by Ben Tarnoff
Menken so thoroughly dominated San Francisco that when Twain returned to town in September 1863, he discovered that no one talked of anything else. “Here every tongue sings the praises of her matchless grace, her supple gestures, her charming attitudes,” he wrote in a letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Yet when he joined the multitudes that descended nightly on Maguire’s Opera House to see “the Menken” for himself, the performance left him cold. Instead of a goddess, he found a lunatic. She pitched forward like a “battering ram,” worked her limbs like a “dancing-jack,” and rolled on the ground like a “pack-mule after his burden is removed.” “If this be grace,” he concluded, “then the Menken is eminently graceful.”
Stoddard felt differently. From the moment he saw her picture pasted in San Francisco’s shop windows, Menken riveted him. It wasn’t just her beauty. It was her strangeness: how far she ventured “out of the common run”—how exuberantly she demolished Victorian ideals of femininity. The masculine vigor of her performance, paired with the “willowy elasticity” of her figure, created what one reviewer called an “idealized duality of sex.” Offstage, she smoked cigarettes and enjoyed an active sex life—by the time she came to San Francisco, she was on her third husband—yet remained indisputably, irresistibly feminine. Stoddard admired her “half-feminine masculinity,” an ambiguity that mirrored his own. In a private notebook, he fantasized about inhabiting a woman’s body, so that his “physique” could be “made whole.”
Menken’s sensuality wasn’t the only reason she fascinated people. She also belonged to an infamous clique of writers and artists in New York that Californians had been reading about for years: the Bohemians. This was a group that gathered at a gritty German bar on Broadway called Pfaff’s. Their patriarch was Henry Clapp Jr., an exceptionally ugly man who diverted attention from his unfortunate face with a scorching wit. He started a weekly paper called the Saturday Press that fulminated against moral hypocrisy, cultural philistinism, and the deadening materialism of American society. “It attacked all literary shams but its own,” William Dean Howells recalled, “and made itself felt and feared.”
Menken joined the Bohemian circle on Broadway. Her favorite Pfaffian was Walt Whitman, the Brooklynite who sang the body electric in sinewy strokes of free verse. In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, he spoke of America as a living poem, written in the vernacular of its common people. Only the poet liberated from “precedent,” he believed, could innovate the “new free forms” needed to bring this hymn into being. Menken worshipped Whitman. She brought his name West, championing his poetry in the pages of the Era and trying to emulate his voice in her own gushing bits of free verse. In life as in literature, she resisted all restraint. “Swimming against the current is hard and dangerous work,” she wrote.
The New York Bohemians were already celebrities in San Francisco by the time she arrived. The Era had been writing about them for years, praising those “fellows of infinite humor and rare fancy” who met at Pfaff’s, and Harte himself called New York the “Bohemian Capital.” In raising the Bohemian flag on the Pacific coast, Harte had hoped to create a literary scene like the one at Pfaff’s. He didn’t want to spend hours in an underground cellar chugging cheap beer, however, and he didn’t share Stoddard’s enthusiasm for Menken’s libertinism. But the Bohemian spirit appealed to Harte. The irreverence, the contrarianism, the sense that precedents needed to be overturned—these would shape his work, and the work of the young writers around him.
There was also a generational element. Most New York Bohemians were in their twenties, the same age as Harte, Stoddard, Coolbrith, and Twain. For this reason they felt more relatable than the older New England writers promoted by Thomas Starr King. The Bohemians of both coasts came of age with the Civil War, and their countercultural sensibility belonged to a broader breakdown in traditional values precipitated by the conflict. When the Civil War scattered the Pfaffians, several of them came to San Francisco. They discovered something Harte had known since 1860: that the city held many advantages for the young iconoclast. Its isolation didn’t provide just a refuge from the war but a safe haven from the conventions of the eastern establishment. It was a city where “eccentricities cause no astonishment,” in the words of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a Pfaffian who took the overland stage to California in 1863.
The legacy of the gold rush gave the city an unsettled feel. The gender imbalance of the pioneer days persisted—by 1860, men still made up more than 60 percent of the city’s population—and evidence of bachelor life was everywhere. In 1861, the Era noted the large numbers of “nomads” who lodged in the “vast beehives” of the city’s many boardinghouses and hotels. And hotels, as Harte observed, were the Bohemian’s “natural resting place,” where he could drift with the rest of the “living tide” perpetually passing through. The large numbers of unmarried men lent San Francisco a looser moral tone. Fewer families meant fewer restrictions, and more freedom to crack coarse jokes or enjoy risqué entertainments.
If San Francisco’s fluid social fabric helped foster Bohemianism, the city’s robust newspaper industry helped finance it. In America, “Bohemian” also referred to a working writer. The New York Bohemians included many journalists who lived by their pen—and San Francisco, which sustained more professional scribblers in proportion to its total population than any other American city, gave writers plenty of opportunities to ply their trade. It also provided a steady stream of suitable material. Sometimes all Harte had to do was look out his window. A “small portion of the large world” passed below, he wrote. The gold rush had brought people from all over the globe; the decade that followed drew even more. By 1860, about two-thirds of the city’s adult male citizens were foreign-born. Irish, German, Italian, British, Scandinavian, French, Hawaiian, Chilean, and Peruvian faces dotted the crowd. The Mexicans sported red sashes. The Chinese wore blue blouses. A “bustling, breathless, and brand-new life,” as Harte remembered it—and a gold mine for the prospecting writer.
There was another factor that made the Far West fertile ground for good writing. The land itself inspired a new kind of seeing. To the first generations of settlers, the country beyond the Rocky Mountains was truly another world. Its strange weather, its monumental scale, the coloring of its sky and soil—all these were alien. In diaries and letters, people struggled to find the right words for what they saw. Writing to his mother from Nevada in 1861, Twain used analogies to describe the desert that surrounded Carson City. A shrub called greasewood grew “to about twice the size of common geranium,” he wrote, and looked like a miniature live oak tree. But when he turned to the mountains, the comparisons broke down:
I said we are situated in a flat, sandy desert. True. And surrounded on all sides by such prodigious mountains that when you stand at a distance from Carson and gaze at them awhile,—until, by mentally measuring them, and comparing them with things of smaller size, you begin to conceive of their grandeur, and next to feel their vastness expanding your soul like a balloon, and ultimately find yourself growing, and swelling, and spreading into a colossus,—I say when this point is reached, you look disdainfully down upon the insignificant village of Carson, reposing like a cheap print away yonder at the foot of the big hills, and in that instant you are seized with a burning desire to stretch forth your hand, put the city in your pocket, and walk off with it.
This was what the writer Wallace Stegner would call the “westernization of the perceptions” more than a century later. In trying to grasp Nevada’s epic dimensions, Twain feels himself “growing,” “swelling,” “spreading”—seized by a new sense of proportion. The terrain demanded a different kind of vision, and this meant moving beyond inherited notions of scale and space.
The seemingly obvious idea that a new landscape required new ways of seeing was actually quite radical. It challenged a set of beliefs about the West that had remained remarkably persistent throughout American history. Ever s
ince the first settlers had pushed into the interior, eastern elites had regarded the frontier with suspicion, condescension, and contempt. New Englanders, steeped in the Puritan theocratic tradition, distrusted a backwoods society unrestrained by religion and law. Even Thomas Jefferson, patron saint of western expansion, saw the pioneers as “semi-barbarous citizens” who existed in an intermediary state between the savage Indian and the civilized American of the Atlantic coast. According to this standpoint, America’s geography recapitulated the stages of mankind’s development, from the most primitive in the West to the most advanced in the East. As the West matured, it would rise to the level of Atlantic civilization.
This theory of progress precluded the possibility that the frontier, despite its lack of refinement, might be able to inspire original works of art. If the West was “semi-barbarous,” it needed more churches and schools and courthouses before it could produce anything of artistic value. Thomas Starr King subscribed heartily to this view. The preacher worked hard to “Northernize” California for two related reasons: to keep the state loyal to Lincoln, and to help a region “struggling up to civilization.” He nurtured San Francisco’s writers and forecast a promising literary future for the Far West, one that followed closely in the footsteps of his beloved New England. He had a very specific model in mind. He gave lectures on poets like Lowell and Longfellow because he wanted California to grow its own Lowells and Longfellows.
These weren’t unusual choices. Lowell and Longfellow were two of the most famous writers in the country. Along with William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., they were known as the Fireside Poets: a set of nationally loved northeasterners who wrote frequently for the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly, the country’s most prestigious literary magazine. To King, they provided a gold standard against which the young aspirants of the Far Western frontier could be judged.
New England had dominated American letters for decades. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson had started an intellectual movement in Massachusetts that molded America’s first generation of literary greats. Emerson and his descendants failed in one major respect, however. They gave the young nation much to be proud of—yet they never quite overcame the postcolonial inferiority complex that, since the Revolution, had kept American writers in thrall to their European elders. In a famous address to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society, Emerson called for the creation of a native national literature, liberated from the cultural imperialism of the Old World. “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” he said. It was a worthy aim, echoed in other quarters by Thomas Hart Benton—but New England’s literary nobility remained too deeply indebted to transatlantic influences to achieve it. Their subjects may have been American, but their style was largely imported.
The Far West offered a possible path forward. On the frontier, the rudiments of a new kind of writing were beginning to take shape. It would succeed only on its own terms, not by slavish emulation of New England or the wholesale adoption of Atlantic tastes but by discovering the value of its local materials, by broadening its vision to see what was hiding in plain sight.
The New York Bohemians would help. They had a special loathing for the “solemn Philistines” of New England, and they provided an alternative to Thomas Starr King’s influence. Still, San Francisco’s Bohemians would never be as combative as their New York brethren. They continued to crave the approval of eastern elites, partly because they feared they might go unnoticed without it.
• • •
IN OCTOBER 1863, Harte published his first story in the Atlantic Monthly alongside pieces by Emerson and Thoreau. This triumph had been more than a year in the making. As early as January 1862, Thomas Starr King had recommended Harte to the Atlantic’s editor, his friend James T. Fields. “I am sure there is a great deal in Harte,” King wrote, “and an acceptance of his piece would inspirit him, and help literature on this coast where we raise bigger trees and squashes than literati and brains.” Nine months later, Jessie Benton Frémont added her endorsement. Harte possessed “a fresh mind filled with unworn pictures,” she assured Fields.
A Californian writing for a New England magazine might be expected to glorify the Far West. Harte did the opposite. He wrote a revisionist tale about California’s history that presented the American conquest as a tragedy, not a victory. He inverted the usual triumphalist narrative, making the pioneers villains, not heroes. In Harte’s fable they come “pushing, bustling, panting, and swaggering” in search of gold, a “deceitful lure” sown by Satan himself.
As blasphemous as this might be to a California reader, it wasn’t out of place in the pages of the Atlantic. In the same issue, Thoreau called the gold rush “the greatest disgrace on mankind,” condemning the prospectors as coarse and immoral. Emerson had said much the same thing three years earlier when he described 1849 as “a rush and a scramble of needy adventurers,” and “a general jail-delivery of all the rowdies of the rivers.”
These patronizing appraisals belonged to a long tradition of New England’s distaste for the frontier. Harte derived his dim view of California from a very different source. He spoke from the inside, as a westerner. His misgivings about the American settlement of the Pacific coast had personal roots. He had seen the mangled corpses of Indians murdered by white vigilantes at Humboldt Bay, and in his columns for the Golden Era, he took aim at the “bustling Yankee” wherever he appeared—the boosters who blindly worshipped progress, the philistines who put money above all else. Yet he also believed in California’s promise. Here was a region rich with “romantic and dramatic possibilities . . . unrivalled in history,” he later wrote.
Harte’s Atlantic coup solidified his place at the head of the San Francisco pack. It didn’t secure him a permanent place in the eastern press, however. When Mrs. Frémont tried to get more of her protégé’s writings published, Fields balked. “Your young friend fails to interest,” he wrote. “He is not piquant enough for the readers of the Atlantic.” Fields wasn’t wrong: Harte’s early fiction fell flat.
Twain, on the other hand, had piquancy to spare. By the fall of 1863, the Virginia City troublemaker had become a fixture of the San Francisco scene. His September visit had brought fresh victories. Before returning home to Nevada, he published four features in the Era, enjoyed another heady dose of high society in the dining hall of the Lick House, and earned a nickname suited to his oversize personality: the Washoe Giant.
Harte and Twain may have met by this point, although their friendship didn’t begin in earnest until later. They differed in almost every respect—clothing, literary taste, lifestyle—yet they would soon form a complex and highly competitive partnership, one that often strained under the weight of their intense ambitions. Together they would do more than anyone of the era to put the Far West on the national stage. In 1863, however, they still played very different roles. Harte strove to be the Pacific coast’s conscience; Twain took great pleasure in being its provocateur. After a tumultuous summer, the Washoe Giant felt unstoppable. His reporting drifted ever further from fact; his sentences convulsed with antic energy. He was headed for a fall, and it came the same month Harte broke into the Atlantic: October.
On October 28, 1863, the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise published Twain’s “A Bloody Massacre near Carson.” The article reported gruesome murders committed by a man named Philip Hopkins: Two days earlier, Hopkins had split his wife’s head with an ax and peeled off her scalp. He had bashed out the brains of six of his children with a club and knocked another two unconscious. He had mutilated and stabbed his eldest daughter.
The story caused an uproar. Newspapers in Nevada and California reprinted it—including the Sacramento Daily Union, one of the most powerful in the West. The next day, Twain published a retraction. The article had been a hoax. “I Take It All Back,” read the headline. He said the purpose of the prank was to expose “dividend cooking,” a common practice whe
reby the owners of certain California and Nevada companies overvalued their stock and sold out before their shareholders discovered the deceit. In “A Bloody Massacre,” Hopkins becomes homicidal because he lost his savings in one such scheme. Twain used the gore to get people’s attention. “The only way you can get a fact into a San Francisco journal is to smuggle it in through some great tragedy,” he explained.
The reaction was swift. The Virginia City Evening Bulletin noted the “almost universal condemnation” of Twain’s “really disgraceful sensation story,” and denounced his retraction as even worse than the hoax. The Gold Hill Daily News slammed him for tarnishing “the already bloody reputation of our Territory.” True to form, Twain refused to apologize. Instead, he counterattacked. He insulted the editor of the News, called the Bulletin’s writer “an oyster-brained idiot,” and declared himself “without a pang of remorse.” This only added fuel to the fire. Even the influential Sacramento Daily Union weighed in, blasting the Enterprise for abusing “the sympathies of its readers.”
Although unrepentant in public, Twain brooded in private. “All this worried Mark as I had never before seen him worried,” recalled Dan De Quille, a fellow Enterprise writer who lived with Twain in Virginia City. “I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains,” he remembered Twain saying. He had written hoaxes before, outrageous ones. Anyone with a fleeting familiarity with his work knew that he rarely told the unvarnished truth. Yet even in frontier journalism, there were limits. Predictably, the Virginia City press refused to let the matter drop. Newspapers kept on it for years. People had seen Twain’s darker side, and found it hard to forget.
