Sam’s hoaxes in the Enterprise, moreover, were often topical and even personal in nature. His satire in “The Petrified Man,” for example, spilled over to an ancillary target: Gilbert T. Sewall, former co-owner of the Silver Age and the Washoe Times, who had contracted with Orion to perform the territorial printing in 1861. Sewall was a political hack and ally of James Nye, who had appointed him to a position as justice of the peace in Humboldt County, in which office he also served as local coroner. For some reason, perhaps the trouble Sewall had caused Orion over the printing, perhaps because of their political differences, perhaps in consequence of some personal affront when they both lived in Humboldt, Sam and Sewall bickered for months. Sewall and his former partner Lewis still owed over five hundred dollars in March 1862 that they had borrowed to buy supplies to complete the territorial printing, and they may have blamed Orion and by association his brother. As Sam wrote Billy Clagett from Aurora the same month, “I have heard from several reliable sources that Sewall will be here shortly, and has sworn to whip me on sight. Now what would you advise a fellow to do?—take a thrashing from the son-of-a-bitch, or bind him over to keep the peace? I don’t see why he should dislike me. He is a yankee,—and I naturaly [sic] love a yankee.” He had not yet begun to temper his Confederate sympathies. “There are good men in the North,” he elsewhere allowed at the time, “but they are d——d scarce.” In any case, Sam readily admitted that the hoax was “an unmitigated lie, made from whole cloth,” which he perpetrated “to worry Sewall” and subject him to public ridicule. In the sketch, Sewall convenes an inquest that concludes the stone man was the victim of “protracted exposure” and forbids the local residents from blasting him from his seat.23
While the piece failed as topical satire, it was reprinted, often in good faith, by newspapers across the country. When the “exchanges began to come in with the Petrified Man copied and guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction,” Sam remembered. Within three weeks the piece appeared in over a dozen western papers, including the San Francisco Alta California (October 5), Sacramento Union (October 9), Nevada City, California, Transcript (October 11), Stockton Independent (October 13), San Francisco Bulletin (October 15), and Portland Oregonian (October 21). Most of these papers reprinted the report without questioning its authenticity. By the first week of November, moreover, the story had reached the East, where it was copied by the Philadelphia Public Ledger (November 5), Saturday Evening Post (November 15), and Boston Investigator (January 7, 1863).24 From there it began to circulate in the Midwest and South, especially in Ohio, where it appeared in at least half a dozen papers, including the Cleveland Leader (November 13). Before the end of the year it was reprinted in the New Orleans Daily Delta (December 20) and in newspapers in St. Louis and Cincinnati. An abridged version of the story appeared in New Zealand in May 1863 and in Sydney, Australia, in September 1863.25
In short, though DeLancey Ferguson averred that the hoax “never attained the nation-wide celebrity” that Sam “claimed for it,” there is evidence aplenty to confirm Sam’s recollection in 1870 that he followed his hoax in the exchanges as it “steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory, State after State, and land after land, till [it] swept the great globe.” Unfortunately, his reminiscence does not stop there; it ends with an even more grandiose claim, that the story finally obtained “sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London Lancet,” one of the leading medical and scientific journals in the world. Ironically, this claim seems to be another iteration of the hoax. No reference to the petrified man appeared in either the British or American editions of the Lancet. Still, Sam made it a point to send Sewall reprints of the piece that came to hand. “I did it for spite, not for fun,” because “I hated Sewall” and “these things pacified me and pleased me. I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him.” Given more time, he wrote, he would have worried “the life out of the poor cuss.” Six weeks after the hoax first appeared, he penned a heavy-handed sequel to it: a traveler named Weisnicht or “Know Nothing” arrives in Virginia City with “the head and one foot of the petrified man.” A “skillful assayer” analyzes “a small portion of dirt found under the nail of the great toe and pronounces the man to have been a native of the Kingdom of New Jersey.”26 This time no one missed the joke.
Though he continued for years to harbor some copperhead sympathies, Sam slowly shed many of his Southern biases during his first year in Nevada. As late as February 28, 1862, in a letter to Billy Clagett, he still identified Union soldiers in the third person. Two weeks earlier, Northern troops commanded by Samuel R. Curtis had driven the rebel battalions under Sterling Price south into Arkansas. Sam hooted that “they” or Curtis’s army “didn’t do it on the Sacred Soil” but had to chase the Missouri militia into another state. But in a letter to Clagett six months later, during the Battle of Antietam, he referred to the Union in the first person. As the rebel armies vanquished the federal army under John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August and invaded Maryland, Sam despaired for the future of the nation: “I am afraid we have been playing the game of brag about as recklessly as I have ever seen it played. . . . God! what we were going to do!”27
In early October 1862, after a fourteen-month separation from their husband and father, Mollie and Jennie Clemens arrived by steamer in San Francisco. Orion was there to greet and escort them across the Sierras to the modest home he had built in Carson City, and the parents soon enrolled their seven-year-old daughter among the forty students in Hannah Clapp’s private school, the Sierra Seminary. A few weeks later, Sam attended her end-of-the-semester declamation exercises and reported to his fellow reporter Andrew Marsh that it was “more brilliant and successful than any other school examination that ever occurred in this or any other country,” a far cry from the declamation scene at Dobbins’s school in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He extolled the virtues of the “excellent school” run by Clapp and Ellen Cutler in his Territorial Enterprise reporting as late as January 1864.28
On November 11, 1862, Orion convened the Second Nevada Territorial Legislature at Abe Curry’s Great Basin Hotel in Warm Springs. Sam and Clement Rice covered the session for their respective newspapers, the Territorial Enterprise and the Daily Union. Five days a week they filed a joint report of legislative business. “I was there every day,” Sam insisted in his autobiography, “to distribute compliment and censure with evenly balanced justice and spread the same over half a page” of his paper. “I used to make reports of speeches in long hand that I could not begin to get the bulk of,” he told an interviewer in 1885. “I would take the merest skeleton, jot down a word here and there, and then fill it out at the office, using the speaker’s ideas and my own language. It made me feel good when they complimented me and said it was better than the original.” Unfortunately, these columns have been lost down the rabbit hole of history. Once a week, Sam penned a comic editorial about the session. “The work of young Clemens created a sensation among the lawmakers,” he remembered in an (auto)biographical sketch. “He wrote a weekly letter, spined with barbed personalities. It appeared every Sunday, and on Mondays the legislative business was obstructed with the complaints of members who rose to questions of privilege, and expressed their opinion of the correspondent.” Sam’s recollection here was not far from the truth. Toward the close of the session, in fact, the representative from Aurora introduced a resolution “highly complimentary to the powers of imagination possessed by one of the reporters for a Territorial paper.” After “a thrilling discussion,” Marsh adds, “which jealousy forbids me from reporting verbatim,” the resolution was tabled. Nevertheless, Sam was soon punished. The assembly abolished the small per diem bonus it had appropriated to compensate legislative reporters.29
On Thanksgiving night, November 27, Mollie Clemens cohosted a ball in the legislative halls for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission. The occasion was marred, however, by the death of A
bram Benway, one of the attendees, who fell from a window to the pavement twenty feet below. “The pleasure seekers, instantly sobered, retired at once from the halls, and the festivities of the evening were over,” Orion reported. “The proceeds of the ball, which be at least five hundred dollars, clear of expenses, go to the Sanitary fund. The amount would have been much larger, had it not been for the sad accident.”30
It was a dire omen. In mid-December the assembly finally passed an incorporation bill that Nye signed into law that regulated the mining companies. The citizens of Carson City celebrated “with the wildest enthusiasm,” Orion reported to the San Francisco Bulletin. “Flags are flying, fires are blazing, drums beating, anvils roaring, drunkards shouting, and dogs are barking. Such frantic scenery I never saw before.”31 But the U.S. Congress effectively nullified the legislation three months later. The Enterprise editorialized that Congress had overstepped its jurisdiction and that nothing in the Organic Act creating the territory allowed the national legislature to void Nevada law—not that this expression of opinion had any discernible effect.32
The second legislature also awarded twenty-three additional toll road franchises and established by law the Washoe Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Society to promote the commercial development of the territory. Its board of directors included Sam, Abe Curry, and William Gillespie. At the close of the session, the representatives unanimously adopted a resolution thanking Sam and Clement Rice “for their full and accurate reports of the proceedings.” Not much else was accomplished. Dan De Quille waited to leave Nevada for Iowa via an overland route until December 27, a week after the legislature adjourned, whereupon Sam assumed sole responsibility for the local beat of the Enterprise. He had proved his mettle and seemed a worthy successor. During Dan’s absence, another local paper reported, “his position will be filled by that inveterate Carson Valley wag, Sam-i-vel Clemens Ekswire, the handsomest man in the Territory. We wish ‘Dan’ an agreeable journey and a speedy return, and Sam as many hay items as he imagines the public appetite will appreciate.” During Dan’s absence, Sam even covered the mining beat, occasionally inspecting the excavations.33
He also started a mock quarrel, a staple of nineteenth-century American journalism, with Rice, whom he nicknamed the Unreliable. It was common to smear rival reporters and editors, even to the point of character assassination and ad hominem attack. These practices make the yellow journalism and the partisan politics of later generations of journalists seem mild by comparison. Sam gave as good as he got, slandering Rice in print as an “abandoned profligate.” Over the weeks they publicly accused each other of various high crimes and misdemeanors, meanwhile cementing a close personal friendship. Rice was Sam’s first comic stooge, though he would scarcely be the last person Sam cast in the role. On the evening of December 22, two days after the legislature adjourned, Sam attended a reception for the solons in Washoe City north of Carson. He traveled to the “Grand Bull Drivers’ Convention” by stage “to see that the ovation” for the lawmakers “was properly conducted.” He was joined by the Unreliable, who “drank until he lost all sense of etiquette.” In his report about the celebration in the Enterprise, Sam also perpetrated a minor hoax. He summarized a speech by the host and state representative Theodore Winters, a famous Washoe Valley rancher, mine owner, and horse breeder after whom the town of Winters, California, is named. In Sam’s précis, his friend Winters admits that
he went to the Legislature with but one solitary object in view—the securing to this Territory of an incorporation law. How he had succeeded, the people themselves could tell. He had gone there determined to get such a law passed; he had schemed for it, fought for it, labored for it throughout the entire session. The friends of the law had met its opponents at every turn and fought them with their own weapons.
Sam’s joking implication was that Winters had bribed some of his fellow legislators to support the law. On the surface, the charge seemed so plausible that some papers, including the San Francisco Bulletin, accepted it at face value. Fortunately, cooler minds prevailed. “That mad wag Clemens,” the Washoe Times reported, “put a comical speech into the mouth of our Representative, Mr. Winters.” Two weeks later, Sam admitted in the Enterprise that he had been teasing and “exonerate[d] Mr. Winters from the accusation of having admitted himself guilty of bribery and corruption.”34
Sam took another jab at the Unreliable in early February 1863 on the occasion of the wedding of Margaret Ormsby to a local Carson City physician. Orion officiated at the ceremony and Sam escorted his latest inamorata, Carrie Pixley, the daughter of a Carson carpenter. Rice crashed the reception, according to Sam, because “his instincts always prompt him to go where he is not wanted. . . . When the bride and groom entered the parlor he went in with them, bowing and scraping and smiling in his imbecile way, and attempting to pass himself off for the principal groomsman. I never saw such an awkward, ungainly lout in my life.” Rice stole a codfish, Sam added, and “I believe he would have eaten a corpse.” Then he “swept the parlors like a pestilence. When the guests had been persecuted as long as they could stand it, though, they got him to drink some kerosene oil, which neutralized the sauerkraut and codfish, and restored his breath to about its usual state, or even improved it, perhaps, for it generally smells like a hospital.” Two weeks later, the “poor miserable outcast” attended the Fireman’s Ball with “his coat buttoned up to his chin, which is the way he always does when he has no shirt on.” As Sam tells the story, the Unreliable “was present, without invitation, at every party and ball and wedding which transpired in Carson during thirteen years.” The next day he facetiously announced Rice’s death: “let him rest, let him rot.” Then the Unreliable was revivified “in the midst of his funeral sermon”—shades of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Joe Harper in chapter 17 of Tom Sawyer. “The frightened congregation rushed from the house, and the Unreliable followed them,” Sam jested, “with his coffin on his shoulder. He sold it for two dollars and a half, and got drunk at a ‘bit house’ on the proceeds. He is still drunk.” Rice soon exacted revenge by claiming in the Union that Sam had attended a formal ball “dressed in a most ridiculous manner. He had on a linen coat, calf-skin vest and a pair of white pants, the whole set off with a huge pair of buffalo shoes and lemon colored kids.”35
Far from a sinecure, Orion’s position in the territorial government became increasingly untenable. He was expected to manage a territorial census, a prerequisite for statehood, but the U.S. Congress appropriated no money for the canvass. In addition to the financial snares set by the federal government, he faced a host of other challenges. After all, as Sam remarked in the opening sentence of Roughing It, the office of territorial secretary “concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of treasurer, comptroller, secretary of state, and acting governor in the governor’s absence.” James Nye was politically ambitious and spent as much time as possible schmoozing with influential men and women in San Francisco or New York—fortunately so, because he and Orion were often at loggerheads. He left Orion alone in charge for a stretch of seven months in 1863. During this period, the acting governor dismissed a disloyal probate judge in Lander County, belying his modern reputation for fecklessness, whereupon the “loud mouthed Copperhead” blasted the “accidental governor” for his “Black Republican” sympathies. Orion’s action was applauded by the Nevada City Transcript, the Washoe Times (he “has been undoing some of Gov. Nye’s hasty work”), and the Territorial Enterprise (“Governor Clemens seems to be the right man in the right place” and “has acted bravely, patriotically, promptly, and to the extent of his power” in removing “treasonable officials”). As the “ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs of Nevada Territory,” as he sometimes signed his letters to the Department of the Treasury during these months, Orion declared martial law, dispatched arms, and deployed some military units to the southern parts of the territory to keep the peace.36 He authorized rewards for escaped criminals and managed a primitive criminal j
ustice system. He steered around allegations of political corruption leveled against Chief Justice George Turner and, as acting governor, he helped organize the constitutional conventions that eventually led to the admission of Nevada to the Union on October 31, 1864, eight days before President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection. Orion obviously played a role in the debate over statehood, and in April 1864 the Virginia Evening Bulletin conferred on him some of the credit in the run-up to the decisive ratification vote: “We have every confidence . . . in Mr. Clemens, and believe by his aid Nevada will yet be a State in time to participate in the Presidential election.”37
Most important, Orion played a critical role in the resolution of a border crisis with California. The Organic Act creating Nevada Territory stipulated that its boundary with its western neighbor was fixed by the summit of the Sierras, but no final survey line had ever been drawn. As a result, Aurora for a time was the seat of both Mono County, California, and Esmeralda County, Nevada. Like the Darnell-Watson feud in 1859, the dispute occasionally erupted into violence. It threatened to become an all-out armed conflict in February 1863, when thirty-five Nevada residents skirmished with a California posse near Susanville, and deputy sheriffs from Roop County, Nevada, and Plumas County, California, battled near Honey Lake. “The people of Roop county are determined never to submit to California jurisdiction until it is definitely determined that they are within the boundary of California,” Sam declared in the Enterprise on March 3, and he wrote his mother and sister that he worried “we are on the verge” of a border war. Orion defused the crisis by telegraphing Governor Leland Stanford of California with an offer to negotiate an end to the dispute. Orion and Judge Robert Robinson of Sacramento, Stanford’s emissary, reached an agreement, eventually endorsed by both legislatures, to authorize a joint survey team to run a final boundary line. Philip Fanning fairly concludes that the settlement of the dispute was Orion’s “finest hour.” The editors of the Territorial Enterprise similarly commended him: “He does his business punctually and thoroughly, and has disclosed so little of the politician since he has been in the Territory that we are sometimes surprised that he ever received a Federal appointment.” On the other hand, the niggling bureaucrats at the Treasury Department in Washington disallowed an expense of forty-one dollars Orion paid a private secretary during his tenure as acting governor.38
The Life of Mark Twain Page 29
