seemed in slow motion. The trip came complete with road agents. “No driver ever gave a stage robber away,” Monk said with a shake of his shoulder-length hair. “He’d get shot if he even showed he recognized the bandit. Later, they would even introduce themselves and have a drink together.” When Sawyer reached the silver town after a breakneck descent and put his feet on solid ground, he was glad he had accepted Twain’s invitation. During his visit Sawyer provided the most popular origin of Sam’s pen name: “It happened at Tom Peasley’s Saloon near morning in Nevada City,” he said. “Larry Ryan was tending bar.”

  “Give us two cocktails, Larry, and such cocktails as them were!” Twain sang out. “Twain used to take two horns, one right after the other, and take them on tick,” Sawyer said, smacking his lips. “Um, I can taste them yet. Larry mixed ’em and handed ’em over the bar expecting Sam to ante up. Instead, he stood there, held up two fingers and, pointing to the slate, sang out: ‘Larry, mark twain.’ Larry, who carried a lump of chalk in his weskit pocket to keep score, added two drinks to Sam’s account. The barkeep told Peasley of it in the morning, and Peasley thought it such a good joke that he told all the boys. And so it was, d’ye see, that he come to be called Twain.” Twain continued the same practice at Johnny Doyle’s, but this was one of Sawyer’s stories that did not hold water. Twain had used the pen name nearly five months earlier and would use the signature “Mark” in a letter to his mother and sister on July 18.

  Sawyer had an exciting few nights with his pal Sam and his friends. He drank and gambled with him and high rollers like Pat Lynch, Sam Davis, Holland of the Enterprise, Tom Fox, and Doc Cole. “In four days I found myself busted, without a cent,” Sawyer said later. “Where under the sun he got it has always been a mystery, but that morning Sam walked in with two hundred dollars in his pocket, gave me fifty, and put me on the stage for California, saying that he guessed his Virginia City friends was too speedy for me.”

  After Sawyer left, Twain’s luck went bad. He moved into a suite of rooms in the new White House Hotel on North B Street. When it caught fire on July 26, most of his possessions and all his mining stocks were burned to ash. In print, he fictionalized the reason for his sudden poverty. “All of sudden,” he lamented, “out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away.” The swagger had gone out of his step. In early September 1863, he dragged himself back to San Francisco and retired to the Lick House to nurse his wounds. He rallied his flagging spirits by submitting his first article to Colonel Lawrence’s weekly Golden Era at 723 Montgomery Street. The proximity to 722 Montgomery put him back at t
he steam baths when he most needed them to ease a troublesome cold. He had not felt this poorly since July. Usually he was writing intently, legs tucked up to his chin, fitted into the window of his room. He had all kinds of vivid dreams but suffered most from recurrent nightmares of his brother’s corpse. Some cards, some stories, some beer, good company—that was the thing. By the time he sought Sawyer out at the Bank Exchange saloon, he was ashen faced and trembling, having fallen into a bleak, almost suicidal depression, the one constant about his life. He saw the round-faced young man across the room and hailed him. Twain brightened immediately, sat down, and began to hold court.

  “Sam was a dandy, he was,” Sawyer said later. “He could drink more and talk more than any feller I ever seen. He’d set down and take a drink and then he’d begin to tell us some joke or another. And then when somebody’d buy him another drink, he’d keep her up all day. Once he got started he’d set there till morning telling yarns, provided someone would throw a bowl at him every few minutes.”