The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  With a daily circulation of about ten thousand, compared to about seven thousand for the Alta California and nine thousand for the Evening Bulletin, the Morning Call enjoyed the largest circulation of the San Francisco dailies—ten times that of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Nevertheless, Sam suffered a decided demotion when he joined its staff. It was by far the cheapest of the local papers, costing twelve and a half cents per week compared to the fifty-cent-per-week subscription price of the Alta California and San Francisco Bulletin. He scoffed later that it circulated “chiefly among a class who don’t own much city property and don’t pay any taxes”—that is, the working class, especially Irish day laborers. It was, Barnes informed him (according to Sam’s autobiographical dictation), “like the New York Sun of that day: it was the washer-woman’s paper—that is, it was the paper of the poor.” He was, he claimed, humiliated by working for such a déclassé operation—“I felt a deep shame in being situated as I was—slave of such a journal as the Morning Call”6—but he held the job for four months.

  From the first, Sam was ill suited to the demands of routine reporting for an urban newspaper. Virginia City, with its city marshal and half dozen constables, scarcely compared to the City by the Bay, with a population of 118,000, a police force of 62 men, 231 liquor dealers, vice-ridden slums, red light districts along the Barbary Coast, and a history of vigilante justice. There were also forty-four periodicals published in San Francisco—ten daily newspapers, twenty-two weeklies, one semiweekly, one triweekly, eight monthly magazines, and two annuals. Whereas Goodman had allowed the local for the Enterprise leeway in what he chose to report, moreover, Barnes expected news and nothing but the news. “On the Enterprise he had been a free spirit; he could free-lance to his heart’s content,” Ivan Benson observed. “On the Call he was merely another staff member, and as such was compelled to follow the rules of the paper.” Much as Walt Whitman could have written conventional poetry or Pablo Picasso could have drawn a horse, Sam might have earned a comfortable living as a journalist had he wished. Still, in a San Francisco letter to the Enterprise in mid-June, Sam boasted of his new circumstances. He purported to be happily rid of the sand and alkali dust of Washoe.

  Here you are expected to breakfast on salmon, fried oysters and other substantials from 6 till half-past 12; you are required to lunch on cold fowl and so forth, from half-past 12 until 3; you are obliged to skirmish through a dinner comprising such edibles as the world produces, and keep it up, from 3 until half-past 7; you are then compelled to lay siege to the tea-table from half-past 7 until 9 o’clock, at which hour, if you refuse to move upon the supper works and destroy oysters gotten up in all kinds of seductive styles until 12 o’clock, the landlord will certainly be offended, and you might as well move your trunk to some other establishment.

  He joked about the “extraordinary decline” of the Gould & Curry Mine while bragging about the lively state of San Francisco theater, and he concluded that the “birds, and the flowers, and the Chinamen, and the winds, and the sunshine, and all things that go to make life happy, are present in San Francisco today, just as they are all days in the year.” He wanted no one to think he missed his old home in Virginia City. But his archrival Albert Evans, aka Amigo, who had become the San Francisco correspondent of the Gold Hill News, hinted at the truth a week or so later with an ambiguous or equivocal compliment: “The Call has secured the services of ‘Mark Twain’ as its local reporter. His items already give evidence of a new hand at the bellows.” At first he damned Sam with faint praise. Soon he only damned him. By late August, Evans belittled him as the “aborigine from the land of sagebrush and alkali.”7

  On the other hand, Sam soon established his bona fides among a group of professional colleagues not named Evans. He befriended Frank Soulé, who compiled the telegraphic miscellany for the Morning Call, “one of the sweetest and whitest & loveliest spirits that ever wandered into this world by mistake.” On Sunday, August 14, Sam and Steve Gillis joined six other newspapermen and Lewis Leland on a day trip to the Warm Springs resort near Santa Clara. They left at 8:30 a.m. via the new San Francisco and San Jose Railroad and arrived some two hours later in San Jose, where they spent time at the bar of the Continental Hotel. They then took a buggy twelve miles to the resort, where they spent the afternoon hiking, swimming, dining, and drinking. They returned to San Jose by 6:00 p.m. and to San Francisco by dusk.8

  During his first weeks in San Francisco, Sam also befriended Lillie Hitchcock, daughter of the medical director of the Union Army of the Pacific, who lived with her parents at the Occidental. The year before, at the age of twenty, Firebelle Lil had been appointed an honorary member of Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5 for the help she rendered the firemen of the city. She became a local celebrity, often appearing at the scene of fires wearing a helmet. Bret Harte later modeled the eponymous heroine of his story “Flip: A California Romance” (1882) on Hitchcock. There he described her unmistakably alluring “nymph-like figure”:

  She was scarcely more than fifteen, slight and lithe, with a boyish flatness of breast and back. Her flushed face and bare throat were absolutely peppered with minute brown freckles, like grains of spent gunpowder. Her eyes, which were large and gray, presented the singular spectacle of being also freckled,—at least they were shot through in pupil and cornea with tiny spots like powdered allspice. Her hair was even more remarkable in its tawny, deer-skin color, full of lighter shades, and bleached to the faintest of blondes on the crown of her head, as if by the action of the sun. She had evidently outgrown her dress, which was made for a smaller child, and the too brief skirt disclosed a bare, freckled, and sandy desert of shapely limb, for which the darned stockings were equally too scant.

  Sam remembered that “many & many & many a time” Hitchcock “waited till nearly noon to breakfast with me, when we all lived at the Occidental Hotel & I was on a morning paper & could not go to bed till 2 or 3 in the morning.” He thought she was “lovely” and “splendid” and “a brilliant talker.” She was as “generous & warm-hearted a girl as you ever saw. . . . It always seemed funny to me that she and I could be friends, but we were—I suppose it was because under all her wild & repulsive foolery, that warm heart of hers would show.” He featured her as the vivacious belle Shirley Tempest, “one of the finest and richest heiresses in New York,” in the play Ah Sin (1877) and as the title character in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (1897), a “trim and fair young girl, bareheaded and riding bareback and astride,” who has “a tropically warm heart, a right spirit and a good disposition” and plays with the boys in her town. “She fished, boated, hunted, trapped, played ‘shinny’ on the ice and ball on the land, and ran foot races. She broke horses for pastime, and for the risk there was in it.” In fact, she “took her full share in all their sports, except those of the swimming-hole,” he wrote in a passage trimmed from the tale in the manuscript stage. “She had to deny herself in that matter, because bathing dresses were not worn. She was called tom-boy, of course; and she was the only tom-boy of respectable family.”9 Because Lillie and her mother were Southern sympathizers, her father exiled them to Paris for the duration of the Civil War. There Lillie worked as a correspondent for the San Francisco Bulletin, married well, and eventually returned to San Francisco, where she became a popular socialite.

  As city editor of a two-penny dreadful, Sam “raked the town from end to end” from midmorning until eleven at night for scraps of news to fill his columns. Every morning he covered the police beat and the criminal court decisions of the previous day in order to “make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. They were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a change. Each day’s evidence was substantially a duplicate of the evidence of the day before, therefore the daily performance was killingly monotonous and wearisome.” He finished his shift every evening by visiting the six theaters in the city to get a “merest passing glimpse” of l
ocal stage productions such as Tom Taylor’s temperance melodrama The Bottle; or, The Drunkard’s Doom. He also reviewed yet another production of Mazeppa starring the local actor Emily Jordan and “the old original sluggish horse” Menken had coaxed onto the stage. The rest of the cast was so “miserably defective” that the audience demanded a curtain call only of the horse. “Some of the combats were ridiculous,” Sam added, “and were openly derided.” He also saw Lotta Crabtree and the Worrell Sisters at Gilbert’s Melodeon as well as Frank Mayo in Othello and Romeo and Juliet at Maguire’s Opera House. “I had to write something about each,” Sam recalled, but “I could not devote that leisure to each play that as a conscientious dramatic critic I should like. Ten minutes here, a quarter of an hour there—that was all I could afford, because there might be a couple more night assignments waiting me at the office. I was very hurried all the time.”10

  Shortly before the 2:00 a.m. press deadline he finally “spread this muck” he had gathered all day in “words and phrases” to “cover as much acreage as I could. It was fearful drudgery—soulless drudgery—and almost destitute of interest. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man.” Edgar Branch calculates that Sam wrote at least 471 and as many as 5,400 items for the Morning Call during his four months on the staff of the paper. He reported many stories of mundane interest, such as the introduction of quail as a breakfast item in the Occidental Hotel dining room and horse races at the Bay View Race Track, without the distinction of a byline—though a local horse breeder, John Boggs, soon named a bay filly after him. Sam was outspoken in defense of the federal employees who worked in the U.S. Mint and Custom House, including Robert B. Swain and Bret Harte, who were paid in devalued greenbacks. “All of the officials in the Mint have, for the last six months, had a hard time of it, and some of them a very hard one,” he reported on October 2. “For six months they had received nothing until yesterday, although there has been money enough here to pay a portion of their demands.” This period was no doubt the most fallow of his writing career. “There was enough work for one, and a little over,” he complained, “but not enough for two—according to Mr. Barnes’s idea, and he was the proprietor, and therefore better situated to know about it than other people.”11

  During his tenure on the Call, Sam was, according to Branch, “more closely in touch with urban crime and misery . . . than at any other time in his life.” The intrepid reporter covered cases of rape, abduction, seduction, sexual and child abuse, indecent exposure, grand larceny, shoplifting, voyeurism, bigamy, perjury, animal cruelty, treason, murder, suicide, labor riots, financial malfeasance, human trafficking, opium smuggling, and domestic assault or “conjugal discipline.” He tracked the “obscene-picture epidemic,” as he called it, that swept the city all summer. He was particularly outraged by crimes committed against single women by hack drivers. He detailed one of these cases under the title “Beasts in the Semblance of Men”:

  Teresa Ford, a young woman of prepossessing appearance, swore that a few nights ago she was standing on the sidewalk conversing with a person on the corner of Dupont street and St. Mark’s Place, when a hack stopped opposite to her, and three men came from it, and, seizing her with force, carried her to the hack, and putting her inside, fastened the door, and took her to the Abbey, where James McKenna and Peter Tully got inside, and Tully forcibly held her down while McKenna, the hack driver, outraged her person. Then McKenna got out, and Tully forcibly outraged her in a similar manner, and during her struggles nearly bit a piece of flesh out of one of her fingers, which caused such excessive pain that she fainted away, and lay unconscious for some time. When she had somewhat recovered her senses, she found that her dress had been torn from her person, no clothing on but her chemise—the hack windows broken and both her dress and chemise were spotted with blood.

  Sam accused the district attorney of gross incompetence: “Criminals leak through his fingers every day like water through a sieve. . . . He affords a great deal less than no assistance to the Judge, who could convict sometimes if [he] would remain silent.” And he protested in particular the failure of the “body-snatchers” in the local coroner’s office to provide journalists with information about deaths in the city or to let them see “the slate.” It was “the most notable thing he did” as the local for the Call, according to Barnes, and elicited “a general apology.” It was also “the wickedest article . . . I ever wrote in my life,” as Sam wrote his sister Pamela, but “we got all the information we wanted after that.”12

  To combat these acts of “baseness, bestiality, and degradation,” Sam declared, the city needed principled men like police judge Philip W. Shepheard and police detective Bernard Blitz. Shepheard convicted the defendants in the Ford case and defended the victim’s rights, stating that “the base and disgusting venality that had been forcibly committed by the defendants upon a defenseless woman, who, whether degraded or not [that is, whether or not a prostitute], was entitled to the protection of the law.” Sam lauded Shepheard as “a kind-hearted, right-minded man, of excellent sense and unquestioned integrity” who “spurns red tape when it interposes simply to delay justice.” Shepheard often forgave first offenses because he “said there was crime enough in the land, without driving children to its commission by heaping infamy and disgrace upon them for their first transgression of the law. He was right: it is better to save than to destroy, and that justice is most righteous which is tempered by mercy.” Sam similarly praised Blitz for “doing more justice to the position than any eighteen men in San Francisco.” Unfortunately, Shepheard died suddenly in December 1865, and Blitz failed to be elected when he ran for San Francisco police chief in May 1864.13

  In other news, Sam reported a case of delirium tremens in which a drunkard imagines “snakes in his boots,” much as Pap Finn in the throes of delirium tremens in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) believes that snakes are crawling up his legs. Sam was particularly miffed by women drunks jailed for affronts to decorum, and he indulged his penchant for scatological humor more than once in mocking them. One woman regular in the city prison was “very drunk, and very musical; her gin was passing off in steaming gas, to the tune of ‘I’ll hang my harp on a willow tree,’ and she appeared to be enjoying it considerably. The effect was very cheerful in a place so accustomed to powerful swearing and mute wretchedness. Mrs. Holland’s music was touchingly plaintive and beautiful, too; but then it smelled bad.” Another woman, he complained, was “so soaked with gin that she would burn like a tar barrel if she should ever catch fire.”14

  As the local editor of the Call, Sam also explored the bizarre sections of the city. He indulged his fascination with “freaks of Nature” at Gilbert’s Museum on Market Street:

  They have engaged an individual at the Museum who may be said to be minimum in regard to size, and maximum as to muscle. He is called the Lilliputian Hercules, and is probably about the dimensions of that mythological deity. . . . You can see the baneful effects of slavery here, too, in the person of a diminutive North Carolina female contraband, who has about as much brain as a humming-bird, and who could be put into a gallon measure with ease without contracting her crinoline.

  He became acquainted with Joshua Norton, aka Emperor Norton I, a Forty-Niner who during the 1850s lost his fortune and his mind. The most colorful character in town, Norton proclaimed himself emperor of the United States and protector of Mexico. As eccentric as a bent wheel, he was nevertheless humored and even celebrated by San Franciscans. Sam met him as early as July 1864, and in 1872 he jotted in his journal a plan to “write up” the crackpot. Shortly after Norton’s death in 1880 he lamented that no one had

  ever written him up who was able to see any but his grotesque side; but I think that with all his dirt & unsavoriness there was a pathetic side to him. Anybody who said so in print would be laughed at in S[an] F[rancisco], doubtless, but no matter, I have seen the Emperor when his dignity was wounded. . . . I have seen him in all his various moods & tenses, & there was always more r
oom for pity than laughter.

  Sam eventually modeled the figure of Father Peter in “The Chronicle of Young Satan” version of The Mysterious Stranger, written intermittently between 1897 and 1900, on Norton. The priest, though driven insane, will be “happy the rest of his days,” Satan explains, “for he will always think he is the Emperor, and his pride in it and his joy in it will endure to the end.”15

  Sam also reported some of the speeches of the local demagogue Beriah Brown, a copperhead and editor of the San Francisco Democratic Press, “the blue-bellied lickspittle” who “does the dirty work of the traitors,” as the Gold Hill News put it. After he condoned the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, Brown was literally run out of town or, as Sam put it, “made his somewhat hurried hegira from these shores.”16 He would give Brown’s first name to the character of the vainglorious Colonel Sellers in an early version of the novel The Gilded Age (1873).