by Ben Tarnoff
Twain’s irreverence didn’t just drive his comic wit; it also adapted him to an era of tectonic change, when technology was disrupting tradition on an unprecedented scale. The Industrial Revolution gathered fresh momentum at midcentury, just as Twain came of age. He watched steamboats make the Mississippi into a bustling commercial highway, and his hometown of Hannibal into a concourse for a lively cross section of humanity. Steam accelerated trade and travel. It annihilated distance. It built new networks along rivers and railroads and, crucially, sped the diffusion of the printed word.
By the time Twain became a typesetter, America’s love affair with newsprint was growing fast. In 1776, the country had 37 newspapers. By 1830, it counted 715. By 1840, that number had doubled. Steam-powered machines made printing cheaper and faster; rising literacy fueled demand. A complex ecology emerged, with high-circulation city papers at the top, one-editor sheets at the bottom, and a diverse spectrum of typographical wildlife in between. Gardening tips shared space with sensationalized crime reports; serialized romances appeared alongside partisan hack jobs. “Story papers” delivered cheap thrills in the form of adventure tales; illustrated weeklies used detailed engravings to visualize the news.
The newspaper revolution created America’s first popular culture. Twain belonged wholly to this revolution, and the world he discovered in the Far West was its most fertile staging ground. Newspapers helped colonize the Pacific coast. They stoked the gold rush by publishing letters from the mines and endorsements from powerful editors like Horace Greeley, and they carried ads for California-bound ships and stagecoaches. Since the price of a ticket was prohibitive to the very poor, the emigrants mostly came from literate backgrounds, and they began printing newspapers and books when they reached the Far West. By 1870, California had one of the highest literacy rates in the nation: only 7.3 percent of its residents over the age of ten couldn’t write, compared with 20 percent nationwide. The region’s wealth financed a range of publications and gave people the leisure to read them. As Twain observed, there was no surer sign of “flush times” in a Far Western boomtown than the founding of a “literary paper.” Poetry and fiction mattered to miners and farmers, merchants and bankers. For them the printed word wasn’t a luxury—it was a lifeline. It fostered a sense of place, a feeling of community, in a frontier far from home.
• • •
Twain arrived in Nevada in the summer of 1861. The ostensible reason was to accompany his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor. With the Civil War roiling his home state, however, Twain had another motive: to avoid the Northern and Southern recruiters drafting Missourians of eligible age into military service. Missouri would be a battleground, split between Union and Confederate sympathies, and Twain had no desire to stay until the real bloodshed began.
So he climbed into a stagecoach and embarked on one of the greatest adventures of his life. In the prairies he saw coyotes and jackrabbits. In Nevada he found a desert full of enterprising young men angling for instant riches—and a social panorama that rivaled the Mississippi in its variety. “The country is fabulously rich,” he wrote his mother soon after he arrived, “in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, cuyotès (pronounced kiyo-ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.” It also boasted one of the wildest newspapers in the West, a far-flung outpost of America’s print empire: the Territorial Enterprise.
After a failed stint at silver mining, Twain joined its staff. He arrived for his first day of work in September 1862 looking like a cross between a hobo and an outlaw: coatless, bearded, with a bedroll on his shoulder and a Navy Revolver in his belt. Fortunately, the Enterprise didn’t scare easily. Its editor, a taciturn twenty-three-year-old named Joe Goodman, presided over a crew of hard-drinking hell-raisers that made Twain’s Hannibal pranksters look like choirboys. Their offices were the epicenter of the human earthquake known as Virginia City, a Nevada settlement of no fewer than fifty-one saloons cut into the side of a mountain that held in its seams the richest stockpile of precious metals ever discovered: the Comstock Lode. “Virginny” lived at a perpetual tilt from reality. It swayed under the wind of frequent sandstorms; it shook with the constant blasting that burrowed mine shafts into the sloping earth. Its foundations were as fragile as the mental states of its inhabitants, who shot one another over the slightest insult, and squandered their lives on fantasies of wealth that rarely paid dividends.
Virginia City’s lawlessness enabled the usual western vices. Young men at a certain distance from civilization tended to lose sight of Victorian values, and indulge urges they might’ve been better able to suppress farther east. The same freedom that facilitated a brisk trade in sex and booze also emboldened the Enterprise to take an especially far-out approach to frontier journalism. Goodman’s writers didn’t simply report the facts. They improved upon them. They sketched their extravagant surroundings with the fidelity of a funhouse mirror, creating a ruthlessly funny caricature. Their aim was to scandalize, to satirize, to sell papers, to settle vendettas, to boost their personal celebrity. One obligation that didn’t weigh heavily on the herd of young heretics at the Enterprise was to the truth, which in the West had a tendency to mix freely with fable.
Virginia City taught Twain how to be a working journalist. He prowled the city in search of anything that might make for a column or two of entertaining copy, from the steps of the courthouse to the stock exchange. He became a sponge for rumor and hearsay. Despite his gift for observation, he discovered that dry facts bored him. He preferred to embroider and enlarge the truth, or ignore it altogether. Less than a week after joining the Enterprise, Twain published a hoax—“an unmitigated lie, made from whole cloth,” he confessed in a letter—called “Petrified Man.” It claimed that a “stony mummy” had been found in the mountains of eastern Nevada, perfectly preserved. Delivered in pure deadpan, the sketch combined Twain’s absurdist sense of humor with his venomous taste for revenge. He wrote it to punish someone who had slighted him, a judge named G. T. Sewall, who appears in “Petrified Man” as a dim-witted magistrate who holds an inquest on the body.
Newspapers throughout Nevada and California reprinted the hoax. Some got the joke; others took it seriously. Twain recalled that he collected the clippings and mailed them spitefully to Sewall: “I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him.” But the greater comfort doubtlessly came from his growing fame. With the Enterprise as his springboard, Twain became a Washoe personality. Goodman, recognizing the young Missourian’s talent, gave him room to roam. Mining companies courted him, hoping for favorable notices. The legislators in Carson City paid tribute to his political dispatches with a resolution of thanks. “I am the most conceited ass in the Territory,” he crowed to his mother and sister.
Yet his swagger disguised a deeper anxiety. As his prominence rose, so did his expectations. Excessive in most things, he always wanted more. Virginia City may have been an exhilarating introduction to the Far West, but it stood in the long shadow of imperial San Francisco. “Not a settler in all the Pacific States and Territories but must pay San Francisco tribute,” wrote Henry George, the economist and reformer, “not an ounce of gold dug, a pound of ore smelted, a field gleaned, or a tree felled” without increasing its wealth.
The Comstock was no exception. The mining shafts that ran hundreds of feet into the Nevada earth were built by San Francisco barons; the gold and silver extracted lined their pockets. Virginia City wasn’t a competitor. Like many outposts of the sparsely settled Far West, it was a colony. San Francisco’s banks and docks and dry-goods houses ruled the region. The city was an unlikely monarch, built on dunes and declivities and other disincentives to human habitation, yet it compensated for its ludicrous terrain with an excellent location. Like Constant
inople, it straddled East and West: linked by sea to the Atlantic states and to Asia, and by land to the boundless Pacific interior. It made gold into coins, trees into timber. It gave form to the raw material of the Far West, and reaped the considerable rewards. Its newspapers commanded a readership far beyond that of the Enterprise, circulating throughout the Pacific coast and sent on steamers back East. In a nation obsessed with newsprint, San Francisco outdid them all, boasting more newspapers per capita than any other American city. Twain could rise only so far in Nevada. So in May 1863, when he came to San Francisco for two months of high living, in a sober moment among several wobbly ones, he performed a small but significant piece of business. He arranged to become a correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call.
By the 1860s, San Francisco reigned over a flourishing economic empire. The gold rush had faded, its diggings largely exhausted by hordes of prospectors, but the Comstock boomed. Then came the Civil War. The conflict that ravaged the rest of the country made California richer. The disruption of trade with the eastern states sheltered the state’s industries from competition. Manufacturers produced mining machinery like pumps and drills, and a range of consumer goods to meet demand from the region’s growing population. Agriculture also expanded, as wheat became a major export. New mines in Nevada and elsewhere kept bullion flowing into San Francisco’s banks—$185 million of which would be sent to Northern coffers to help finance the Union war effort. Aside from this hefty contribution, however, California’s role in the conflict was limited. No serious fighting reached the coast, and Lincoln never applied the draft west of Iowa and Kansas, partly in a bid to keep the Far West loyal.
The Civil War would be a boon to California: not only by increasing its wealth but by bringing the dream of a transcontinental railroad closer to reality. Although a railway to the Pacific had been debated for decades, Congress didn’t lay the legislative foundations until the war made it possible to sell the idea as a matter of military necessity. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 took the first step, chartering two private companies to build the tracks, and subsidizing the venture with land grants and federal bonds. The construction would go slowly at first. Californians followed its progress closely. They awaited the approaching triumph with an intensity verging on the messianic. The railroad was more than a twisting trellis of iron and wood: it represented the consummation of a spiritual tradition as old as Columbus. It would unite East and West, and link the Atlantic trade with the Pacific. California’s current riches paled in comparison with its estimate of its future fortunes. While the East descended into hell, the West strode confidently in the direction of its dreams.
• • •
ANY CITIZEN OF SAN FRANCISCO Asleep at daybreak on July 4, 1863, might’ve thought, in a haze of half-broken slumber, that the war had come to California. The cannon at Fort Point and Alcatraz pounded the sky. Warships at anchor opened fire. Little boys lit firecrackers in the street. The city celebrated the eighty-seventh anniversary of American independence with an expenditure of gunpowder that couldn’t fail to evoke the smoky, sulfurous battlefields thousands of miles to the east.
Elsewhere, Americans spent the holiday differently. On July 4, Confederate general Robert E. Lee began his retreat from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The battle had killed or injured more than forty thousand men of both armies, and broken Lee’s momentum by ending his invasion of the North. The same day, the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to Union forces commanded by Ulysses S. Grant, a victory that helped restore the Mississippi River to Northern control. By the time San Francisco awoke to the celebratory sounds of gunfire, the tide had shifted ever so subtly against the South. The Civil War would grind on for another two years, and claim many more lives, but in hindsight, the summer of 1863 would be decisive: the moment when, two years after vowing to save the Union, Lincoln finally began to reverse the Confederacy’s gains.
The news from the front wouldn’t reach San Francisco for another few days. If it had come sooner, it might have lent some enthusiasm to the Independence Day parade, which lacked the numbers of previous years. People could be forgiven for not feeling particularly festive. Even Californians, who had been spared the Civil War’s worst suffering, had begun to tire of the conflict. Their appetite for alcohol and entertainment remained intact, however, and they used the holiday as a pretext to indulge in both. The alcohol came by way of brewery wagons, which dispensed enough beer on July 4 to put thirty-five people in jail for public drunkenness. The entertainment took place at the Metropolitan Theatre on Montgomery, where a Unitarian minister named Thomas Starr King delivered the day’s oration.
King knew how to draw a crowd. Within five minutes of the doors’ opening, the Metropolitan had filled to bursting. Men, women, children, even Copperheads—those who sympathized with the South—turned out to see California’s most popular preacher take the stage. Five feet tall and 120 pounds, King didn’t look like much of a performer. Yet when he spoke, the sounds that flowed from his dainty frame were so robust, so heady with aphorism and humor, that they commanded rapt attention and thunderous applause. For the last two years King had crusaded tirelessly for the Northern cause, touring the state to proclaim the indivisibility of the Union. From the start of the war, a vocal minority had supported Southern secession, and even discussed turning California into an independent republic. That danger had passed, but pockets of pro-Southern sentiment persisted, along with a certain indifference to national politics that came naturally to westerners. Californians found it easy to forget they belonged to the United States, and King endeavored to remind them in the most emphatic terms.
Before speaking that day, King read a poem written by a local poet. Like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address four months later, it spoke of the current convulsions as another American Revolution: “these throes that shake the Earth / Are but the pangs that usher in the Nation’s newer birth!” The house received the verses warmly. Strangely, their author was nowhere to be found. He was ill, the papers reported. A sturdier soul might’ve rallied for the rare opportunity to stand before such an audience. But anyone who knew the poet personally might suspect this was precisely the reason for his absence: that shyness, not sickness, had kept him away.
Bret Harte around 1862, when he was just becoming famous. He was about twenty-six.
Not that he wasn’t fond of being noticed. On the contrary: Bret Harte liked to be looked at. That season, as summer fog cooled the city, he might be seen in a stylish overcoat sporting a lamb collar, brightened by a felicitous flash of color—a crimson necktie, perhaps—that set him apart from the rabble. Every fold, every fabric of the young man’s outfit would be as carefully arranged as those stanzas delivered at the Metropolitan. On Montgomery Street, he flitted through the human foliage like a brilliantly plumed bird. If your eyes happened to meet his, he would smile; if he spoke a few words in greeting, his voice would be agreeable. But there would be no yarn spinning or rib splitting—nothing to remind one of that Washoe wild man Mark Twain. He preferred to be admired from afar.
And there was much to admire. At twenty-six, Harte had become the leading literary light of the Pacific coast—no small feat in a state where even the shaggiest miner aspired to bardhood, and poets were pop stars, declaiming verses to cheering crowds at public gatherings. Harte had powerful friends, a rising reputation, a wife, and an infant son. Since 1861, he had worked as a clerk for the surveyor general of California, then for a US marshal. In the summer of 1863, he became the secretary to the superintendent of the US Mint in San Francisco. His evenings didn’t involve drunken romps of the Virginia City variety. They centered on more domestic concerns, like how to keep baby Griswold from disturbing his study, or his wife from dragooning him into household chores, so that he might have a couple of quiet hours to write.
This shy, soft-spoken dandy must’ve seemed like an odd choice for the Far West’s literary spokesman. He didn’t wield an ax
or a revolver. He ridiculed the region’s most cherished myths, especially the cult of the pioneer. He hated philistines, sentimentalists, and hypocrites, and felt that California had all three in abundance. Where others saw progress, he saw decline. The sea trade that made San Francisco rich? The “vagrant keels of prying Commerce.” The stately City Hall of white Australian sandstone? A “district poorhouse.”
Few things escaped “the corrosive touch of his subtle irreverence,” as his friend William Dean Howells later observed. But Harte wasn’t just a destroyer. If he often felt disillusioned with California, this was because he saw its true potential: as an infinitely original civilization with its own unique history and habits—a “singular fraternity” of Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese, Europeans, Australians, Indians, and Americans living “free from the trammels of precedent” on the far edge of the world. Here was the “real genuine America” trumpeted by Walt Whitman, a world of raw literary possibility beyond the wildest imaginings of the country’s reigning custodians of high culture—and, just possibly, the seeds of a new national literature.
• • •
HARTE HAD ALWAYS WANTED to write. Nothing in his early life suggested he would succeed. His first literary effort, at age eleven, ended in a trauma that nearly derailed him. He wrote a poem, which he submitted to a Sunday newspaper. All week he anxiously awaited the outcome. When the fateful day finally came, and he raced to the nearby newsstand and discovered his poem printed on the newspaper’s first page, his heart leaped. He bought a copy to take home—only to learn, to his horror, that his family didn’t share his enthusiasm. “It was unanimously conceded that I was lost,” he recalled many years later. His father had been a schoolteacher, but aspired to literature. He had died two years earlier, leaving his wife destitute. The thought that the young Harte would take a similarly impecunious path prompted a harsh response from his family. In their New York home was a book of Hogarth illustrations, and one of the pictures, The Distrest Poet, summarized their fears: it showed a pathetic figure in a dingy garret, hounded by a milkmaid demanding payment of an overdue bill. “It was a terrible experience,” Harte remembered. “I sometimes wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse.”
