Their mode of transportation was luxurious for the time and place. Built in New Hampshire, the Concord wagon weighed over a ton, carried over a ton of freight and passengers, seated six comfortably, and was drawn by six horses in hand. “Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description—an imposing cradle on wheels,” Sam remembered in Roughing It. In his baggage was a sack of silver coins and a Smith & Wesson seven-shot revolver that fired a ball the size of a “homoeopathic pill.” Orion packed a Colt popgun and a six-pound Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, perhaps the very volume Marshall Clemens had owned at his death. If so, it was a talisman. His oldest son was a hack politician, his other surviving son an unemployed riverboat pilot. Each of them would hereafter earn a livelihood by his pen, either as a scrivener and editor or as a journalist and man of letters, and each would emulate his father’s lexical turn. The dictionary repeatedly bounced off their heads, shoulders, and shins on their way west. “Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other,” Sam remembered, “the Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody.”2
During the trip “we changed horses every ten miles,” he noted, “and fairly flew over the hard, level road.” They averaged about a hundred miles of travel per day. Their path took them along the Little Blue River to Fort Kearney, then into Sioux territory along the Platte River to Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger. It was the same route Huck, Tom, and Jim would follow in the fragment “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians,” composed in 1884, and it was the only time in his life that Sam passed through any part of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, or Utah. On August 3, in Rocky Ridge, Nebraska, they crossed paths with Joseph A. (Jack) Slade, a Mexican War veteran, the local division superintendent of the stage company, and a notorious gunslinger. Neither Sam nor Orion knew who he was and, in truth, his violent reputation was greatly exaggerated. A decade later, while writing Roughing It, Sam remembered virtually nothing about the encounter. “Please sit down right away & torture your memory & write down in minute detail every fact & exploit in the desperado Slade’s life that we heard on the Overland—& also describe his appearance & conversation as we saw him at Rocky Ridge station at breakfast,” he begged Orion. “There was nothing then in a name to attract us to Slade, and yet I remember something of his appearance while totally forgetting all the others,” his brother replied. “He had gray eyes, very light straight hair, no beard, and hard-looking face seamed like a man of 60. His face was thin, his nose straight and ordinarily prominent—lips rather thinner than usual—otherwise nothing unusual.”3 Three years later, after begging for his life on the scaffold, the metonymically named Slade was lynched by vigilantes in Montana.
On August 4, nine days after their departure from St. Joseph, Sam and Orion arrived in Salt Lake City, the capital of the Latter-Day Saints’ Zion, where they paused to recover from the rigors of the journey to date. They visited the foundation of the Mormon Tabernacle, which had been under construction since 1853 and would not be completed until 1893. Later, in his account of their layover in Roughing It, Sam joked about polygamy. He was ready to condemn the institution until he saw the “poor, ungainly and pathetically ‘homely’” Mormon women. “The man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure,” he decided, and “the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in their presence and worship in silence.” He similarly joked about the Book of Mormon, which he dismissed as “chloroform in print.”4 He might have added that Mormon holy writ actually contains a “Book of Ether.”
Orion had been instructed by his superiors in the State Department to consult with Mormon officials to ascertain their political allegiances in the early weeks of the Civil War. He interviewed Heber C. Kimball, one of the original twelve disciples of Joseph Smith and first counselor to Brigham Young, the first president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Kimball impressed Sam as “a saint of high degree and a mighty man of commerce,” though Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, considered him “as unctuous in his manner as Macassar hair oil.” On August 7 both Orion and Sam met with Young. He seemed to Sam “a quiet, kindly, easy-mannered, dignified, self-possessed old gentleman” with “a gentle craft in his eye that probably belonged there.”5 Young did not tip his hand regarding his wartime loyalties.
On August 11, sixteen days from St. Joseph, the brothers first encountered a band of Paiute Indians. Sam was unsparing in his portrayal of the “Goshoot” (Goshute) and “Digger” tribes—the latter term has no ethnological meaning—a decade later in Roughing It:
It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa. . . . The Bushmen and our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, whichever animal-Adam the Darwinians trace them to.
He blamed James Fenimore Cooper, Emerson Bennett, and other writers of their ilk for depicting natives in the romantic light of “mellow moonshine” and he never recanted the allegation. Or, as Sam put it, Cooper Indians were “an extinct tribe that never existed.” They “are dead—died with their creator. The kind that are left are of altogether a different breed, and cannot be successfully fought with poetry, and sentiment, and soft soap, and magnanimity.” In a letter to his family in March 1862 he ridiculed Cooper’s “lordly sons of the forest” and insisted that his own impressions of natives were based upon firsthand experience rather than the novels he had read as a boy. He insisted that “typical” native men ate body lice and grasshoppers and native women ate soap and played poker, wagering their children. In the ironically titled “The Noble Red Man” (1870), Sam disputed the representation of Indians as “tall and tawny, muscular, straight, and of kingly presence,” with “generous impulses” and “knightly magnanimity.” For “such is the Noble Red Man in print.” In reality, he claimed, the natives were ignoble miscreants. They are “little, and scrawny, and black, and dirty,” “thoroughly pitiful and contemptable,” “base and treacherous,” and descriptions of “their favorite mutilations” could not be printed. The race was “a good, fair, desirable subject for extermination if ever there was one.”6
Such opinions creep into his fiction, as in his portrayal of Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Asked by Huck in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” where he had learned “about Injuns—how noble they was,” Tom confesses with embarrassment: “Cooper’s novels.” In fact, Sam groused about Cooper’s depiction of such noble Indians as Uncas, Hard Heart, and Chingachgook throughout his career, most famously in his essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895). Cooper “was almost always in error about Indians.” Despite his modern reputation as a racial progressive, Sam to the end of his life turned a jaundiced eye upon Native Americans. He publicly referred to the mountain West at least twice—once in Roughing It and again in his “Roughing It” lecture (first delivered in 1871)—as “unpeopled” before white settlement, completely ignoring the indigenous populations. Not that such racial profiling was original with him: he shared a well-established racial bias. Horace Greeley, for example, asserted after his trip west in 1859 that based on his experience “with the actual, palpable aborigines” he was convinced “that the poetic Indian—the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow—is only visible to the poet’s eye.” A. D. Richardson similarly declared after his trip west in 1865—when he and Sam met for the f
irst time—that he was “no believer in the Noble Savage. If he ever existed outside of Cooper’s romances, he was long ago extinct.”7
Yet while Sam often parodied the West of the dime novelists, with its brave shootists, handsome gamblers, and honest miners, he elsewhere wholeheartedly subscribed to the mythology. He repeatedly evoked the popular trope of the virgin land in describing the region. He claimed as early as February 1862 in a letter to his family that California was “the Garden of Eden reproduced.” Lake Tahoe was, he wrote in the fall of 1863, the “beautiful relic of fairy-land forgotten and left asleep in the snowy Sierras when the little elves fled from their ancient haunts and quitted the earth.” He claimed in chapter 22 of Roughing It that he inhaled the air that “angels breathe” during his escapes to Tahoe and that “three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator.”8
On August 14, twenty-six days from St. Joseph and a week after meeting Brigham Young, the Clemens brothers finally rolled into Carson City, with a population of between three and four thousand, in the still woolly if not quite wild West.9 The entire population of Nevada Territory was at the time 16,374, not counting several thousand Indians, who were literally not counted. “When I disembarked from the overland stage,” Sam remembered in 1905, “I was tired, discouraged, white with alkali dust, and did not know anybody.” He wrote his family that he had his “whiskers and moustaches so full of alkali dust that you’d have thought I worked in a starch factory and boarded in a flour barrel.” Sam and Orion registered at the Ormsby House, located on the plaza near the stagecoach depot.
It had been built by and named for Major William M. Ormsby, who had been killed in the Pyramid Lake War, waged by the Paiutes and Bannock Shoshone against the invading Anglos in the spring of 1860. The proprietors bragged that all its beds were “furnished with spring and hair mattresses, making it the best hotel for ladies and gentlemen east of the mountains.” Within a few days the Clemens brothers relocated to Margret Murphy’s fourteen-bed boardinghouse on the north side of the plaza, where accommodations cost a mere ten dollars a week. Murphy had known James W. Nye “in his prosperity as commander-in-chief of the Metropolitan Police of New York,” Sam remarked, “and she would not desert him in his adversity as Governor of Nevada.” Among her other boarders were Tom Nye, the governor’s nephew, and Clement T. Rice, a reporter for the Carson City Silver Age, soon to become Sam’s counterpart on the staff of the Virginia City Daily Union. Within two or three weeks, he was infatuated with his new surroundings. As he excitedly reported to his mother and sister, “The country is fabulously rich 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.”10 He was so intrigued that he indefinitely postponed his return to the States.
Before Sam left Missouri he entrusted to his mother “a lot of notes for money I had loaned (for I did not know what might happen).” After Will Bowen paid her half of the two hundred dollars he owed, Jane Clemens was determined to collect on a note that, she thought, indicated Horace Bixby owed Sam two hundred dollars, too. She was unaware that her son actually owed Bixby two hundred dollars under the terms of their lost contract. She confronted Bixby in St. Louis in late September 1862 while he was in port on the Continental, but she received no satisfaction.
A pilot has told me repeatedly B[ixby] is getting $250 per month, and I must go and see him. . . . I called on Mr. B. He met me with an outside friendship. He was pleasant but he and his wife after talking mentioned the note. He said he was not ready to pay any of it and that was not all, he intended to make Sam knock off $100 of it because he knocked off $100.00 off [sic] of Sam’s note to him. I asked him what he did that for? He said because he was sorry for him he was a young man just setting out in the world. I have been told by a pilot since you left that no man ever paid such a price [for his apprenticeship] as you did. [The five hundred dollars Bixby charged Sam was in line with what other pilots demanded, though they were liable to be criticized for the exorbitant fee.] I would have told Mr B that, but I was not going to quarrel with him. He swore one dam[n] after another. I could not tell you the language he used. Of course I can’t write it. He said no secesh ever should have $1.00 of his money. He would see him starve and go to h—— before he should have a dollar. If he owed him a thousand he would not pay it. He kept on in that strain until I said, “Mr. B, Sam is no secesh.” “O no” he knew that. . . . During the conversation he said there was no law to make men pay debts these days. When I left he followed me to the door, [and] said he, I will tell you what I will do. I will come out some day with $90.00 in my pocket, and you will give me the note. I told him he was mistaken. I told him I would not knock off one cent. He said he was not going to know no one but Sam in that note. I told him I had the note, and I intend[ed] to keep it. He asked me what I would do with it. I told him I was going to sell it. He said I could not get 50c on the dollar for it. I told him I would try. When he found I was in earnest he eased down, but I left him. Now, Sam, he thought would scare me and get the note for $90.00; but I intend to try some of the pilots to get them to sell the note to the C[a]p[tain]. It is losing nothing. If he knocked off $100.00 as he says, it was no more than he ought to do. If he was a gentleman he would not ask it of me. Will [Moffett] says honest men pay their debts and rascals get out. Dont you knock off one cent.
Two years later, to resolve the misunderstanding, Bixby gave Jane Clemens $235, “the full value of Sams note, intrust [interest] and all,” as she gleefully reported to her sons. In effect, that is, Bixby apparently forgave the remaining two hundred dollars Sam still owed him and refunded all but sixty-five dollars of the money Sam had already paid him. Under the circumstances, Bixby acted more honorably than required, and their friendship survived. They occasionally corresponded over the years, though virtually none of Sam’s letters to Bixby is extant.11
Orion’s first order of business upon settling in Carson City was to plan for the sixty-day session of the territorial legislature scheduled to begin October 1. Governor Nye and his entourage of ward heelers and carpetbaggers—whom Sam promptly nicknamed “the Irish Brigade”—had arrived in Carson via steamer and stagecoach over a month earlier. Nye had called for an election of legislators, nine to the Council, or territorial Senate, and fifteen to the House of Representatives, to occur on August 31. But there was no territorial capitol where the legislature might meet. Within a week of Orion’s arrival, Abraham Curry, one of the founders of Carson City in 1858, a member of the legislature, and one of the discoverers of the Gould & Curry Mine in Virginia City, offered rent-free the entire unfurnished second story of his Warm Springs Hotel two miles from town. The territorial secretary jumped at the chance to save the federal government the cost of rent, and the provisional capitol was soon nicknamed the Hotel de Curry. Orion had the vacant floor partitioned into four apartments, two for each chamber of the legislature. As he wrote the Treasury Department, “I have also made arrangements for supplying the two houses and committee rooms with furniture, stove and fuel.” He insisted to his handlers that he was practicing a strict frugality: “I have studied economy in every way on account of the war.”12
Not that he received any thanks in return. “There is something solemnly funny about the struggles of a new-born Territorial government to get a start in this world,” Sam remembered in Roughing It. “Ours had a trying time of it.” Curry built a mule-drawn plank railroad from Carson to the capitol “and carried the legislators gratis. He also furnished pine benches and chairs for the legislature.” But for him “the government would have died in its tender infancy.” Some locals complained, however, that the provisional capitol was located two miles from the capital designated in the Organic Act creating the territory, thus questioning the legality of
all the laws the legislature enacted. Then a wag observed that Carson City had not yet been incorporated and so existed only as a fiction of law and that by custom a town in the West was anywhere liquor was served. By that definition Curry’s hotel, with a saloon on the ground floor, was within the town limits. The argument quieted the critics.13
Orion faced bigger problems than locating a site for the capitol. The U.S. Congress had appropriated an annual contingency fund of only $20,000 to finance the operation of the Nevada Legislature. “The appropriation is too small,” Orion insisted in a letter to Elisha Whittlesey, the pecksniff in the Treasury Department to whom he submitted his vouchers for reimbursement. “The appropriating of $20,000 for such a Territory as this is preposterous. If Kansas ever needed $20,000, we need $60,000 a year, as prices here are universally three times what they are in Kansas, if Iowa and Missouri are any criterion.” Sixteen months later he complained to Washington, “When I first arrived here people were surprised and incredulous when I talked of making the appropriation answer the purposes it was intended for in this Territory—they said it ought to be three times as much.” Whittlesey, a self-effacing bureaucrat, simply replied that Orion should contact his ex-officio or nonvoting delegate to Congress for remediation.14
In fact, Orion was routinely scolded by the U.S. Treasury comptrollers for his ostensibly reckless spending, and occasionally his requests for reimbursement were denied. “The members of the House of Representatives of the first session sat on borrowed pine benches until two ladies of the place bought and presented them with chairs,” he once protested. “The members of the first Session complained of my strained economy. They said they were put up to long desks like so many schoolboys.” Additionally, he explained, “I bought no carpet for the first session—not even for the presiding officers’ stands—but covered the floor with saw dust.” After he bought sixteen pocketknives at government expense, he was required to explain how he distributed them among the lawmakers. The $1.50 he paid “to an Indian for cutting 1⅓ cordwood” was disallowed. The department even contested the $8 a day he paid Sam to clerk for him. “I did not employ a messenger or porter during the session of the Legislature, but employed my brother,” Orion explained. “This is considered about right in this country. It is little enough. $4 to $5 per day are the wages of day laborers.” In order to be paid, Sam was required to complete a voucher for work performed. Dated November 29, 1861, it read: “For services as clerk in recording and copying and rendering general assistance in the office of the Secretary of the Territory during the Session of the Legislature, the business of the office being so heavy that the Secretary could not get through it without said assistance, Sixty days, @ $8 per day, 480.00.” In truth, Sam admitted in Roughing It that he had rendered little service during the session because “there was not yet writing enough for two of us.” But, he added, “Nothing in this world is palled in such impenetrable obscurity as a U.S. Treasury Comptroller’s understanding. The very fires of the hereafter could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it.” He also listed his occupation in the First Directory of Nevada for 1861–62 as “Assistant Secretary” of the territory,15 a trace of hubris that must have galled anyone who knew the truth.
The Life of Mark Twain Page 23
