The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Finally, on February 20, Sam left Angel’s Camp with Jim Gillis and Stoker to walk back to Jackass Hill in a snowstorm, “the first I ever saw in California,” as he remembered. “The view from the mountain tops was beautiful.” Three days later, traveling alone, he left the Gillis cabin via Copperopolis and Stockton for San Francisco, where on February 26 he again registered at the Occidental Hotel. “After a three months’ absence,” he reminisced, “I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent.” He had become “too mean and lazy,” he said, “to work on a morning paper, and there were no vacancies on the evening journals.” He was nearly at the end of his tether, though not so desperate as he later pretended. At the end of March he called on the editor of the new and short-lived Journal of the Trades and Workingmen, who soon announced that the “lively sketchist” had promised to “tune his lyre” for “the edification of our readers.” When Webb got wind of the deal, he hastily assured readers of the Californian that there was no truth to the rumor. Sam was “engaged to write for the Californian for a longer period of years than the chances are he will live, and at a greater salary than the proprietors [of the Journal] can possibly pay.” Over the next few weeks Sam “pawned everything but the clothes I had on,” or so he claimed, and he became very adept at “slinking,” a term that suggests his affinity with the coyote with the “general slinking expression”—a trickster or prankster figure in Indian cultures—who outwits and outruns the town dog in chapter 5 of Roughing It. “I was once dead broke for several months,” he wrote Will Bowen later, “& sewed up bursted grain sacks on the San Francisco wharves for a starvation living (when I was already sufficiently famous to be welcome in the best society of the city & State).” For some two months, he recalled in Roughing It, he “slunk from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar, I slunk to my meals, . . . and at midnight . . . I slunk to my bed.”40

  Then a crucial moment, if not in Sam’s life then in the narrative he constructed about his life: “I remember a certain day in San Francisco,” he recalled in 1901, when at the absolute nadir of his fortunes he picked up a dime at the corner of Commercial and Montgomery Streets. If he had not found that dime, “I should have asked someone for a quarter. Only a matter of a few hours and I’d have been a beggar. That dime saved me, and I have never begged—never!” Similarly, in chapter 59 of Roughing It, he chronicles the adventure of a “mendicant” who “had been without a penny for two months’ before he finds a silver dime in the street.” At first glance, in reporting this incident Sam seemingly affirmed republican values that discouraged vagrancy. These values were ironically at odds with the mining ethos of wealth quickly gathered and squandered as well as his ambition to get rich by trading mining stock rather than by manual labor. Sam occasionally qualified his praise for the republican and working-class virtue of industry, however, by advocating the exploitation of Chinese workers (“The sooner California adopts Coolie labor the better it will be for her”) and convicts: “In America we make convicts useful at the same time that we punish them for their crimes. We farm them out and compel them to earn money for the State by making barrels and building roads. Thus we combine business with retribution, and all things are lovely.” He also contradicted the labor theory of value in retelling the story of his discovery of the coin in the street in his autobiography: the “dime gave me more joy, because unearned, than a hundred earned dimes could have given me.”41 Even in Tom Sawyer, Sam implicitly commends Tom for tricking Ben Rogers and several other village boys into whitewashing a fence in his stead, in effect valorizing Tom for exploiting them.

  But Sam’s discovery of the dime in the street enabled him to buy a decent meal and anticipates several comments about beggars in later writings that betray his “reactionary social politics,” to use Peter Messent’s phrase. Though Sam might have been forced to panhandle had he not found the dime, he was nevertheless disgusted by the beggars he encountered in Italy, Morocco, and Palestine during his Quaker City cruise in 1867. For “every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred—and rags and vermin to match,” he remonstrated. When he rode into Magdala on horseback, his disdain was even more palpable, in no way mitigated by a sense of charity:

  [T]he ring of the horses’ hoofs roused the stupid population, and they all came trooping out—old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the crippled, all in ragged, soiled and scanty raiment, and all abject beggars by nature, instinct and education. How the vermin-tortured vagabonds did swarm! How they showed their scars and sores, and piteously pointed to their maimed and crooked limbs, and begged with their pleading eyes for charity!

  In a letter to the editor of the Hartford, Connecticut, Evening Post in January 1873, even before the financial panic in September that precipitated a long economic depression, Sam belittled the “able-bodied tramps who are too lazy to work.” In a similar letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant in September 1875, he scoffed at the claims of a stranger who had appealed to him for a contribution to support a school for freed slaves in the South. Sam admitted he had either “been unjust to a stranger today” by dismissing him out of hand “or unfaithful to my duty as a citizen, I cannot yet determine,” but he planned to investigate. If the stranger’s references “fail to establish his worthiness,” Sam added, “I will publish him and also try to procure his arrest as a vagrant.”42

  He was particularly impressed by the eradication of vagrancy in Germany. After arriving in Hamburg in April 1878, he noted in his journal that he had not “seen or been accosted by a beggar. Haven’t seen a tramp—what luxury this is.” In another unpublished letter to the editor of the Courant from Munich a few weeks later, Sam commended the Hartford city authorities for cracking down on “tramps.” They had “stopped the inexcusable custom of lodging & feeding mendicants at the police station without an equivalent of work” and discouraged local residents from feeding them because “any community which will allow tramps to be assisted by its citizens will be sure to have a plentiful harvest of tramps.” Instead, Sam believed that tramps should be required to work a day for every night they enjoy public charity in jail. To illustrate the genius of this solution, while residing in Munich he noted that a Bavarian nobleman once

  provided work for all comers, & then shut square down on all forms of begging. His system has remained in force here ever since. Therefore, for three-quarters of a century Bavaria has had the reputation of being the only country in Europe uncursed by tramps. I have lived here two months & a half, now, & have walked a mile to my work & a mile back again, every day during that time, through a densely populated part of the city, yet I have never once been accosted by a beggar,—have never once seen a person who looked like a beggar.

  Sam added that he had “retired from the tramp-breeding business two years ago,—after the self-same tramp, in four different disguises, had called on four successive days & borrowed money of me ‘to get to Springfield’ with,—& now the police station has retired.” As a result, he expected that “tramps will as soon go to any other place beginning with H as Hartford. Meaning short-syllable places beginning with H.” He derisively described “tramps” at an 1880 Republican Party rally in Hartford as “our old ragged tourists moving in eternal procession from door to door disdaining bread and demanding pie at the butt end of the club.”43

  Sam expressed the same aversion to begging as a character flaw in The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and Huck Finn. The pauper Tom Canty, who is cursed with the epithet “beggar’s spawn,” in fact “begged just enough” to escape his father’s beatings, “for the laws against mendicancy were stringent and the penalties heavy,” as the narrator explains in chapter 2. King Edward VI, disguised as a pauper and desperately hungry, begs at two farmhouses but is “driven rudely away” and “called hard names” and “was promised arrest as a vagrant except he moved on promptly.” Finally, a goodwife gives him something to eat on the condition he perform a few household chores such as cook
ing, washing dishes, and drowning kittens. Sam satirizes the king’s camp-meeting sermon in Huck Finn as another form of irresponsible citizenship along the same lines: the king dupes people into contributing money to a fraudulent cause, specifically to convert the pirates of the Indian Ocean, much like the stranger in Hartford proposed to open a school for freedmen. Such behavior was worse than cheating at cards, Sam believed, because it wasted money better given to truly needy petitioners for charity. As late as 1894, in his essay “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” he dismissed Mary Godwin as a “rapacious mendicant.” He was, simply put, averse to penury and shared the belief that sloth was a cardinal sin.44

  Like the resilient coyote in chapter 5 of Roughing It, Sam survived. As improbable as it may seem, when he was down-and-out in San Francisco in the winter and spring of 1865 he was on the cusp of one of the most successful and productive years of his life. While he began the year broke and out of work, by the end of the year he was regularly employed and engaged in a personal crusade to reform the San Francisco police department. When Sam arrived back at the Occidental Hotel from northern California in late February he found a letter from Artemus Ward that initially seemed to portend more bad luck. Ward had written to solicit a contribution from Sam for inclusion in a book about his western sojourn. But the letter had been mailed the previous November, during Sam’s months in the goldfields, so he assumed he had received the invitation too late to accept it. As he noted in his journal, he “ought to have got[ten]” the offer “3 months ago.”45 He did not yet know that Ward was still working on the book.

  Sam soon received more disappointing news (or so it seemed at the time) when Harte rejected his poems “He Done His Level Best” and “My Hog Ranch” for publication in Outcroppings, an anthology of western verse published by the San Francisco bookseller Anton Roman. The project became a succès de scandale even before it appeared in time for the Christmas shopping season in 1865. Harte winnowed hundreds of submissions to only forty-two odes by nineteen poets, among them Ina Coolbrith, John Rollin Ridge (aka Yellow Bird), Charley Stoddard, and C. H. Webb. He omitted not only Sam’s comic verse but submissions by Joe Goodman and Rollin Daggett. The volume was favorably noticed in several eastern newspapers, including Bowles’s Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican (“very elegantly got up”) and the Boston Courier (“a string of gems”), but it was roundly ridiculed on the Pacific Slope. The San Francisco Sunday Mercury derided Harte as “a pitiful ass,” and Evans disparaged the volume in the Gold Hill News as “purp-stuff,” prompting Harte to dismiss him as “an infinitely small rascal.” Even Sam belittled Evans’s critique “because he don’t know anything about polite literature; he has had no experience in it further than to write up runaway horse items.” But when Goodman denigrated the collection in a five-column spread in the Territorial Enterprise as “the very trashiest of the trash,” Sam concluded that “poor Bret is done for. The storm has burst. Sage Brush land is in arms, and the Sage Brush poets have taken off their coats and commenced sailing in with a ferocity that indicates war to the knife.” He attributed “Goodman’s fearful paroxism of wrath” to “the fact that Bret did not make him an ‘outcropper’” and predicted that Harte would “bitterly repent the slight to Sage Brush genius.”46

  Early in the new year the San Francisco Bulletin excerpted several hostile reviews on its first page. The “book has created considerable excitement here,” Harte wrote Roman, and “the compiler has been abused beyond his most sanguine expectations.” Sam had been spared the embarrassment of publishing anything in the book. “I wrote a sublime poem,” he joked with Stoddard, “& what credit did I ever get for it?—None. Bret left it out of the Outcroppings. I never will write another poem. I am not appreciated.” Instead, he appended “He Done His Level Best” to his Californian column for June 17:

  Was he a mining on the flat—

  He done it with a zest;

  Was he a leading of the choir—

  He done his level best.

  If he’d a reg’lar task to do,

  He never took no rest;

  Or if twas off-and-on—the same—

  He done his level best.

  If he was preachin on his beat,

  He’d tramp from east to west,

  And north to south—in cold and heat

  He done his level best.

  He’d yank a sinner outen (Hades)

  And land him with the blest—

  Then snatch a prayer ’n waltz in again,

  And do his level best.

  He’d cuss and sing and howl and pray,

  And dance and drink and jest,

  And lie and steal—all one to him—

  He done his level best.

  Whate’er this man was sot to do,

  He done it with a zest:

  No matter what his contract was,

  He’d do his level best.

  The poem was copied with his pseudonym in dozens of papers across the country, including the Boston Transcript (July 31), Cleveland Leader (August 7), St. Louis Missouri Republican (September 3), New Orleans Picayune (September 3), and Cleveland Plain Dealer (September 16). It became Sam’s greatest publishing success in the East prior to the appearance of the jumping frog sketch. Harte later “admitted, not without humor,” that he had “overlooked” it while compiling Outcroppings.47

  The popularity of the poem even inspired a tribute to Sam in the New York Round Table: he was the “foremost among the merry gentlemen of the California press” and “if he will husband his resources and not kill with overwork the mental goose that has given us these golden eggs, he may one day take rank among the brightest of our wits.” As soon as this news reached the West Coast, Sam announced in a famous letter to Orion that he had received

  a “call” to literature, of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says that to do right you must multiply the one or the two or the three talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping, I would long ago have ceased to meddle with things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures. . . . It is only now, when editors of standard literary papers in the distant east give me high praise, & who do not know me & cannot of course be blinded by the glamour of partiality, that I really begin to believe there must be something in it.

  The notion of a “call” to a profession was not accidental. A quarter century later, Sam reiterated in an interview that “I never have wanted to write literature; it is not my calling.”48

  His fame flowed eastward against the tide of gentility and the so-called genteel tradition. Both Webb (“his humor has met with recognition at the East”) and Harte (“a California humorist, whose crude but original sketches have been a feature of our local press, is handsomely recognized by a critical Eastern authority”) bragged about the acclaim their friend had received.49 Though he could not have known it at the time, Sam’s decision to travel to the West in June 1861 was the most crucial one he ever made, for he likely would not have found his calling anywhere else on the continent.

  The second Nevada Constitutional Convention was held in Carson City in early July 1864, a few weeks after Sam vamoosed for San Francisco. The delegates approved a document that was ratified by the voters on September 7 and Nevada was finally admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864. Much as Sam had seceded from Missouri shortly before it seceded from the Union, he left Nevada shortly before it joined the Union.

  Moreover, the new state constitution effectively expelled Orion Clemens from office. When the grieving father visited Virginia City in August, he reportedly “looked dusty and careworn.” According to Sam, Rollin Daggett and Thomas Fitch were scheming to deny him the nomination for secretary of state at the Union Party convention in mid-October. “I know Daggett & Fitch both,” he warned his brother, “& I swear a solemn oath that I believe that they would blast the characters o
f their own mothers & sisters to gain any great advantage in life. I know both dogs well. Look out for them.”50 Though Orion was endorsed by the Virginia Daily Union—“he has given general satisfaction heretofore”—at the convention he lost the nomination to Chauncey N. Noteware by a vote of 44–13 after he failed to campaign for the job. Noteware was elected in November to succeed him, and so on December 5, 1864, the former acting governor was out of work but not out of the crossfire. The meticulous inventory of assets Orion filed when he relinquished the office listed twenty-six iron paperweights, fourteen tin spittoons, nine boxes of sealing wax, two gavels, and a lampshade. Even more to the point, Orion dutifully reported to the Treasury Department that during his three-year tenure he may have “frequently expended money where the Department would have instructed me differently if I had been nearer; but, on the other hand, I think I have often retrenched where the Department would have allowed more expenditure.”51

  Nevertheless, the federal government hounded him about outstanding balances in the territorial accounts for years. “I was astounded that my account had not been received,” he wrote the auditor of the Treasury Department in September 1865, nearly a year after leaving office, “or if received had been mislaid, and I was mortified that you should apparently have any shadow of ground for supposing that I would creep out of office without rendering an account.” Orion signed this letter to the Treasury Department with the title “Late Secretary of the late Territory of Nevada.” He was dunned by the department as late as the fall of 1869 to reimburse $1,330 for disallowed payments and overpayments he had authorized years earlier to several Nevada job printers, including the Virginia City Enterprise and the Daily Union. Sam offered to pay the bill should the department refuse to budge, but first he wanted his brother to challenge the demands. “Tell Orion to keep a stiff upper lip,” he wrote his mother, and “when the worst comes to the worst I will come forward.” Or, as he added in a note to his sister Pamela, Orion should advise the government that “he has no money” and ask the auditors to prove the justice of their claims.52 Sam asked Tom Fitch, recently elected to Congress, to intervene and the ploy apparently worked. In the end there is no evidence that Orion complied with the government demands.